Author: Steveark

Being bored out of your mind! Does that thought scare you? Many of you are pursuing an early retirement.  Others don’t plan to retire early but are focused on having enough of a nest egg saved up to allow an enjoyable conventional retirement in your sixties.  Either way, you do foresee a time when you will not spend 40 plus hours a week at a job.  A day when you’ll have more time to live life on your own terms.  

And that can be a problem, living life with more time and less constraints.  It seems counterintuitive doesn’t it?  You’ll have more freedom to do what you want but even now when you think about it I’m willing to bet there is at least a grain of doubt in the back of your mind.  Because, how is that going to go?  We’ve all been bored, and we do not like that feeling.  And if we get bored in the midst of a busy working life how can we escape mega-boredom in a life that has an extra 40 hours, or more, added to it?

I have some thoughts because retirement is not a hypothetical concept to me.  I retired, slightly early, four years ago which coincidentally is about the same time as my two brothers-in-law.  As far as I can tell we have all three managed the amount of boredom in our lives successfully and are very much enjoying the way we spend our time. 

We are all brothers-in-law because we married three sisters and we get together from time to time and talk about our retired lives.  Starting with the oldest sister’s spouse, he is the strangest case.  I remember when I told him I was contemplating retirement his one word of advice was, “Don’t!”  That was at a time in his life where he was struggling with boredom after a high powered career.  I rose pretty high in the ranks at a Fortune 500 corporation but I was a minnow compared the big fish he was.  He ran the biggest part of one of the largest corporations in the world, one every one of you knows by name.  Where I had some 700 employees on my team he had as many as 40,000 reporting through him.  

He lived on corporate jets, the transcontinental type and not the short hoppers I  occasionally flew on.  His compensation was up in the seven figure zone instead of my  six figures.  He was doing trade deals with foreign governments while I was just trying to meet production targets.  So in other words he was legitimately a big deal.  I’ve said before you don’t see star NFL quarterbacks retiring when they are still at the top of their game but a change in ownership of his company retired him when he was still an All-Pro executive.  And he hated it, at first.  He wasn’t used to having free time, he literally worked all of his waking hours and it was his only real hobby.  And he was not atypical, that is how almost every C-suite executive I’ve ever met lives.  You almost cannot reach that level with anything less than a single minded devotion to your career.  It is one reason I never tried to get that high in business, because I did not want work to be my life.  

So here he was, not happy because he was not the shot caller any more.  But being a problem solver he created some hobbies, which in his case meant buying himself a job.  He found a run down facility that produced the same kind of widgets his former employer did in a niche they did not care about and set about modernizing it.  And you could see him reanimate into the high energy and happy guy he had always been.  He was no longer a big fish in the big pond but he found being the big fish in a small pond delivered the same endorphin rush with much less stress.  It wouldn’t work for me, but it was a valid answer to the boredom problem for him.  

Brother-in-law number two married the middle sister and worked as an inspector in a field that paid middle class wages.  He enjoyed his job because he was very good at it but never aspired to get into upper management, or even middle management.  He loved to be the technical expert and to spend a good part of his day outside talking to people and inspecting things.  He also enjoyed golf, fishing and hunting and his workdays were generally only eight hour ones except for the occasional crisis time.  He looked forward to retirement and never seemed to miss a beat when it arrived.  He is an excellent carpenter and devoted himself to making things for his family and friends and helping keep his church in good repair after he left his 9 to 5.  He also has some grandkids he adores and they occupy much of his time.  He is a happy guy and always fun to be around.  He has less money than the other two of us but he has more than enough and boredom is not a problem in his life.

And then there is me.  I had a great career doing a job that involved both technology and management.  I resembled brother-in-law number one in that for most of my career, work was my favorite hobby too.   However there were some major differences between us.  Unlike him I never worked more than 45 hours a week unless there was some kind of emergency.  And because I did not have extreme work hours I had a richer life apart from my job.  I had more time to have a great marriage and  good relationship with my three kids.  In addition I had many hobbies that included distance running, tennis, fishing, hunting, skiing, travel, volunteering and hiking.  I also reached a point in my career pretty quickly where I could see that I did not want to promote up further into the corporate ranks.  My bosses did not seem nearly as happy as I was and I felt like it was because they were under a relentless pressure to achieve.  I’m all for achieving but they were being given unrealistic and unattainable goals and were being blamed for circumstances that were far out of their control. And when that trickled downhill to me I stopped having fun and retired.  

But because work wasn’t my only hobby and because I had spent years planning, the transition to retirement was kind of a nonevent in my life.  I knew I loved some aspects of work so I stepped seamlessly into some consulting fields that I enjoyed and that had very little of the negative aspects of traditional work.  I also kept my volunteer positions.  The consulting and volunteer work kept most of my old networks alive so I stayed socially engaged.  And because I only spend 8 to 16 hours a week consulting, sometimes even less, I have more time for all my hobbies including new ones like pickle ball and blogging.  And I’m happier now than when I was a 9 to 5 guy, just as happy as when my old career was at its very best.  Boredom just hasn’t become a thing in my life. 

Looking at the three bro-in-laws, we’ve adopted three different strategies to enjoying retirement.  One recreated his old world on a much smaller scale but one that allows him to enjoy being his creative best.  Work is still his only hobby, but he has found a way to work less and still be the man in charge.  And it is one that he can continue until he dies.  He wouldn’t have it any other way.

 Number two just quit working for money, he already had enough  hobbies and family opportunities lined up that he filled the newfound hours easily.  He did not have a plan for retirement but was flexible enough to fill the time with things he enjoys without facing boredom at all.  Because he was never one dimensional he has adapted without any issues.  

And then there is me, the one who married the baby sister.  Like the engineer I am, I defined the problems I might face years ahead of my retirement and already had consulting jobs lined up that would engage me in case I found myself facing boredom.  I also spent a lifetime developing many hobbies I could pursue, most of which I could do with my family. So far retirement has been even better than I hoped.  

I encourage each of you to take a look at yourself and start preparing now for the day you quit full time work.  If you have to work to be happy then figure out how to create the ideal job for you that you can control into old age.  If you have plenty of things you love to do but just don’t have the time now because of that pesky job of yours then you may not need any plan. Or if you feel like you will always need a balance between a little bit of paid work, some volunteering and pursuing your many hobbies then plan for that life now.  Make time to explore and develop lifetime hobbies, figure out how to monetize something you love doing and find some ways to give back to others.  

What about you?  What will it take to keep you happy in retirement and to keep boredom at bay? 

Do you know family or friends that have retired from full time work and are killing their retirements?  How are they doing it? 

Do you know someone for whom retirement has become a curse instead of a win?  Someone who wishes they had never retired?  

This post is a little off topic, it has nothing to do with personal finance, careers or retirement.  It is simply a very unusual hunting tale and so if you are philosophically or morally opposed to hunting I’d advise skipping the rest.  

 I was listening to a podcast today, This American Life, it was their Halloween edition with darker stories.  And in it a woman walking in the woods near her house was attacked by a raccoon.  She saw the creature on the road walking toward her and waved her arms to scare it away, and it went into beast mode.  It charged her from a distance and although the woman fled the raccoon eventually ran her down in the snow and bit her.  She fought the 30 lb raccoon for half an hour until her family arrived and eventually killed it, with great difficulty.  It was unbelievably aggressive and almost supernaturally strong.    The reason for the aggression from what is normally a fairly docile animal was the fact that it had rabies.  The episode went on to detail the difficulties the woman had in getting the treatment for rabies within the golden window of 72 hours, after which, if you have contracted rabies its basically all over for you.  

Rabies does several things to the nervous system and metabolism of its victims.  In animals it turns off the fear center in the brain and turns on both adrenaline production and aggression.  So animals like a raccoon that would never attack anything bigger than themselves are driven to fearlessly attack anything they see in a fit of rage. The adrenaline also gives them a physical boost to their strength and speed.  It truly is like something out of a zombie movie, the ones where the zombies are lightning fast and incredibly strong.  

