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It is no secret I am an engineer.  And not one of those new fangled software designer type “engineers” but an old school physics and math type engineer, specifically a chemical engineer.  But because I volunteered for everything at work  (one of my similarly afflicted friends and I have co-labeled this as pathological volunteering syndrome) my career took me off onto a number of rabbit trails that were decidedly not the norm for an engineer.

 

One of those was becoming a lobbyist. A perfect storm of circumstances converged to put me into that world for seven years of my career.  First my only long-time rival in the corporate world, ironically a guy whose job I had saved early in his career, succeeded in moving me out of managing the chemical complex I ran.  For reasons I still do not understand he moved me off  into the area of government affairs so he could put someone else in my former position. He was not trying to do me any favors but in fact he did me a solid without intending to. Second, I had become over time, our company’s main representative for our national trade association which was the lobbying arm for our industry and third, my chairmanship of the state chamber of commerce automatically put me in the middle of representing all the large businesses in our state when it came to regulations and legislation.  So, I went from being the Vice President of my division to being the Vice President of Governmental Affairs.

 

I had responsibility for defeating any legislation on the state level that was bad for my company and for helping to do the same through our trade association on the national level.  That meant being a witness at hearings of committees and subcommittees both in our state capital and in Washington D.C.  Since Arkansas does not have a full-time legislature that work focused around the legislative sessions that occurred every two years and the meetings that occurred between sessions.  In D.C. Congress meets pretty much all the time so I spent more time there than in Arkansas. We generally only tried to defeat bills rather than to create our own legislation because we did not have the public or congressional support to pass our own bills. Our industry stayed in a very defensive posture.

 

If you think about the Hollywood version of lobbying you think of lavish golf outings, cruising around on yachts and “fact finding” junkets to Morocco or the French Riviera.  In reality, not so much.  The ethics rules in D.C. are crazy strict to the point that you can’t even buy a lowly staffer of a congressman a cup of coffee, much less treat the legislators themselves to fancy meals or entertainment.  In fact, in seven years of working in D.C. I spent a grand total of $0 on meals, drinks or entertainment for congressmen or their staff.  The job, instead, entailed meeting with legislators or their staff and presenting them our side of the story when it came to proposed regulation or legislation that we disagreed with.  Sometimes they agreed with me and sometimes they basically threw me out of their offices but my job was to show them the unintended consequences of passing what my industry felt were bad laws.

 

On occasion I testified before House or Senate committees about proposed legislation.  For a period of time I was basically the voice of the industry because of one thing that separated my company from the pack.  We were family owned and did not have shareholders and were not publicly traded like other large corporations.  That meant our owner did not fear stockholder backlash from negative publicity and because he was a feisty guy who had built an empire from nothing, he authorized me to go out and tell the truth even if it wasn’t popular. The mega-corporation members of our industry were terrified of being seen unfavorably in press coverage of hearings so as the only volunteer I was the guy who got to be on camera with the bright lights shining in my face.  Personally, I loved it. I’ve always been an adrenaline junky and it doesn’t get much more intense than having an anti-oil, anti-chemical Senator berating you when you are sworn in as a witness.  I always had the facts to back up my statements and as an engineer I understood the science much better than the politicians did.  Those guys deal with a myriad of issues and we always used to say they were a mile wide and an inch deep.  They and their staffers just did not have time to really learn the issues all the way through, and in fact they often voted on legislation they had not even had the time to read.

 

On the state level it was similar but it was less factious.  Votes did not always go down party lines and state legislators really do understand that their constituents are the ones they represent.  It is much closer to what our founding fathers intended government to be like, with volunteer legislators that have real jobs in the real world they do when the legislature is not in session.  They see themselves as regular people, not as celebrities and will always make time to listen to you.

