I know most of you are on the journey to financial independence and early retirement but still have some debts to pay off and some more investments or passive income to build. Some of you are financially independent but still working because you enjoy it. And perhaps a few of you are afraid to make the leap away from a 9 to 5 to a less defined future, even though you have hit your target amount of wealth. And most certainly some of you are suffering from “one more year” syndrome where you just can’t pull the trigger because your safety factor will be better in just one more year.
I get it, I’ve been there. As an older, not necessarily wiser, voice in this community I could have left work much earlier than I did and even now, three years later, I cannot say if my timing was perfect or delayed by my own fear and ignorance. One thing I can say with confidence is that when I compare my life now to my life then, life now is much better. Let me show you the difference.
This was me two and a half years ago at work. I was a corporate officer of a Fortune 500 company and the General Manager of one of their subsidiary corporations having worked my way to the top over a thirty plus year career that began as a summer intern. That gave me a lot of employees to manage and a lot of equipment both at a large chemical complex and moving on the highways and rails across the nation. I was on call all of the time, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, even while on vacation, when I could manage to take one. I enjoyed my job for most of my career but for the last couple of years it had stopped being fun, and I was in a quandary about staying or retiring.
A typical two weeks looked like this. Monday, every Monday, a video meeting with our CEO and the other plant GM’s and our direct reports. We each took turns explaining everything bad that had happened. Our corporate standard was high so typically all the news we presented was about the things that missed being perfect. It was one of the reasons things had stopped being fun, because every single week started with a healthy dose of criticism and some of it was very harsh. Sure, I was well paid compared to the median salary in my state but not the kind of huge corporate salary you would imagine the top guy to make. Most of my union hourly co-workers assumed I made much more, and those guys got paid extra if they were asked to work over 40 hours, they got to take their vacations and they never worried about the plant when they were off work. Some years I got a nice bonus or a stock benefit that was worth a good bit of pay but those were not anything I could count on.
Tuesday I would have meetings with my staff, with the project teams who were working on expansion projects and with my operating guys to try to achieve that near perfection that had eluded us the previous week. Wednesday would be all kinds of regulatory hassles. We had the EPA, DOT, Customs, SEC, PHMSA, OSHA, EEOC, FTC and the NLRB on the federal side of things and just as many state regulatory agencies to deal with.
As a nice twist in recent years, criminal penalties had been added to their bag of enforcement mechanisms and I had seen friends in positions similar to mine at other companies convicted of felonies not because of what they did or knew about, but because a jury of their peers thought they should have known about misdeeds of others at their company. While I have faith in our justice system as the best in the world I do not think a jury of my peers has the faintest idea what I should or shouldn’t know about the actions of hundreds of subordinate team members on a 24 hour a day basis. I also think a jury of my peers is probably already conditioned to think that anyone who runs a chemical plant is likely guilty of something since I have almost never seen that particular job portrayed in a favorable light in the news or in a movie.
Try knowing you’ve got your financial independence secured but that you could lose it all in a criminal proceeding about something someone else did that you were not aware of. It was something that kept me up at nights. I know that sounds paranoid but I could show you two of my acquaintances that now have felony convictions and had to pay out of their personal funds, fines of around a half million dollars each without any help from their former employers. They cannot vote, cannot own a firearm, cannot land a decent job and have had their retirement assets plundered.
Thursday would be all about people, hiring, promoting, demoting and on rare occasions discharging employees for performance problems or failing a drug test or some other issue. Because I was always approachable, always had my door open and felt that my team was my most important priority I listened a lot to a lot of employees. From truck drivers who had problems with loading at different places to people with gambling addictions to a terminal cancer victim who could only find relief through medical marijuana even though the federal agencies that regulated us prohibited its use by my employees. Sometimes I could help but most personal problems are far beyond resolution by an employer so usually I could just share their pain. I absorbed a lot of shared misery from nice people whose lives had gone unimaginably wrong.
Friday, most employees looked forward to that day, but for me it was a mad scramble to get information together for the Monday video conference with the CEO so that I would not have to work all weekend. Also a time to try to make sure we had fixed the problems we had been criticized for the previous Monday, resulting in a long day of trying to pry information out of people who were more interested in escaping for the weekend. Saturday, unless something broke or someone got injured or there was a logistics problem I usually got off. Yay me! Sunday I’d go in early and put my Monday video meeting report together since I never got everything I needed in time Friday to do it. Then if I got it together in time I’d meet my wife at church and get Sunday afternoon off, sometimes. Then the next morning, it would be Monday, wash, rinse and repeat the same week all over again. That was pretty much my life then. The negatives are pretty obvious, the positives were a healthy paycheck, a level of notoriety in our small town and small state and sometimes the feeling that I was making life better for my coworkers.
Life now? Much different. Monday I got up when I was ready, about 7:15AM. I had a college board meeting later that day, I chair the board of a small community college. It is a non-paid appointment by our governor and a lot of work but it is the kind of volunteering that really changes peoples lives. I see it every year, how education can offer hope and future success to people climbing out of poverty. So, I was tied up until 5 PM but my wife and I jumped in the car right after that and drove to Tulsa, some eight hours away. The next morning we got up and drove twelve more hours to get to Colorado and the cabin we had rented. We met some friends already there and planned the next four days of hiking.