The reason I am telling you about this is because as I listened to the true story I realized it was shockingly similar to something that had happened to me twenty years ago.  Something that had always puzzled me greatly.   I’m an Arkansas native and I grew up hunting just about everything that moved and while I no longer actively hunt I do still own guns and my wife and I shoot targets and catch a lot of fish, which may trouble some of you who view animals and guns differently than we do.    

Back in those days my company lawyer and I shared a duck hunting lease just outside of Stuttgart, Arkansas, commonly known as the duck hunting capital of the world for its abundance of green head mallard ducks.  It was a slow season and I was riding my four wheeled ATV, what we call a four wheeler in redneck country. It was midday and we were through hunting, so I was just exploring the dirt roads around the big rice farm we leased.  I was alone and puttering down a long straight dirt road in the freezing cold.  I had my unloaded gun strapped to the front rack ( you can’t legally ride a four wheeler with a loaded gun for obvious safety reasons) and was enjoying the outdoors at a very low speed because it was way too cold to go fast.  

I noticed something white coming toward me in the road way off in the distance, maybe a quarter mile away.  I thought maybe a goose or a rabbit or somebody’s bird dog and I just put my bike in park and left the motor running and watched it coming my way.  The closer it got the more confused I became because it was seriously starting to look like a giant white rat, and rats do not come running toward noisy four wheelers or toward humans.  This was perfectly flat rice land, you could see for a mile in every direction so there was no way this creature could have been unaware of my presence.  There were no houses for miles so it wasn’t likely somebody’s pet ferret or ermine but since it was closing the distance I knew I’d be able to discern what it was in the next little while.  It was small so I never even considered getting my shotgun off the rack and loading it, small animals do not attack humans, at least not when they have ample opportunity to escape.  And rather than avoiding me this thing was choosing to approach me.  I decided it must be somebody’s exotic pet.

Eventually, when it was within maybe fifty yards, I could see it was clearly a possum, or opossum to be scientifically correct.  As I’m sure you know possums are rat like, mostly nocturnal marsupials that are pretty common in rural areas and often forage in garages looking for stores of pet-food or other tasty morsels.  They are not aggressive and are famous for faking their own deaths with involuntary seizures that leave them  perfectly still, as a defense mechanism.  They secrete a foul smell when this happens so they not only look dead but smell like they have been dead for days, awesome, right?  They will bare their teeth and hiss if cornered but they are never overtly aggressive.  They also avoid all human contact since they are small, slow and poorly armed for combat. 

I was very puzzled by this as the little guy picked up his pace and headed right for me sitting on my rumbling four wheeler.  I had decided by now that if he wasn’t a pet that he was blind and deaf and I expected him to pass by me on the road and keep going wherever he was going.  I wasn’t threatened in the slightest because he was, you know, a possum! But just as he got within maybe three feet he bolted toward my bike and climbed up one side, he was clearly trying to get to me.  At that point I thought crazy possum, crazy possum and the thought clicked in my mind that maybe he had rabies.  I managed to jerk my shotgun off the rack as I rolled out of my seat and ran a few yards away while the possum jumped off the four wheeler and came after me.  I realized the absurdity of a ten pound animal attacking a 170 lb human armed with a twelve gauge semi-automatic shotgun, while at the same time realizing that if he did have rabies he was life threateningly dangerous.  

I never killed animals for fun, we ate what we killed.  So I never shot a non game animal like a possum that was just doing his animal thing, but this was different.  If this animal was rabid then it not only was already dying a terrible death but might well spread the virus to other animals and or even end up biting a child.  So I slid a cartridge into my shotgun and killed it as it came toward me.  I hoped it was the right choice.

Because a twelve gauge shotgun fires a giant load of steel pellets it is a fearsome weapon at close range.  All that remained of the opossum was a crater in the road where he had been a moment before I fired.  Bits of mud and potentially bits of possum sprayed everywhere since he was almost on me when I pulled the trigger.  Some of the debris landed in one of my eyes.  I didn’t think about that at first but when I got back to the camp house it occurred to me that rabies might well be transferred from the animal’s blood through my eye tissue so I called an animal control expert and was told that possums are immune to rabies and can’t carry the virus.  I was relieved that I wouldn’t have to get shots but also very puzzled at the animal’s behavior.  If he wasn’t rabid why did he attack me?  I chalked it up as one of life’s mysteries.  

That brings me back to the podcast I heard this morning about the rabid raccoon.  It was so similar to my experience that I did an internet search on the topic and found out that possums can indeed catch rabies.  I had been misinformed twenty years earlier!  Because marsupials run a very low body temperature, compared to other mammals, they are less likely to catch rabies. However there have been documented cases in the past of rabid opossums.  I had mixed emotions upon learning that. On the plus side I felt better about having killed it because it probably was rabid, but I also felt a shudder run through me because I never sought treatment based on what an “expert” friend told me.  I guess all that hit me in the eye was a little bit of mud, but the fact that I could have ended up with one of the worst imaginable, hopeless, painful and terminal diseases is a stark thought.

Lessons learned?  Don’t just make a cursory investigation if an issue could have life changing impact.  Find indisputable facts when it comes to your finances, your health and your relationships because there is a lot of false information out there.  Even my internet search today turned up at least one web article that declared possums are “immune” to rabies and can’t carry the virus.  That’s simply untrue and it could have cost me my life.  Second, when you are faced with something unpleasant that you do not want to do, don’t let emotion get in the way of doing what you know is the best thing.  I did not want to kill a harmless little critter,  but I could not come up with a more likely reason for its behavior than rabies.  And if it had rabies it was a mercy to end its suffering and prudent to stop the possible spread of the virus.

What about you?  Have you ever been in a situation where your mind could not process what you were seeing yet you were forced to make a decision in spite of not understanding what was happening? 

Have you ever thought you knew the facts about something only to find out you were completely wrong and only luck kept you from suffering the consequences of your ignorance?  

I was reading Mr. Groovy’s recent post about what he likes and doesn’t like about retirement and it made me think about how different his life is from mine.  The three things he doesn’t like, are flying on commercial airlines, sleeping in rent-a-bed hotels and not having unlimited financial resources.  Or at least that was my Readers Digest condensed version (if you know what that means you might be as old as I am).    As far as his favorite things about retirement, they included blogging, reading, writing books, travel, furnishing his ranch/house, building his workshop and welding up some steampunk metal art (OK that’s my image of what his art will look like!)

I’m not saying we are opposites but I like staying in hotels and flying as long as I’m not stuck in a middle seat between wide people (that gives me screaming claustrophobia).  But those are small things, it was his list of how he spent his time and why he loved his current life that really made me scratch my head.

What he loved was that he was not on anyone else’s time table.  He only did what he wanted when he wanted to.  He doesn’t work part time unless you count blogging, but that’s not really work for him, its more of a passion.  And because I’m in the middle of a three week period where my days are largely preordained to fit arbitrary schedules and locations set by others I had to stop and think.

 I wondered, “Am I living this early retired life all wrong?”  After all Mr. G is a very wise and reasoned individual and I’ve had a lot of success in life emulating people who were doing things right.  And when someone I admire and respect chooses a different path, I feel compelled to at least stop and try to figure out why that works for them, and if it might work for me too. 

Here is the three week schedule I’m currently living, on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday the alarm goes off at 4:50AM  because my wife and I run four to eight miles early with an interesting group of friends.  We could run any time, but that’s when the group has always run.  Starting Monday of last week I had a finance committee meeting at the foundation that I chair and an appointment to get a family photo for our church directory. Tuesday I left very early to drive to the airport(two hour drive) and catch a flight from Arkansas to San Francisco, CA.  The trip was to attend the annual national meeting for college trustees which consisted of seven hours a day of continuing education, Wednesday through Saturday.

Being a college trustee is a job that pays absolutely nothing unless you count a trip to an out of state meeting less than once a year.  It is a significant amount of work, but I’ve seen community college change lives.  One friend, Maria, I watched grow from being a starving undocumented teenager to now being a medical doctor with five degrees, two of which she obtained at our school.  How can I not help be a part of that?

Sunday I pretty much chilled around the house unpacking from the trip, except I did have a church  meeting where I was assigned about fifty names to call about their committee assignments.  I had gotten in at dark thirty Saturday night after I allowed the airlines to buy me off my original flight for $600.  It is hard to turn down free money, especially when it is enough to pay for my wife to take a round trip flight to Orange County CA to see her best friend!