 

I hate to make it sound so mundane but for the most part it was just like any other white collar job.  Lots of meetings, perhaps a few more social gatherings.  Lots of dry time studying documents, reports and proposed legislation.  Lots of time building PowerPoints and writing position papers.  A few interviews with the press, an occasional appearance on a Sunday morning news talk show and writing opinion pieces for magazines or newspapers.  It was very easy compared to running a chemical complex.  Emergencies did not occur on weekends or nights so you could plan your life better than a complex manager can.  You were not on call like I had been for the previous 20 years.   Was it fun?  Yeah, it was.  But so was running the plant.  The thing that I really liked the most about the lobbyist job is that it let me build a whole new network of contacts and it helped me build a skill I could turn into a fun post career side gig.

 

After the seven years of doing that work our corporation was absorbed into a much larger publicly traded entity.  They did not need a VP of Government Affairs because they already had one, so I expected to be part of the collateral damage that accompanies any change of ownership.  To my surprise the new company was being run by a couple of old friends of mine and they moved me back into my former site VP job where I stayed until I slightly early retired.

 

I no longer need an income but I enjoy doing some meaningful work so I side gig in a few consulting areas.  Three of the five types of consulting I’ve experimented with so far have included lobbying as a core part of the job.  Having testified to the Big’s in D.C. adds seriously to my street cred in the lobbyist community and having also worked the state level for years makes me one of the more recognizable faces in that world.   Interesting projects have tended to seek me out in spite of my not advertising myself, and I owe a lot of that to my seven year detour into the world of influencing others.  It taught me a couple of things.  First, just because something happens to you that looks like a step down it might turn out to be one of the best things to ever happen to you so always give it a try before you get mad and quit.  And secondly, every detour in life is a chance to learn something new and meet new people.  I’ll always be grateful for that period in my life because it adds value to my retired side gigging life every day.

 

So tell me:

Do you see lobbyists as the devil?

Have you ever been assigned a job you didn’t want that turned out to be the best thing since ice cream?

 

 

  And remember if you’d like to comment just click on the title of this post!

 

 

 

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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What does the phrase “Old Money” bring to mind?  Being from the deep south I think of some Colonel Sanders type tycoon whose wealth dates back from antebellum times.  Or maybe some stuffy family  with a place in Hyannis Port living off the riches generated through the ingenuity of a robber baron patriarch.   Any way you look at it there aren’t many of us who actually belong in that group. Most of us are looking to be “New Money”, building a modicum of wealth through our own cleverness and hustle-ability.

 

Old money and new money have always had a precarious relationship.  Typically old money is purported to look down its nose at upstarts who have attained some recent wealth as the nouveau riche.   They are supposed to consider the newly flush as ostentatious pretenders lacking in good taste.  And with good reason at times, who hasn’t seen a newly wealthy film star or pro athlete make a fool of themselves through ridiculous behavior and silly over the top purchases of mansions and $500,000 automobiles.  Without even listing them I’m sure the names that popped into your head were the same ones I instantly thought of.  Often the new money doesn’t last very long and today’s heroes are tomorrow’s zeroes.

 

The reason for my bringing up new and old money is that I spent the last week with friends that would legitimately qualify as “old money”.   And they were wonderful people, a really fun, friendly and generous couple to hang with for a week of hiking in the Colorado Rockies.

 

One of our friends (he might qualify as old money also, it is hard to say, he does run a family oil business he inherited) told us he was going out to a resort town in Colorado next to Rocky Mountain National Park with his two grown kids and their families and that another couple from our small town was also going to be there.  All of them are avid hikers and in addition this is the town where our “Old Money” friends spend the summer in a family lake house.  Because my wife and I are avid hikers the lure of having five or six fit people to hike with for a week was too much to pass up so I scrambled and found a place to stay in the area and we packed up and hit the road.

 

Once there everything revolved around our old money friends and their lake estate.  It had two houses with six bedrooms and a dock and boathouse.  This was from his side of the family.  His wife’s family had a very similar set up on the coast of North Carolina so the old money’s divided their time between the mountains and the beach and spent the rest of the time in a Denver condo.  Ken, I’ll call him, retired slightly early like I did and has been living the good life ever since.  They have three daughters who are all grown, married and successful.  His wife, lets call her Heidi, was a wonderful host and every evening the entire group of us got together on their back deck overlooking the lake and talked and laughed about our mutual friends and the experiences of the hikes.