Those four days were full of long hard hikes, but that’s the kind of thing we enjoy. The air was thin at 12,000 feet so we gradually ramped up our activity and saved the real killer hike for the fourth day there. It was a ten hour 18 mile hike up and down 12,000 foot elevation Flattop Mountain. We spent an awesome week seeing all kinds of wildlife and incredible natural beauty in and around Rocky Mountain National Park with a number of our friends. Then, on an unplanned spur of the moment impulse, we left Colorado and drove north to Wyoming because we had never seen the Devil’s Tower. It is pretty amazing and I had wanted to see it ever since the movie “Close Encounters” had come out (note: if you don’t know what movie that is then you might be a millennial). From there we drove to Mount Rushmore in South Dakota and through Custer State Park, the Black Hills and the Badlands. It was all extremely beautiful in a stark and otherworldly way. Finally, we spent two days driving home. The trip added 3,052 miles to the odometer of my seven thousand dollar 2008 car which I had purchased earlier this summer, and the little Infiniti performed flawlessly.
Now “Wait” you might say. “You got to take vacations when you worked, that’s not fair comparing a work week to what is essentially a vacation week!” On the surface that sounds like a valid criticism but not in this case. I could have never gone on this kind of eight day trip at the last minute with no more than three days notice during my work days. In fact, it was very difficult to get off at all when I was working and many times I made trip plans and then had to cancel them. We literally decided on a Friday afternoon to take this Colorado trip on the next Monday. And we did not have any idea how long we’d stay gone. We added the whole Wyoming and South Dakota legs to the trip on a whim after we had finished our hiking in Colorado. None of that would have been imaginable during my days of indentured servitude at my 9 to 5.
So on with the rest of my two weeks of “how I live now”. We returned from the road trip the next Monday and spent a day catching up on having been away for days. Laundry, mowing the lawn, getting the oil changed and things like that(and yes, just like when I was working my wife still mows the lawn, runs the weed eater and blows off the sidewalks and driveway). Tuesday, we ran five miles with our 5:30 morning group and while we thought it would seem easier at 200 feet elevation above sea level with thicker air than Colorado, it wasn’t! Running in Arkansas in the summer is just plain tough no matter how early you get up! That afternoon we played tennis with a couple of super good players. Wednesday was my one work day of the week, I read some documents and wrote some emails and listened to some conference calls. Thursday we ran with the group another five miles early and then my wife and I hooked up the boat and we drove to a nearby lake and fished until noon. We caught about twenty fish and kept enough for three or four meals. Fishing has been slow this summer so that was a fairly good day. Later that evening after I cleaned the fish we had another tennis match with the same couple since we had team tennis matches coming up on the weekend and needed to practice.
Friday there was a special college board meeting to deal with a single time sensitive issue and after that we drove to Little Rock for our first team tennis match. Playing competitive sports with your wife as your partner is complicated, believe me. I’m pretty much a “win or die” kind of person and she’s more of a “let’s all have fun!” kind of personality so I have to dial my intensity way down. But I managed and we beat a good couple in straight sets, plus our team won the overall match 2-1! Saturday, we had a lot of down time since we were staying in a motel so we read and watched a movie and then had a nice lunch out. We had an afternoon match against another team and my wife and I played great again and just barely scratched out a win in a third set tie-breaker, but our team lost 1-2 overall. Saturday night, our son, an MD just starting his residency, met us for dinner and we had a good time catching up with him. He was excited to show us the “new” car he had driven across two states to pick up, a 2004 Toyota Land Cruiser. He paid $8,000 for the vehicle (I paid $7,000 for my last “new” car) so I felt proud we had indoctrinated him in frugality at this stage of his career. That is something that most MD’s don’t achieve early in their career, if ever. I read enough of “The White Coat Investor’s” blog posts to realize we are fortunate to have a financially smart son. I had another tennis match Sunday on a team my wife does not play on. It was kind of a thrown together team and it has not been competitive due to the way it was built but it was still fun and a good way to meet some new players. Then we drove home again exactly two weeks after we left for the road trip.
So how does life before compare to life after? Well, I still work but instead of working twelve days out of fourteen I worked about nine hours, more or less, spread out in phone calls and emails over a four or five day period with most of it happening on one day in my house office. Some of that involved a long conference call I took lying on the sofa. The work is still interesting but the intensity level is dialed way lower, to the point that I cannot detect any stress from it at all. In my old life at work I stayed wired up most of the time. I did not recognize that fact until I left and began to notice that I felt so light, like I was floating. I still feel that three years later, like I dropped fifty pounds off my shoulders, it is a very nice feeling.
We still meet early with our running group three days a week, even though most of us in the group are retired. We all prefer running on the streets when there are few cars to dodge and in the summer it is way too hot here to run any other time of day. We also still play a lot of tennis. We are pretty fit for people our age and that only happens by having a constant commitment to working out.
To me it is big that we got to see three things I had always wanted to see with no planning and no work worries just because we wanted to. Devil’s Tower, Mount Rushmore and the Badlands were all bucket list items I never would have gotten to while working. And I know the 40 miles of hiking we did just added to our fitness as opposed to spending that time inside a fluorescent lit office worrying about problems. I did not have the choice to spend very much time this way when I was working full time, now I can choose to do the things I enjoy the most, the things we both enjoy the most.
What am I saying to you? I’m saying that when you have enough saved and invested generating enough passive income to cover your costs, and you are no longer in love with your job (if you ever had been), then you need to make a change. In my case it was a carefully planned exit to very low intensity but still mentally complex side hustles. These keep me in the game but let me reverse the work to time off ratio from six days of work and one day off to one day of work and six days to do whatever I choose. Like what I’m doing right now, blogging! Tomorrow I’ll hop in the car and spend a couple of days working on the road but today and the rest of the week, who knows? You will probably have more exotic plans in mind, after all I’m an engineer, I get excited by math. But the thing is they will be your plans, not your boss’s plans, but yours. I knew I had plenty of hobbies and plenty of places I wanted to go and still had an interest in working just a bit. That may not be you at all so do some soul searching and put some thought into what you want your next life to look like. Or maybe not? Maybe you just pull the plug with the faith that you will figure it out later. I’m just saying that when it works it is beautiful.
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