  Monday, I had a very long board meeting for the charity foundation I chair, another unpaid job that is a lot of work, but one that provides low income people free medical care at our clinic and free scholarships to our health facility/gym. It literally is a life saver.   Tuesday, I had the day off completely, that was yesterday, and we ran with the group, then I played singles tennis with a buddy and later played doubles with my wife against a couple of other guys.  After running and playing two tennis matches the same day I was feeling old and sore.  The third time I climbed the stairs to my loft office I wondered why my office is upstairs in a house with so many unused rooms? 

Today is Wednesday and I slept in until 7 AM when the power came back on, we didn’t know it was off since we were sleeping. When it comes back on our robo vacuum always goes nuts and starts cleaning.  The first time that happened I was sure someone had broken into our house, I was in full home defense mode when I turned the hall corner and realized it was just our little robot cleaning up!   After that I made the bed, our rule is the last one out of bed has to make it.  Next, I came up to the office where I looked at ten grant applications for people wanting money from our foundation and prepped myself for the next two to five days of negotiations for my clients for whom I do regulatory consulting.

  After that I did the annual evaluation of the paid director who runs the charity foundation and pondered what kind of pay increase we should give him, he’s amazing by the way.  Then I gathered up the receipts for the college trustee trip to San Francisco last week so I can get partially reimbursed for airfare, lodging and meals.  I’ll only get partial reimbursement on meals because I didn’t get the right kind of receipts, again, for several of them and because the state is rather parsimonious in what it thinks meals should cost. 

This afternoon is actually looking like free time, up until I hit the road around 4 PM for the two hour drive to our state capital where the negotiations will be held.  I really prefer driving up the day before a consulting project rather than getting up early and trying to not look sleepy during meetings.  Like I said, I like staying in hotels, I’m not sure why exactly but even in my old work life I was on the road some years as many as 240 days.  Mr. Groovy is trying to ruin that for me by spreading his phobia of bacteria and bodily fluids that might be all over the bed sheets, thanks for nothing Mr. G!  But I know they wash all of that stuff in giant industrial machines that kill all germs.  I know it because I need to know it.

The next two days will be spent with my lawyers and the consultants I hired and with our adversaries and allies as we attempt to forge a compromise that will keep our issues from going to court.  We might win or we might not but it will be an interesting contest.  My wife will join me up there Friday because we both are on tennis teams playing in the state tennis tournament conveniently being held in that same city.  It rarely works out so well but this time we got lucky.  I’ll have to pay for the hotel for the weekend since it is personal business but I will get a special low rate from the tennis association. (Update added later, My team won state!  My wife’s team did not do very well so my celebration has been sort of muted. Otherwise I would be penalized for unnecessary gloating.)

Monday, I’ll either continue on with the negotiations or switch to another consulting project, if we are finished, I’m really getting a lot of things done in one trip but I’m going to have to take a lot of clothes. Or I might drive home Sunday and back up Tuesday for the second project.  This looks a lot like a full time job right now but I also can go for a few weeks with little work activity so I still consider it a very part time job.  Then I will get two days off!  Oh wait, I have to finish reviewing those pesky grants and I still have all those church members to call.  And then back on the road for a one day consulting meeting Friday.  Oh yeah, there are going to be about 80 applications for a new college president posted this week and I’ll have to review all of those sometime, forget the two days off.   

If you read Mr. Groovy’s post you’ll know his three weeks don’t look at all like mine and in fact mine might look like one of Dante’s warmer rings of hell to him.  But oddly I’m having quite a good time doing things my way.  And I think I know why.  It is because my spirit animal is a slug. You know those little slimy homeless snails, that’s me.  Unless I am activated by an outside commitment like a paid consulting gig, or an unpaid volunteer duty or a scheduled activity with my friends I tend to become gooed into my recliner where I peruse blogs and YouTube.  I honestly could do that several days a week but that would be bad for my health, both physical and mental.

  Also, these three weeks are on the extreme end of what my daily life is usually like.  I sometimes go for two or three weeks with almost no paid or unpaid work requiring my attention and if a conflict does develop between my work or volunteering and something fun I want to do, the fun almost always wins.   That’s what vice chair people are for, amiright?

Believe it or not, my careers, both as a corporate executive or during my stint as a lobbyist, were much more packed than now. Every week was busy back then.  This would have seemed a walk in the park to that version of me, so maybe it is just what I’m used to. 

And I don’t think I’m that unusual for a retired guy.  When my wife and I try to schedule an overseas trip, or an off road weekend with friends it is difficult to find empty time on anybody’s calendar.  There may be some early retired people sitting on their porches somewhere watching the world go by but the ones I know are still helping make it spin.  Many are still making income they don’t need, like me, or are heavily engaged in volunteer work.  Is being busy the ideal way to live after leaving the full time workforce behind?  I do not know the answer to that one.  It is certainly the path I’m walking.

What do you think you’ll do when you can do anything you want?

Will you try to keep earning money if you reach a place where you already have more than you’ll ever spend?

Is it insane to let volunteer work control a big part of your schedule?

My friend died last week.  He was 82 and was someone very special in very many ways.  In our small southern city/town he was a force of good who had a hand in some of the best things to have ever happened here.  I and many others loved and admired him and will miss him greatly.

But he also was the first early retiree I ever met, long before it was a thing and long before the FIRE movement existed.  You see, my friend retired in 1986 at the age of 49 and spent the next 33 years of his life living with, in his own words, “work shifted to the bottom of his list of priorities” and with “seeing all of this world” shifted to the top.  I did not know him well until about 20 years ago when I started running with his morning distance running group.  But after that I spent a lot of time with him volunteering at charitable and civic organizations, running marathons and making annual trips to watch baseball in Saint Louis. 

My friend, before early retirement, was the stereotypical picture of the hard driving corporate executive.  He had started at the bottom of the insurance business but through hard work and talent had risen near the top of that world with hundreds of agents spread across many southern states reporting to him.  He was a big deal in that world and made a considerable amount of money.  He worked long hours, travelled constantly and made work one of the very top priorities in his life.  The thought of retirement was an unpleasant thing in his mind, something to be staved off for as long as humanly possible.  He was a good father and husband but balanced that with a fierce commitment to his career. It is very likely he would have stayed in the 9 to 5 corporate executive role until he reached conventional retirement age or maybe even longer, until tragedy struck his family. 

He and his wife were out of town on a trip when his teenage daughter, who had stayed home under the supervision of an older brother, was killed in a car wreck.  She was a great kid with a future full of possibilities, and then she was gone in an instant.  Grief is much too weak a word to describe the impact this had on my friend.  Devastation, that comes closer.  He was wrecked, displaced from his former life and adrift.  He was a man of strong faith but how does faith explain things when you have to bury your child?  He grieved and he healed, to the extent that you ever heal from that kind of loss, and he stopped.  He stopped his routines, stopped going to work, stopped seeing what used to seem so important as mattering anymore. 

That could have been the end, he could have sunk into despair and found comfort in a bottle, opioids or by doubling down on being a workaholic, but he didn’t.  He stopped and thought and pondered his future.  He still had two sons, a wonderful wife and the rest of his life to live.  He decided it was too precious to waste, that he was going to be intentional about his life and trade his time only for things that had value.  He shifted around his priority list, he kept family and friends and faith at the top of the list, but he moved work way down toward the bottom.  And he began a new life. 

He could do that in part because he had saved and invested wisely and had already amassed a nice portfolio. Plus, he enjoyed dabbling in real estate and entrepreneurship, so he had several sources of passive and active income from what were favorite hobbies of his that did not feel like work at all.   His health was OK at that point but like many men of that generation he was a smoker and did not exercise. 