Apart from the old money couple and our friend who invited us, and is probably old money himself, the other two couples were definitely new money.  My friend Bill is a self-made millionaire who is a genius entrepreneur worth much more than me and I’m slightly early retired with more invested than I’ll ever need, especially since the small amount of consulting I do more than covers all our family expenses.

 

So, after all that set up what did I learn about old money versus new money?  Here is my take, old money wins!  First there is the whole attitude thing, how you see life.  While my wife and I have an abundance of resources because she ran a frugal household and I made a strong income, we struggle with spending it sometimes.  For instance, on this trip on the way home we stayed in Omaha which is known for steak dinners.  We ordered a steak and as usual split it since we aren’t big eaters but it was pretty pricey at $65 for a single entrée and by the time drinks and tip were added it was over $120.  It was the only expensive meal of the trip and even at that we split one order. But still, it was hard to convince ourselves that it was “OK” to spend that much. Really?  We have millions invested and we don’t feel we’ve got enough to buy a $120 meal?  That’s kind of crazy.  Our old money friends could drop $500 on a meal and not give it a passing thought.  They understand abundance because it has been in their family for generations. We don’t get it sometimes, because our parents grew up in the great depression and squeezed every nickel.

 

Generosity is another trait the old money couple displayed.  By the end of the week both of us new money couples had been invited to stay at their compound so we cancelled our condo’s and moved in.  The extra laundry and food and wine and snacks weren’t given a passing thought by our hosts, they valued the time with friends way more than the extra cost and the nuisance of doing more chores when we were gone.  And yes, they do their own laundry and cooking, no household help at all for them.  They also made me promise to invite a mutual friend who is struggling with cancer to come back with us next year so he can fly fish while we hike.  And they are like this with everyone, we were never their bestest friends when they lived in our small town in Arkansas but they are open and accepting with almost any acquaintance, and treat them like family.  I was so impressed and feel like I need to learn to be that giving myself.

 

Calmness and an utter lack of hurry surrounded our old money friends, they never insisted on having anything their way and never seemed agitated or perplexed.  If the schedule changed they just rolled with it.  Even their expressions were just so calm and peaceful.  In short, they had it together, they weren’t trailing any loose threads.  They honestly seemed to enjoy the moment, all day long.  My wife and I are pretty happy people but in comparison I have to admit I sweat the small stuff way more than I should, which our friends did not do.

 

They were frugal.  OK, I know you aren’t buying that, how can having three houses be frugal?  Well, in terms of their spending versus their assets I maintain they are indeed frugal.  The house was not lavishly furnished, the kitchen was vintage 1970 for instance, and everything was simple and pretty much unchanged from the time their aunt had purchased the house decades ago.  Also they share both family houses with siblings and other relatives.  They did not buy $100 bottles of wine and the food and snacks did not involve caviar or truffles but consisted of hamburgers and baked beans.  The boats were well used and their hobbies were primarily hiking, local town theater, book clubs, sailing in a very small sail boat and golf.

 

So what does old money have to do with you and me?  It is an interesting question.  Most everything we talk about in this space concerns the immediate future of this one generation, it concerns your life.  The future is all about achieving financial independence and maybe retiring early.  However, life doesn’t stop when you achieve FI, and if the past is any guide most of you that achieve FI will end up with three to five times your initial target amount of money later in your life due to the continued compounding of your investments.  So think about it, three to five times your target FI number is serious money!  It makes you a member of the new money crowd.  And since you are going to have a lot of money perhaps there is something to learn from those old money people that have always had more money than they needed.  Things like an attitude of abundance,  natural generosity, calmness and relative frugality in line with the wealth you are likely  to attain.

 

I gained a new perspective last week by spending time with “Old Money” people.  I feel a little embarrassed that they turned out to be so nice and likeable and did not display any of the characteristics that society, in general, ascribes to them.  I chalk up the stereotypes to jealousy, like any form of prejudice, an unfounded and ugly thing.  In the case of old money it is fueled by that little green monster that lives in every person’s heart, envy.  I have done well in life so far and my kids have a good start, maybe there will be an old money future for my descendants.  If there is I hope my family can do it as well as my friends have.

Financial independence, it is a huge privilege for some of us, and an inspiring dream for others.  It is the bedrock principle for this community whether you are a frugalista, a tiny houser, a blogger extraordinaire, an investing guru, a minimalist extreme or a side gigging entrepreneur.  In a close knit but diverse community like ours it comes close to being the one unifying theory that everyone holds to. It is the concept that by living on less than you earn you can reach a point where you do not have to work a full time job to meet all of your material needs.  After that we all go in different directions.  Some advocate living on $10 per day in some remote part of the world, some live with few possessions and enjoy the simplicity and freedom that brings them, some hustle for small or large fortunes as they build internet empires and a few play that corporate game so well they can walk away early to a life of volunteering or travel.  Finally, a few do not ever intend to retire but enjoy knowing they can.

 

That last group was me.  If you had asked me ten years ago when I was going to retire I would have told you without hesitation that I planned on working into my seventies.  And I meant it, work was one of my favorite hobbies and I had a high-profile job that stroked my ego and left me feeling very good about myself most of the time (I realize that sounds pretty shallow but I’m being honest here).  At that time, ten years ago, I was already financially independent but I did not comprehend what that meant and had never run the numbers or even given the idea a thought.  I had never read a blog on early retirement or on financial independence and in my mind retirement was just what you did when you could no longer contribute in a career.  It was a type of personal failure only a few steps short of death or incarceration in a nursing home.  Crazy, right?  I know, that sounds insane to me now, but I clearly remember thinking those thoughts.

 

And I also know what you are thinking, “You are such a typical workaholic boomer!”  So sad for this guy to be so enslaved and one dimensional.  But that was not the case, that was not me at all.  I was living a very diverse and active life.  I was running marathons with my running buds and my wife, we had kids in high school and college, we were playing tennis, hiking, skiing and fishing and I never stayed later at work than I had to.  I looked forward to my family and leisure time and by all accounts was a pretty decent dad and husband. While work was a fun hobby it was not my whole life, just a part of it.  And life was good, no midlife crisis for me and no regret I had not done more.  In fact, I felt like a guy who had won the lottery because I was overpaid but not overworked and every area of my life was running pretty smoothly.

 

But then some things happened.  My mom passed away and my dad began to decline at an increasing rate due to Parkinson’s and that confronted me with the fact that he had worked and saved into his seventies only to be rewarded with a wife who was assaulted by Alzheimer’s and with his own terminal illness.  At the same time I stumbled upon the personal finance, financial independence and retire early blogosphere and podcast genre.  It shocked me to realize that people with only a portion of my net worth were successfully retiring in their thirties and that the math was solid.   Finally, after my dad passed away and my brother and I amicably settled the estate we were both recipients of a sizeable inheritance equivalent to more than I would have been able to save if I worked another ten years. And finally, the family owned corporation I had worked at for 28 years was sold to a Fortune 500 company which put my job at risk and brought drama and politics into what had been a kind and gentle place.

 

It would have been the perfect time to leave, right?   But no, my plan was still the same, work into my seventies.  I’m an eternal optimist and I saw opportunity and excitement in a changing workplace.  And I was right, at first.  I had some great projects and then earned a big promotion which came with big compensation and I was pretty happy for a couple of years.  And that was when financial independence killed my career.

 

It has been a struggle, three years after leaving the 9 to 5, to explain to myself what happened.  If I was working for fun instead of for money then why did having more than enough money make it stop being fun?  We are so conditioned to needing money that the very concept of having enough seems hypothetical to most people.  Surveys always show that when millionaires are asked how much money they need to feel comfortable or wealthy they estimate it to be about twice what they currently possess. If they have one million then they say they would feel rich with two million but if they have five million then they say they would need ten million.  We are all naturally greedy misers deep down, apparently.  Yet by immersing myself in the personal finance community and by seeing how my dad died without being able to enjoy what he had saved and invested I finally began to grasp the concept of “enough”.  The compensation of paychecks, bonuses and stock grants lost most of its meaning because I had enough.  And though I had always said I would do my job for free, I realized that was not true.  A big part of the fun was that the hard work was rewarded by something my family needed and they did not need it anymore, we simply  had enough.