After quitting his job his next big life change was to change his sedentary lifestyle into a very active one.  He started slow but added running, weight lifting, tennis, hiking and biking to his hobby set.  He refereed high school and college football games.  And because he was an “all in” kind of guy he committed himself seriously to fitness.  Over the next 25 years he would run 82 marathons, including marathons on each continent on the planet.  He would even run back to back marathon races on a Saturday followed by another on Sunday.  He climbed over 30 mountains, at least one on every continent.  He lifted millions of pounds of weights, cycled all over the world and changed his diet to one designed for health.  He quit smoking and became as healthy a person as I’ve ever known, who could run and cycle with the best of them well into his 70’s. 

He determined that travel was one of his priorities and he made his way to 106 countries across the globe.  He had a huge map on his office wall with push pins at every location he had traveled to, it was completely covered with pins!  His wife made most of those trips as well and she was as fit and strong and adventurous as her husband.  Their trips included a wide group of active friends of all ages that grew with each new person they met.  Their unrelenting optimism and curiosity about each new country was infectious and drew others to them. 

Besides health and travel my friend was incapable of seeing a need without trying to meet it.  He was a giver and plugged himself into local nonprofits and his church to find ways to help kids who lived in poverty have a better chance of succeeding.  He had decided that spending time helping others, especially those who desperately needed help was another one of his top priorities.  And because he was financially independent, he did not have to spend his days working for money, he could spend them working to help others.   He also could afford to give generously to support the causes he believed in. 

He helped inspire a program that provides five years of free college tuition and fees for every graduate from our local public school system, money they can spend at any college in the country, not just local ones.  It isn’t need based or awarded on academic merits, it goes equally to rich trust fund kids and impoverished ones, academic all stars and struggling students. 

I could go on, its hard to condense 33 years of exceptional living into 1500 words.  And it should be hard, I hope if someone tries to write my life someday, they’ll struggle with having too many good things to include.  I’ve just scratched the surface when it comes to my friend. 

But what if?  What if tragedy had not blindsided him and knocked him off the predictable path of his life back in the 80’s?  Would his life have gone on to be so remarkable, would anyone remember him after he passed?  Would we have cried at his funeral?  I don’t know, my friend chose to become a different man with different priorities because of that accident.  And most of us will not have that experience, and without it most of us might just keep living the same, safe, boring existence. 

I never considered retiring at 49, I was 59 before it occurred to me that I had done all I wanted to do in the corporate world and that my priorities needed to be shifted, much like my friend did.  But I’m very grateful I did, my life has been much fuller and more relaxed and just plain fun the last four years.  I’ve also been able to give back to help others less fortunate than me. I have time to truly engage in helping people since my days are not spent earning money anymore.  I highly recommend it and so I highly recommend the prerequisites that are required for you to have this choice.  You have to control lifestyle inflation, save and invest aggressively and guard your health to make this work.  And most of all you have to stop and take a hard look at your priorities and make sure they reflect the life you want to live, for the rest of your life.

I’m posting this in honor of my friend.  I’m hoping that his story will encourage others to look for more than just a bland boring life.  Hoping it will encourage you to seek and reach financial freedom so that you can live your best life with the freedom to set priorities that make your heart happy!

What about you?  Have you decided what your priorities in life are?  Is career high or low on your list and are you OK with that? 

Have you ever had a personal role model that inspired you to be better than you are, like my friend has inspired me? 

If you divided the bloggers in the personal finance and early retirement space into groups you could split them into the “Not early retired yet but on my way!” group and the “Already early retired and this is how I did it!” group. I’m in the second group and have been for going on four years now and that gives me a perspective on what early retirement is like that isn’t based on my imagination. It is based in cold hard reality.

I always enjoy blogs written by those who are on the journey but haven’t actually pulled the trigger on leaving the full time work world behind. It is kind of like listening to kids talk about what they want to do when they grow up. That’s not to say I’m the wise one, only to say dreaming about something and living it are two different things. Some dreamers talk about traveling full time, being nomadic and rootless whether that is in an RV or backpacking around the world living in hostels. And in fact there are some notable bloggers doing just that. My wife and I travel overseas and all over this country and we do enjoy it but after about five or six days we are usually missing home, I do not think we could ever adopt a permanent traveler lifestyle. Others see becoming organic farmers as an idyllic pursuit. I’m married to a farm girl and I’ve spent just enough time on farms to know that’s back breaking, monotonous and relentless work that isn’t on my list of fun times.

And many others list out what they’ll do on a typical early retired “day in the life of” with quite a detailed schedule. This often includes a pretty sizable chunk of time volunteering at Habitat for Humanity, a rescue animal facility or the local food pantry. That’s where I want to take you today. To the world of volunteering. Most FIRE devotees are living very busy lives, many have young children, pets and side gigs that just do not allow enough time for volunteer work. But many of these same people look forward to a more leisurely existence once they reach financial independence. A life with many unscheduled hours in it, maybe most of the hours they are currently spending at a 9 to 5 job. A frequent thought expressed is that they will spend some of these hours volunteering for a cause they believe in deeply. They feel this will provide them more meaning and fulfillment than their old day job and will be a key puzzle piece in their pursuit of happiness.

As a slightly early retired guy what has my experience shown me regarding the vast satisfaction that comes from volunteering? The short answer is that volunteering is not that satisfying and if you are expecting it to provide a major part of your reason for getting up in the morning, I think you’ll be disappointed. Ouch! That may have triggered a few millennial readers, and I’m sorry for that but it is for your own good. Let me see if I can explain why I am not so enthused about the volunteer life.

First I’m a habitual and lifelong volunteer. I always tell a similarly inclined friend of mine that she’s a pathological volunteer because she can’t tell anyone no, but the same thing is true for me. I always say yes. I’m a little more selective since I retired but the two main organizations I volunteer at are ones I’ve served with for over ten years and I believe deeply in their missions. One is a community college where I’ve seen people lift themselves out of abject poverty by gaining an education that changed their futures. The other is a foundation that provides low income medical care and end of life care. It helps people who have fallen through the cracks in our constantly changing health care system and literally both saves lives and lets people exit this world with dignity. Both of these nonprofits are doing life changing work that I support and believe in, so how can I find volunteering at them to be “less than” compared to my old day job?

Nonprofits are odd ducks compared to for profit businesses. They look like businesses from the outside. The college, for instance, charges tuition and fees to provide a service, such as a certificate or an associates degree in a field. They have employees they pay, teachers, maintenance workers, accountants and others, just like a business. They advertise like a business and compete with other community colleges and four year universities for customers. They look just like a business! The foundation provides medical care with doctors, nurse practitioners and nurses and they also have human resource professionals, IT technicians and administrative assistants. They charge a copay for visits and receive insurance payments for their patients. So both the college and the foundation look an awful lot like regular money making businesses from the outside. But there is one big difference. They lose money! Lots and lots of money. They do not charge their customers what it costs to provide their services, not even close. The college receives most of its income from the government and the foundation makes up for its losses by the investments gains on its endowment. They aren’t just nonprofits, they are negative profit organizations.

For someone who spent his career in a very “for profit” sector, oil and chemicals, it is hard to enjoy the process by which nonprofits do business. The best way I know to explain this is to contrast what my old world was like to what the college and foundation are like. Ambition is a huge driving force in the private sector. I looked at work as a game, with my goal being to climb as quickly and as high as I could on the corporate ladder. This would bring me financial rewards and an increasing amount of control over my job and my company. And that is what happened, I was paid plenty of money, enough to allow me to walk away from work when I stopped having fun. I also had a great deal of control over how I did my job and even in what I chose to do. But in the volunteer world most of the wages are constrained by government payments that do not keep pace with inflation. Add to that the fact that the clients that are being served do not have any money to pay for the services they need.

This basic lack of resources means that the kind of incentives like decent raises, bonuses and stock awards that can motivate corporate employees are not readily available in the nonprofit world. Most college employees are lucky to see a one percent raise. The amount of state money provided to support our college has been basically flat for years while inflation marches on, albeit at a fairly low pace in recent years. And while both the college and foundation have motivated employees it is hard to dig deep and kill it on a project when you know that no matter how hard you work your pay will not be affected. That’s a common millennial complaint in the for profit world but believe me it is far worse in the nonprofit sector. This cannot help but diminish the overall level of ambition, and as a guy who spent his career surrounded by thoroughbreds itching for a race it is not very inspiring. It impacts the overall morale and work ethic of most nonprofits, in my experience. There are a few self motivated true believers who are shining stars but they stand out for a reason, they are rare.