 

Also, I worked for status and relevance.  My job was very public and I was like a small-town mayor in that hundreds of people worked for me and thousands worked with our company so people were nice to  me everywhere I went in my small state.  That’s pretty heady stuff for a guy who was the least cool member of his high school class.  But losing loved ones impresses on your heart that life is very short and that eventually you will leave your job and whatever social status it provided you. Since I was going to have to reinvent myself anyway why not do it now?

 

Watching how the new corporation worked made it obvious to me that I unless I chose first I would not  have a choice in when I left my job.  Compared to the family I had worked for the Fortune 500 world is a real meat grinder.  When you get into the corporate officer ranks, longevity is highly unlikely.  Executives came and went almost weekly and I was not going to be immune to that.  The corporate mentality is that if anything goes wrong, throw out the tool and get a new one out of the tool box.  And I could see I was a very expendable tool in their hands.  That is really clear in hindsight because I have been gone for less than three years and they have already tried three different people in my old job so far without finding someone they are satisfied with.

These three things changed everything for me at work.  Having enough money and not being driven to earn more, realizing the status was fleeting and would run out someday and realizing that they were going to churn people through my position so I had zero chance of surviving all destroyed my job satisfaction.   Work became surprisingly difficult and for the first time in my life, joyless.  I became uncooperative, unmotivated and increasingly intolerant of absorbing criticism and threatened consequences.  What, they might fire me?  That had been the scariest idea ever for most of my career but now the thought made me smile and struggle to suppress mad giggles or sarcastic retorts.

 

Financial independence ruined my career.  And I’m so very glad it did.  So I left it behind three years ago.  We parted amicably and the corporation is doing extremely well.  I still occasionally do some consulting for them and enjoy it because it is on my terms and drama free.  My mix of paid and volunteer side gigs and recreational pursuits are satisfying and what has always been a good life is even better now.

 

What does this mean for you as you pursue financial independence?  Well, it means a lot.  Becoming financially independent will change how you value some of the things that currently motivate you.  And it may change them in ways that make you less employable.  Being FI means you’ve made it, in a real sense you’ve won the lottery.  One of the most quoted lines I see in this space is that being financially independent means that I will only do what I choose to do.  When people say that they are saying in effect that being FI will let them avoid things they do not want to experience, like tedious cubicle jobs.

 

In a world where much of life follows the carrot and stick model of motivation being FI makes you carrot careless and stick free.  You stop valuing the little pittances they toss to you and you lose your fear of punishment.  In a world where everyone else has a carrot/stick mind you are now a weirdo, a completely unmanageable person.  And the world hates weird.  I saw that personally, once the stick stopped scaring me, then I started to scare my superiors.  Plus the carrot is not so big a motivating treat once you have enough money.  You are now doubly odd and uncontrollable which is something most management systems cannot understand and cannot tolerate.

The changes that financial independence brings are both good and bad.  It makes you unsuitable in an organization that uses fear and reward as the go to motivational techniques.  That’s bad because that represents most of the corporate world today.  The good is that you become more than perfect for anything that has a vision you can internalize.  Being fearless is a pretty awesome feature when you are doing things that matter.

 

Most of you are on the journey to financial independence and many of you are not in the same kind of corporate environment I was but I think most of you will eventually reach your goals, that is just who you are.  This is written to caution you that there are consequences to targeting financial independence as a goal and some of them may force you to reshape your plans entirely like I did.  I love what I’m doing now but the fact is, achieving financial independence ruined my career plans of working another ten years in my corporate job.

 

What about you, are you planning on staying at your job after you are financially independent?

 

Do you think that financial independence might make you unemployable in a carrot and stick world?

 

 

 

If you want to leave a comment just click on the title of the post!

A few years back, quite a few, when I was in my thirties I played another guy in a singles tennis match.  He was maybe 19 years old and it was brutally hot and while I was clearly the better player I lost.  I lost because he was 19 and seemed impervious to the heat, while I was 35 and just got gassed out there on the 140 degree F concrete.  And that led me to take up a new discipline, running.

 

I started slowly running only as far as I could comfortably, maybe a quarter mile, and then walking until I felt I could run again.  I did that for a solid month on the streets around our house and by the end of the month I was running 2.5 miles continuously with no rest breaks.  I kept that up four times a week for the next few years, moving to town when the horseflies and deerflies became too intense.  In town I ran at a track where a running club also ran and they eventually adopted me into their group.

 

They scoffed at my short 2.5 mile runs and within a couple of weeks they had me running ten milers and eventually introduced me to marathons.  We had a great time road tripping to marathons all over the country and it really did help my tennis a little so I kept it up.  Today I want to tell a story about the single most moving thing I ever saw on a run, something that makes me misty eyed now, years later just to write about.  I did include a paragraph about this in a previous post but I thought it was worth revisiting in a little more detail so here it is.

 

The Marine Corps Marathon is held in the Washington DC area every year.  Some 30,000 people from 50 countries participate in the event and much of the organization and volunteer staffing is provided by service men and women.  It circles around DC and Arlington VA and takes in some historic sites and has a very patriotic feel to it that is unique among the marathons I’ve run.

 

As is common among large marathons there is a wheelchair class that starts prior to the runners and at some point if you are fast enough you will pass some of the competitors in that group.  And this is my story.

 

 As usual with any big race there is quite a lot of milling about and standing around before the start as everyone is herded into position.  But finally we were off and I settled into my mindless trance of thinking about anything but how far I had left to run.  I was looking at the scenery, the other runners, anything that kept me from obsessing about only being six miles into a twenty-six mile run!  I was not well trained, and that is a big mistake in long distance racing and therefore my attitude starting out was one of feeling sorry for myself and a little dread as to how much this was going to hurt and whether I could finish the course. But other than having a pretty sorry attitude I was doing OK.

 

Then up ahead in the distance I saw a…formation?  You see a lot of things in a marathon, people in costumes, people juggling while running and even people running barefoot sometimes but I had never seen this.  I was intrigued!  As I got closer I could see it was four marines clad in full battle gear running in formation with a wheelchair racer in the center.  While the four running marines all had big heavy packs on, two of them also had something else strapped to their backs but they were far in the distance and I could not make out what this unusual collection of men represented.

 

I was thrilled to have a target ahead of me and a puzzle to solve because with any luck I would be able to go a couple of miles figuring out what this meant and oblivious to the monotony and pain involved in the race.  Runners are faster than wheelchair racers so I steadily closed the distance until I was running right behind the Marines.  And I still have tremendous difficulty talking about this or even typing it right now because I was so swept with an emotional wave that has stayed with me for the ten years that have passed since this transpired.

 

The wheelchair racer was a Marine who had lost his legs in an IED attack in the Iraq War.  The four Marines were fellow members of his platoon and the two objects I had not been able to recognize strapped on their backs were his prosthetic legs.

 

Up to this point I had been lamenting my situation, poorly trained, already hurting six miles into the race, no chance at a personal best time.  Twenty more miles to go and my attitude was awful and childishly self-centered.  Poor poor me!  And yet here was this young man in his twenties, no legs, but proud to be representing his Corps and his country with nothing but his arms to propel him the extreme distance. He was resolute and focused and not whining like I was.  And here were his brothers carrying not only 40 pound packs but also…his legs.