Alignment is another key part of the business world, at least at effective companies. It is critical that everyone understand the mission of the company and how their job ties into the mission. And people know that if they can’t demonstrate that on a daily basis they will probably be out on the street pretty quickly. At nonprofits there is little pressure to conform to a unified plan. Everyone seems to have their own ideas of what the organization should be doing and there is a lot of inefficiency in terms of people not playing well together. Everyone knows that the college has the mission of providing an affordable education to both traditional and non traditional clients but that means something different to every professor or administrative staffer. At the chemical plant we all knew we needed to maximize production, minimize costs and do it safely. The lack of clarity and lack of a coherent plan make volunteer work fuzzy and unfocused.

Excellence was the way to advance in the corporate world. You had to be fast and productive and at the same time you had to be a team player who took care of your coworkers. Living in that kind of world was a lot of fun. You had to be on your game all the time. There isn’t so much of that in the nonprofit world. Standards are much lower because lower pay doesn’t attract the same level of talent as higher pay does. CPA’s generally make more than accounting teachers and an IT professional at an oil company makes more than the same job at a charity. While we have a lot of talent where I volunteer we do not have the same level from top to bottom that I did on my team at the chemical plant. My engineers and some of my hourly union workers were making six figures, more than the highest paid professor at the college. The competition for the jobs at the plant was extreme because the pay was great, and the fact is you really do get what you pay for in this world. And making do with a less motivated and talented workforce can be very frustrating to a volunteer in the nonprofit space.

And finally, the dirty little secret of the volunteer world and of the organizations that accept volunteers is that they don’t really want your help. Don’t misunderstand, they need you because some of their grants are based on having volunteers signed up. But they do not really want you doing their jobs. They see volunteers first as a financial resource. Either because you’ll likely donate some money to them or because you’ll help them secure grant funding. Second you are an amateur and they have no real control over someone who can walk away at a moments notice if they get their feelings hurt, or just get bored. Can you imagine how great an assistant a volunteer would be in your day job? You’d have to cajole and coax them to do anything for you. And that would be exhausting. Face it, there are plenty of things at your day job you don’t like to do. And you do them only because they pay you and you need an income stream. None of that applies to volunteer work. So if you run a charitable organization part of what you have to do is find busy work for volunteers that can’t be trusted or relied on to do anything unpleasant or boring. I’m exaggerating this a little to make my point, but it is critical to understanding why volunteer work isn’t as much fun as you imagine. Volunteers just aren’t a good workforce because they lack the same kinds of incentives that paid workers have, so they don’t get the kind of work they are seeking.

All this may sound like a major downer to you, my bashing volunteering. I do not mean to do that, and I have not reduced my volunteer work in any way. I just want to make it clear that in itself, volunteering, even for very noble causes, does not make up for a lack of purpose in the rest of your life. It simply isn’t enough by itself. It can be a meaningful piece of your plan, but if you are like me you’ll find it brings with the satisfaction, equal helpings of frustration and tedium. I do it because it is important work that changes lives. I do not do it because the work itself is fulfilling, but I do it to give back in gratitude for what education has provided me. And I do it because I can afford the best medical care and I want that for everyone regardless of their income.

Compared to my old corporate job, volunteering isn’t as much fun, most of the time. Frankly I think you’ll find that to be true for you as well. But life is not about just doing fun things. It is about doing worthwhile things. It is about making a difference in the lives of others and volunteering is one way to do that, even if it is a little muddled and imperfect. That’s my take from this side of the retired life.

As usual if you can’t find the comment box just click on the title of the post and it should take you there.

What about you? If you have pulled the trigger on early or not so early retirement have you found the volunteer world to be as lacking in instant gratification as I have?

Or if you are still chained to your job do you have any plans to volunteer some day? If so, are you counting on it to be a major source of joy in your life or will you just look at it as a job worth doing?

You’ve read about it a hundred times, the four percent rule. All you need to do to retire early is to learn to live frugally and efficiently and then save up 25 times your annual expenses. Some very clever people have worked out the math using the past market performance and inflation rates to show that if you invest that much money, and have no debt, you can be retired for thirty or more years safely without earning another paycheck. Four percent of course is 4/100 or 1/25 which is how 4% gets you to 25. I would never argue with any of that, it is after all just mathematics, and as a licensed professional engineer math is my friend.

Most of the blog posts I’ve seen using this algorithm are written by people who haven’t saved up 25 times their expenses yet, so they are future looking posts. They do know their current expenses and generally, by budgeting, they do a great job of keeping their expenses on target. There is that occasional “uh oh” when Murphy sucker punches them with a leaking hot water heater or vehicle fender bender. But a surprising number of them make a hugely dangerous assumption when they are crafting their financial plan toward Financial Independence and Retiring Early. They forget about the time value of money.

To be accurate they do not forget about the time value of money altogether, they are using it to project the growth of their investments, but they do not apply the same logic to their future expenses. How dangerous is this omission? The answer is “it depends”. If your plan is a highly accelerated scorched earth campaign like Mr. Money Mustache followed then it probably isn’t going to wreck your plans. But if you are more like me and took a leisurely path toward financial independence then it could be a fatal mistake. Not fatal in that you are going to die, but fatal in that your plan may already be DOA (dead on arrival).

Let’s look at two examples, one is a ten year plan for FIRE and the other is a 30 year plan to retire. I would assume most of us fall somewhere in between these two goals, with me being one of the turtles who worked for the whole 30 years while many of you are gazelles who plan on whipping across the finish line in ten or less years. In both cases lets assume you are kinda sorta lean FIRE oriented and have trimmed your expenses to $40,000 a year which covers a life that you enjoy and find meaning in. Using the 4 % rule you need 25 times that or 25x$40,000 which is a cool $1 Million when you leave the workforce. Now I’m also assuming you don’t earn another penny after you retire and I’m not counting paying any taxes on your investment earnings so I’m not being entirely rigorous, but I can still make my point.

Let’s start both cases on January 1, 2019 so that the gazelles will hit their $1 Million target in January of 2029 and the turtles will plod agonizingly across the finish line in 2049. Obviously the gazelles will have had to have had a much higher savings rate than the turtles but for my purpose it doesn’t really matter how they got there. The thing that matters is they are both millionaires and since they can live on $40,000 which is 4% of their one million dollar portfolio they are both sitting pretty, right? No! They aren’t. There is a huge difference in the lifestyles they will be able to afford and I can show you why.

We love to show the magic of compound interest in building a portfolio, if the stock market averages 6% growth you can expect your money to double every 12 years. That is the only way that normal people could ever accumulate a million dollars, because their money compounds over time. What we often do not consider is that the time value of money also works against us when it comes to inflation. While inflation has been very low in recent years that isn’t always the case, in fact during my working career I remember seeing several years where inflation topped ten percent and in 1980 it averaged 13.1%! Nobody knows the future inflation rate but most people use somewhere in the 2 to 3% range per year when they correct for inflation’s impact on the future. I’ll use 2.5% in looking at the impact on my turtles and gazelles because that’s right in the middle.

I’m sure you can see where I’m going with this and the numbers are very straight forward. If you have shown you can live comfortably on $40,000 in 2019 and have accumulated your million dollar nest egg by 2029 then you can pull $40,000 and live just like you live now, right? Wrong again! Because that $40,000 that you withdraw in 2029 is not worth $40,000 of 2019 buying power. When you time adjust it to today’s money it is only worth $31,250. So you can only buy that much food, rent, electricity, gasoline, cell phone, lattes and streaming services. That means cutting your budget by nearly 1/4th of what you planned on spending. I don’t know about you but cutting my budget by 1/4th would really crimp my lifestyle. And that is the result on the gazelles who are retiring in only ten years. If you are a turtle the impact of inflation on the real value of your financial target is much worse. For a turtle that $40,000 in 2029 dollars will only buy what $19,000 buys today. You are losing over half of your buying power! If that is not fatal to your plans it has to at least put them in intensive care.

What’s a turtle to do? Or a gazelle for that matter? The answer is not fun but it is also not complicated. If you are a turtle you’ve got to hit two million at retirement in order to live like you live now on $40,000 a year. Instead of 25 times your current expenses you’ll need to save 50 times. If you are a gazelle it isn’t quite so bad, but you’ll still need to have about $1.3 Million invested to provide you a lifestyle equivalent to $40,000 today. That’s the same thing as saving 32 times current expenses.

That’s pretty depressing in one way but it is not really as bad as it seems. For one thing income also rises over time. If you are making $80k and saving half of it now chances are that you’ll be making over $100k in ten years so if you manage to keep on saving half you’ll be saving more money each year and getting to the $1.3 Million will not “feel” any worse than your original path to saving one million. Same thing for a turtle, in thirty years if your pay just keeps up with inflation, and it should do better than that, then your $80k income should increase to over $160k. You may say “You don’t know my boss and my company, not gonna happen!” But while I don’t know your circumstances I do know my own past. I started work when $18K was considered a high salary (dinosaur, I know) and because those were high inflation years I watched my pay go up to $200k and higher during my career. I also watched starting pay for my 18k job go up to 80k for chemical engineers starting their careers today where I worked. I can personally attest to this inflation stuff being real. I honestly lived just as well when I made $18,000 a year as the new engineers starting now do making $80,000. Maybe I lived even better because of the way tax bracket creep works.

So what does it mean to you? Just one thing. When you figure out your financial independence number you need to know what year you will plan to get there and adjust that for inflation. There are all kinds of free time value of money and inflation calculators on the internet and they will all give you the right answer. Or you can just track your expenses every year, a very good idea anyway, and as you get within a couple of years of hitting your target amount then inflation stops making enough difference to matter. You’ll just keep adjusting your target as you see your actual spending go up a little almost every year. If you are a gazelle you still need to do this, because who can afford a 25% cut in an already frugal budget but if you are a turtle on a 30 year path to financial independence it is even more important. Nobody can afford to cut their spending in half for the rest of their life and feel like they’ve won the prize.

One thing that occurred to me while writing this is that because some people neglect to include inflation in their personal finance planning they set themselves up for budgeting failure. If you have a goal to live on $40,000 in 2019 and you make it, great! But in 2020 your goal should be somewhere in the $40,800 to $41,000 range, it should not stay at $40,000. Sure maybe you’ll ratchet down your spending enough to hold the line but your lifestyle will dwindle because that 2020 money just isn’t worth what it was in 2019 and to live the same life you’ll have to spend more. Once you’ve figured out what the optimum amount is for your life you cannot freeze that number, it has to grow with inflation or your quality of life will suffer. And if you aren’t having fun you’ll never finish the race.

As always, if you want to leave a comment click on the title of the post.

What about you, have you factored in inflation into your financial independence target?

Do you give yourself a little extra spending space each year, not for lifestyle inflation but to account for real inflation?

Don’t worry, no animals were harmed in the writing of this blog post! My wife and I joined a few other couples in Colorado to hike the Rocky Mountain National Park last week and have just returned to the flatlands. We enjoyed the relatively cool summer weather in Colorado which was a welcome break from the oppressive heat and humidity of the Deep South in July.

As usual we squeezed in a lot of hiking and as usual we did not take even one day to acclimate to the altitude. We hiked 50 miles of trails over a five day period with most of the trails running from 300 to 500 feet of elevation gain per mile. If you are used to mountain hiking you’ll know that is STEEP stuff. We also generally were in the 10,000 to 13,000 feet of elevation range for most of the treks. Considering our home in Arkansas sits at about 200 feet of elevation it is a pretty good struggle to catch your breath in such thin air, in fact the available oxygen is reduced by over a third at the heights we were hiking, so while it was awesome to see the views, we paid for it with a lot of panting and heavy breathing.

My wife and I are both boomers, but we are runners and competitive tennis players so we are in somewhat better than average shape for our age. Still it was all I could do to keep up with the others in our group. We saw some wildlife, mostly deer and moose with an elk or two included but not as many as we expected. I think the rainy spring and summer has made so much food available that the animals do not have to range very far to find plenty of forage.

As is often the case I thought about how difficult taking a hiking trip would have been four years ago when I was working my old 9 to 5. First I would have had to plan the dates of the trip far in advance. And generally about half of the time something would happen in the chemical complex I ran that would cause me to have to cancel the trip. In fact, a standing family joke for us was that a family vacation was a trip for Mom and the kids, because Dad always ended up missing the trip! That’s not a thing anymore because I do not have a job to go to and I am never on call since I retired.

Also we would have flown because of the time factor of being away from the job, but now we could spend a few days driving and not miss all the interesting things we pass on the way there. I’m not opposed to flying but for my wife and me the drive is half the fun. We’ve seen dozens of unique sights traveling at ground level that you miss at 40,000 feet. The Painted Mines, the Bidi Badlands, Canon City Skyline Drive and the world’s largest ball of twine. Well, actually, we skipped the ball of twine in Kansas and went to the Painted Mines instead.

I’d have also been concerned about the lack of cell coverage on the drive and in remote Colorado. Most likely I’d have received dozens of email and several work calls every day of my vacation and some of those would require a quick response that would be difficult from the top of Mt. Ida or Lulu City. But now, who cares if the phone works? Not a problem!

And try as I might I’m sure my mind would have kept grinding away on whatever big problems were my biggest concerns at work. Being over budget by a few million dollars on the latest project or having capacity problems with some of the equipment or perhaps safety concerns for my people. On this trip I did not worry about anything. The consulting work I do on a very part time basis doesn’t cause me enough stress to mention and it can almost always wait a week without any input from me at all. Best of all there is zero work that piles up when I’m away. Most of the time I could be gone a month and my clients would not be impacted.

At the end of the planned week of hiking we decided to drive about 500 miles out of our way to do some off roading at Lake City Colorado. There is a very cool trail system running from Lake City to Silverton, Colorado that is perfect for Jeeps and side by side ATV’s so we rented a Polaris RZR, just like the one we own, and spent all day riding rough trails through amazing mountain passes. It was a wonderful break for our legs from the extreme hiking and had equally gorgeous scenery. We just came up with that idea at the last minute and extended our road trip for two days. In my old life that would not have been possible, my CEO would have been breathing down my neck about my absence and stretching it longer just to have some more fun? Not likely. But now, we take as many trips as we want. There are no financial or time constraints any more. It is a nice way to live.

Sometimes I take my new life for granted, sleeping in until 8:30 AM this morning for instance, and not having an alarm clock set. That’s an amazing thing, if you are still working I know you probably hate the alarm going off. In my case the only time it alarms is when I’m getting up early to do something fun that I want to do. But the thing about human adaptation is that I have stopped realizing what a huge gift it is to not have to get up and go to work. Same thing about being able to sit here and type this post in the early afternoon while my wife is out playing tennis, that seems normal now and I guess it is my new normal. Since it is now my everyday life I don’t even notice. But before I retired early, there is no way I could be doing this on a week day, I’d be busy in endless meetings at the plant.

Vacation trips are much different in another way as well. In my old work days they were an attempt to squeeze in some time to unwind and find peace of mind. But work always intruded and constrained the joy to less than it should have been. Now fun trips are not so different from staying at home. The scenery changes but the feeling of doing whatever I choose is pretty much the same. Basically every day feels like vacation, in fact better than vacations used to feel, because there is little threat of work interrupting my plans.

Oh yeah, there was the moose wreck, almost forgot about that. One thing hiking allows is the ability to observe wild animals up close. Sometimes a little too close. Our third day out we were hiking a ten mile loop to Little Yellowstone and Lake Verna in the Park. Suddenly a mama moose appeared on the trail right in front of us, and a very large calf followed her out onto the trail. They seemed unconcerned about a few hikers and one went left and the other went to the right side of the trail to munch on tasty vegetation. The calf, which was the size of a horse, not a new born by any stretch, decided he did not like the looks of our crew and bolted back toward mama moose. The only problem was he decided to make a very sharp turn just as he crossed the trail, which was muddy and slick at that spot. He took a major pratfall just like he had stepped on a banana peel and slammed down on his side in the mud. He was uninjured, but I’m sure, very embarrassed. Mama, walked up to him as he regained his feet and looked at the little guy reproachfully. I don’t speak moose, but I’m fairly confident that what she was telling him was that moose have a responsibility to the dignity of the species. In other words “Never fall on your face in front of humans, son!”

These thoughts about “vacationing” as a slightly early retired couple versus what used to pass as vacations are evolving with each year that passes since I pulled the plug on my job. We take the same kinds of trips to the same kinds of places but we do them much more often. The biggest change though, is we are never in a hurry now. We have time to extend our stay, time to add on destinations and time to recover from trips after we get back home without having to rush back to a pile of backed up work. It may not sound that different to you, but to me the difference is in the way it feels. It feels like I always thought vacations should feel, but that they never quite did.

As usual if you’d like to make a comment please do! If you don’t see a comment box then just click on the title at the top of the post and that should get you there.

What about you, if you have retired do vacation trips feel different now?

If you are still working full time do work worries ever interfere with your enjoyment of your vacation trips?

What does Financial Independence feel like? That’s an interesting question because in this space, the personal finance world, the vast majority of people blogging and reading posts are not there yet. They are paying off debt, life hacking, side gigging and minimizing their way on the journey. But they are still years, perhaps decades, away from reaching their goal.

When I try to think of something I can write that is more than just another opinion, I think of what I’ve experienced that most readers have not. As an older writer I have shared career tips from a career that lasted over three decades and the advantages of rural non-metro living from somebody who doesn’t live inside any town’s city limits. I’ve reveled in driving my eleven year old, $7,000 car that outperforms most 2019 models. And I’ve talked about hiking to every waterfall in our state, something I’m pretty sure no reader has ever done. (Louisiana readers don’t count, water doesn’t have anything to fall off of in Louisiana, it mostly just sits still unless it is flooding.)

But just a minute ago it occurred to me that I know one more thing that most people do not know, so I dropped what I was doing and started creating this post. I know what financial independence feels like, and I’ve known it for years! What is life like when you not only can buy anything you want but also know for certain you will never, ever, have to work for money again? That is something I know!

First the space that worrying about money occupies in your life now is freed up. That time is now useful to you. Sure, you still analyze purchases to see if the value you perceive in an item exceeds its price. But you never think “I can’t afford that.” or “Can I afford that?” Those thoughts are gone, never to return. Certainly there are things I can’t afford, like a ten million dollar yacht or a twenty million dollar jet, but I’d never find myself wanting those things. What I mean is that every single thing in this world that fits in the realm of things I’d consider purchasing, is now affordable to me, so affording things will never be a question again. If my seven thousand dollar car falls to pieces tomorrow I can go buy another used car or any new one I want and price really isn’t a concern. Knowing me I’ll try to find a similar one for $6,000 but if I replaced it with a 2019 model for closer to $60,000 it wouldn’t hurt us. It may not sound like a big deal, but knowing that you’ve got enough money that the cost of things is no longer a required factor in your decision making, feels like a big deal.

Perhaps even bigger than not worrying about money, you don’t worry about being employed. I have a nice set of side gigs that entertain me now. They also bring in six figures in income, and trust me none of it comes from the internet or from blogging. The side gigs are various forms of consulting that are based on my old job experience and my chemical engineering skills. I’ve been doing them for three years and they’ve been a nice transition from my old nine to five to my retired life. But they are nothing like a real job. First they only consume about one day a week’s effort, at most two days. Second I don’t really have a boss, just clients, and they have to pay me whether they like my results or not. It’s been mostly fun with just enough hard mental effort to keep my brain taxed with problem solving. But I’m already looking for what’s next. Maybe more volunteer work or maybe a different kind of paid work? It may take me a couple of years to move to whatever that turns out to be but there is no pressure to figure that out.

And did I mention I don’t have a boss anymore? That’s big. I liked my bosses, our CEO was one of the most charismatic natural leaders I’ve ever known. My other bosses were brilliant and experienced engineers with incredible talent. But the job was tough and the pressure to be perfect was intense. And I am not talking about intense in the way that all jobs can be stressful, I’m talking about an intensity I would not have believed if I had not been the victim of it first hand. The best way I know to describe it is in what has happened since I retired. They are currently looking for a person to replace the person who replaced the person who replaced me. That’s a lot of replacing in just three years. Even for high six figure pay it is hard to find people that can handle the pressure. I eventually couldn’t do it anymore even though I did hang in there for over three years. That made me the all time record holder for that job. What let me escape? That financial independence thing of course. So another way it feels is the way it feels to not have a boss, simply free!

In your case you might choose to keep working like I did for years after financial independence. I even considered working full time again briefly when a couple of great jobs were offered to me after I retired. But it doesn’t make sense to work full time at anything less than a dream job and I haven’t found one of those yet, other than my side gigs. I am a proponent of always working some, I think the benefits are worth the fact that all work has some drudge days included. But I can be hella picky now! And that is also how financial independence feels.

Some of the things financial independence feels like are about things I don’t have any more. Work stress is a big one, and it is gone! Not the worries about getting fired but in my line of work worry about one of my workers getting hurt or even killed on the job. Chemical plants are fairly safe compared to many other jobs but when things do go wrong they can go very very wrong very very quickly and can have deadly results. Another thing I do not have is being on call. As “the boss” I was on call every hour of every day of the year. If something bad happened, an accident or a major equipment failure, then my CEO expected to be notified by me within minutes of the unfortunate event. This kind of thing seemed to happen most often on vacation, Christmas or during family events. Not any more, that’s gone.

I know I could go on and on. But let me end with one of the bestest things. There is no alarm clock or phone alarm set for Monday morning. No…alarm! I just wake up when I wake up. Sure I still get up before 5AM three days a week to run with my wife and our running group but that’s my choice. And we never run on Mondays. If you are working a nine to five then I know every Sunday you start to think about Monday morning and when that alarm goes off, man, it is just not a good feeling knowing you have five days to live through before you have much free time of your own. I mostly liked my job until at the very end. But even so there were many Mondays when the last thing I wanted to do was to crawl out of my warm bed and get ready for work. And never feeling that way now, that’s how financial independence feels to me. It feels like rolling over and catching a few more Z’s.

What about you, if you are already financially independent how does that feel?

If you aren’t how do you imagine it will feel?

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One of the conundrums that people in the FIRE community puzzle over is the problem of imagining what life will be like beyond the 9 to 5.  Most of us have worked our entire adult lives so we haven’t practiced owning our own time.  We tend to try to see it as an endless vacation, because vacations are the only time we are not working.  But we also know, and perhaps fear deep in our hearts, that it is not going to be like an endless vacation.  We know we cannot lie on the beach every day, or ski every day or just watch Netflix every day for the rest of our lives and be sure we will be happy.  I think it is up to us who have made the transition from the corporate world to try to explain what “retired” life is like, particularly what it is like for young or young at heart, active people.  

My Independence Day from the 9 to 5 was over three years ago and I’ve lived over a thousand days of my new life since that first day.  I think it is safe to say that I’m way over the honeymoon phase and I’m well into life 2.0.    Today, right now, I’m sitting at our kitchen table, just after enjoying an amazing rib barbecue that my incredible wife put together, thinking back over today.  Today might be the single best day of the last thousand but not because it was particularly special.  In fact, it was spent doing things my wife and I do frequently and we never were more than 15 miles from our house at any time during the day.  It wasn’t special in any way, but it was magical in that redneck, athletic sense that she and I cherish. 

At about 6:15 AM she got out of bed.  It was an unremarkable night, we slept well as usual but having gone to bed pretty early, sleeping any later wasn’t a possibility.  After she got up, I played with the idea of sleeping a little longer.  But no, I was well rested so I got up and made the bed.  And there’s a thing right there.  We have a house rule.  The last one out of bed each morning has to make the bed.  So that was me, and I did it with a smile.  Then I shaved and got dressed and wandered down the hall to the kitchen and asked her if I could fix her anything for breakfast.  She was fine without, so I had a nice egg and sausage and hash brown breakfast, cooked by me, for me and it was wonderful.  We had discussed bass fishing this morning because at one time the weather had been forecasting rain and clouds, which is when bass bite best.  However, they had changed the outlook to all sunny skies at bedtime so we had cancelled that plan.  But here it was, morning time and the sky was dark and radar showed rain coming our way, rain but not storms.  So, we tossed around the idea, why not go fishing?  We had tennis set up at 1:30 PM but we could still squeeze in a couple hours at our friend’s private lake about 15 minutes away.  So, we threw some drinks in the cooler, grabbed our rain-suits and took off across town with our boat in tow. 

We launched and it started to rain lightly, and the fish went crazy.  We caught bass after bass on top water baits.  If you aren’t a bass fisherman then it is hard to convey how much fun it is to catch fish on topwater lures.  You cast your plastic floating bait out next to shore or a floating weed bed, then you twitch it and the bass plunge up out of the water in a huge explosion and the fight is on.  For two hours we had a lifetime day of catching fish and then the rain and the fish stopped.   We loaded the boat back on the trailer and headed home where I cleaned the fish.  Then we had a nice fish taco lunch with fresh guacamole.  By then the sun had come out and dried off the tennis courts so our tennis doubles match was still on.  My wife and I are pretty good tennis players, we both play on tennis teams with people much younger than us.   It is rare that high school team players can win a match against either of us and sometimes we even pull off a win against college team players.  But this match was different.  There are three older players, 70 and 80 plus year old players that aren’t as fast or as good as they used to be but playing is good for them mentally and physically.  It is fun for us to get them out on the court to compete.  My wife plays on one side and I play on the other and we run down the shots the older guys can’t get to.  It’s just a wonderful time to keep those guys in the game and I credit my sweet wife for making it happen.  Me and Doc won today over my wife and Alan and it was close and fun and it really mattered to those guys that someone is interested in playing them.  I hope when I’m that age and less capable than now, someone is helping me stay in the game.  But if not, I’m proud to have helped do it for them. 

All in all, it was a great morning fishing and an awesome tennis match, on many levels, and then it just kept getting better.  I got a call from the foundation I chair in one of my non-paid charity gigs and they couldn’t get payroll out unless someone could sign the checks and as board chair I was the only one in town with check signing authority.  Threw my sweaty self into my car and drove across our little city and signed the checks.  Just to be able to solve one little problem for the foundation employees felt good and it exemplified the super power of time flexibility that comes with retirement.  Usually if anyone needs a hand you can lend it and just rearrange your schedule at will.    When I got back home  my wife had picked up ribs on sale for super cheap and she threw them on the grill, fired up her riding mower and proceeded to cut the neighbors lawn and the other neighbors lawn just for fun while I watched from our patio, with an adult beverage, and guarded the ribs on the grill.  Her mower is one of those fast zero turn models since we have a very large yard, so she was back in no time after mowing about three acres of grass.  I cooked some baked beans and we had a feast, with a little Malbec thrown in.  She also took a plate of ribs next door to our recently widowed neighbor who we’ve adopted as a favorite older sister. After dinner I started writing this post.  

A perfect day.  A day that started out with very little scheduled but ended up being pretty busy with things we both loved to do, and some we did separately.   We had a one in a thousand, exciting fishing trip, we had a great tennis game that was about much more than winning or losing, we fixed a feast beyond the imagination of the kings of yore and we helped our friends and neighbors along the way. 

Is every day in early retirement this good?  No, of course not.  But so many are!  Imagine no alarm clocks.  No assignments.  No eight AM start and five PM finish times in an office.  No emails about work, no texts about work, no calls about work.   For me it is just being together with my best friend and lover, helping others and having fun.  It is good.  It was a good, good day.  Tomorrow will be different, no idea really what we’ll do after the five thirty AM Thursday run with our friends.  It might get exciting right there.  A large black bear was spotted where we usually begin our runs and we had to relocate our route to stay out of his way last time.  I’ve got a few projects around the house and will probably finish this blog post but other than that my calendar is open for whatever opportunities to play or serve might appear.  I think it is going to be another very good day!

You probably think this is going to be one of those, “OMG, I just turned a corner and ran right into middle age!” kind of stories. But it isn’t. I passed age 41 a long time ago. And if anyone refers to me as middle aged I’m going to hug them. This is a different tale about a marriage celebrating its 41st birthday, today! Imagine, being married to the same person for four decades, plus one year. Just how long ago was that? Well, there were no cell phones, no personal computers, no laptops, no iPads. The Vietnam war had just ended three years earlier. The Alaskan oil pipeline had just started pumping oil and the Bee Gee’s were hot with Stayin’ Alive.

I was a new engineer, just starting a career five months past graduation and my girlfriend would not marry me until she finished college in May. She had promised her dad that she’d finish school before marrying since one of her sisters had not, and never did finish. So in a small country church we gathered with family and a few friends and had a wedding that could not have cost more than $500, probably considerably less. My fiancé had no diamond engagement ring, she did not want one. We both had $71 plain gold bands for our wedding rings. We had no money, but also no debt. College was pretty inexpensive back then and most families could cash flow the costs without student loans. I had gotten a very good starting offer so I had saved enough the first few months to be debt free.

Early on we rented an inexpensive older apartment, then moved into a house trailer that we bought with payments, it was only $5,000. We then bought our first house after about a year for $32,500. That was the last time we moved. We are still in that house today, for forty years so far. We’ve remodeled, added on and expanded the house nine times over the years. And what was 1440 sq ft then is about 3,000 sq ft now. And it has been paid for at least the last 15 years, I forget exactly when.

So what is life with one person for forty-one years like. In a word, it is nice. It is comfortable. It is strong. You learn each other’s language and you get much better at making each other happy. You can sit together without speaking for an hour without getting nervous or uncomfortable from the silence. And in our case you can recount a thousand tennis matches played, a thousand miles hiked, a thousand miles of distance running and perhaps a thousand fish caught while fishing together. You can count three grown millennial kids making their way through life after a good start in our home. You can count millions in investments and almost as much given away. You can count a dozen cats and dogs that lived their short appointed lives at our place. But the memories of those forty-one years, you cannot possibly count all of those. They simply are vastly more than can be counted.

We have had a few tragedies, as a brother and two nephews died far too young, and as another friend left a too young widow when his corporate plane went down in the trees. We’ve dodged false diagnoses of cancer, heart disease and stroke to remain pretty healthy into our sixties. But we know there are no guarantees going forward and that with each year that we live together our remaining years are one less. I suspect each of us would prefer not to be the one that wins the longevity game since it is very hard to imagine a meaningful life that did not have our other half in it. But of course we would because we have never quit anything and certainly would never quit on life. The last three years we’ve both been retired. And they have been three of our best years. We do more together than most couples because we share the running, hiking, tennis, fishing, skiing, travel and off-roading hobbies that make up most of our recreation. But we also have separate lives, she’s off on a European River Cruise with a girlfriend next week and my hobby jobs take me to other cities frequently, usually without her. But more often than not we spend our time together. It is very fortunate for me that she’s always been my best friend. I can’t imagine spending that much time with anyone else.

She is patient, she is kind and she takes care of people because that is who she is. Whether it is me, our widowed neighbor, the older tennis players that she gets out to play because it is so good for them or anyone she sees in need, she helps without thinking about it. She listens so people who like to talk seek her out and they talk and talk and talk. But she is kind and she is willing to listen, more patient than I would be. She builds, including a good bit of our house, all of our landscaping and outbuildings. She paints and cleans and fixes things. Growing up on a small farm makes you handy, even compared to an engineer like me. I was a legend at work, I never cut the grass, ran the leaf blower or weed eater. I bought her Christmas presents like table saw’s, routers and power washers. Yet she is crafty and can decorate and accessorize the house beautifully. She can sew clothes from scratch and she is an awesome cook. I on the other hand am great at thermodynamics, and not much else.

So is there a secret to staying married for many decades? I’ve wondered that myself. Is it luck, skill or just purely random chance that determines marital success? After much thought I think I know the answer to that question. I think there is a secret. And it is very simple, marry someone like my wife.

What do you think? Are lifetime marriages a thing of the past or still a valid concept?

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