 

I am not a crier. OK maybe if I’m watching a sad movie and I’m all alone I might, but if no one sees it, did it really happen?   But I cried, I ran and I cried because it hit me hard what he had lost.  He would never run again, he would struggle to do simple tasks in a world designed for fully mobile people and he was only in his twenties.  He had no doubt been as fit as the manly men running at his four corners in formation.  And those guys, running in so much gear and in military boots and carrying huge packs, and his legs, carrying his legs.   Running for him, for their brother, for the ideal that their service represents to them and to this country.  I just have no words for this, it was too real.

 

I was torn between admiration for these young men and shame over my weakness and pathetic lack of grit.  I quickly passed them and ran on the rest of the race.  And rather than a two mile distraction that experience became a ten year inspiration because since then, anytime I feel like I can’t finish, that my particular problem of the day is too hard, I think about that Marine, and his brothers in arms, and I shake my head in wonder at myself.  Of course, I can finish this, he did.  They did.

 

This community of people who are seeking to make sense of their finances, to escape regimented unfulfilling jobs, to travel, to be frugal, to live unconventionally but to fully live, remind me of those marines quite often.  There are so many who prove by example, like the wheelchair Marine racer, that no matter the mountain of debt towering over you there is hope and there is victory that you can grind your way through to if you have a plan and if you persevere.  And like the Marines running alongside there are so many here who will inspire and encourage you when you are tired and sore or maybe just need a good thump on the head because you are not facing reality.

 

I hope you see that this is not an exercise in equivalency.  What wounded warriors have given to this country is in a class of its own and we aren’t their equals in any shape or any form.  But using great people to make good examples does not cheapen their sacrifice.  We need extraordinary people to inspire us in life and that is all I am doing here, honoring them.  And to the many of you who have served this country, thank you for your service, we so appreciate it.

 

If you would like to leave a comment just click on the title of the post.

Well, actually I only made $1917.50 and I made it yesterday but it just is not as catchy when I say it like that.  All around it was a very odd day.  I got up that morning feeling like I needed to do a little bit of work on my normal consulting side gigs but I was still kind of sleepy after breakfast so I decided to take a nap.  I usually sleep like a dead man but that previous night not so well.  One of the best things about life after leaving the 9 to 5 behind is my schedule is very flexible and I can be shamelessly lazy on short notice, so I hit the couch about the time my former coworkers were hitting their desks and got a little nap in.

 

It was already a strange day because my current volunteer work had intersected my former corporate job for the first time since I had retired.  My old company was holding an annual charity fund-raiser and the community college I volunteer at was participating.  The college offered tickets to my wife and I to the dinner celebration that night where I knew I would get to catch up with all my former coworkers, some of whom I had not seen in three years.  It sounded like fun!  Then it got weird, because I got a phone call after getting my nap in and was surprised to hear it was one of my former management team members.  They were in a bind, could not get the plant started up and the only expert they had on the problem areas was on vacation clear across the country.  It happened to be a niche area that I actually am kind of an expert in so I said, sure, I can come over and see if I can help.

 

The thing is, up until that phone call I had zero contact with my former plant since I left.  I left on great terms with retirement parties and dinners and hugs and jokes but when I left I left. In a small town the last thing a new facility General Manager needs is the former boss looking over her shoulder.  And my side gigs, while technical, weren’t really focused on solving chemical plant problems.  I had done a little work at one of their other plants down in Texas but I never thought they would want me to be active in my old plant because it might look like I was trying to come back to a full-time position which is not in my plans, ever again.  But the guy on the phone was my friend and he had a serious problem that I could probably fix so I said yes.  I got out my old work clothes and took that familiar 8-minute commute back to my old plant.

 

As I had expected everyone I bumped into when I walked into the offices was surprised and intrigued, immediately quizzing me about “Was I coming back?”  But soon I was immersed in the plant data and in interviewing operators and engineers about the problems they were facing.  Minutes turned into hours and before I knew it we had spent the whole day troubleshooting and the problems were solved and the plant was back to normal.  I charge $250 an hour for that kind of work but they felt like it was a bargain considering that the plant was making $100,000 a day more when I walked out than it was when I walked in.

 

I don’t market myself for this kind of work because it usually occurs on nights and weekends and involves sitting up all night at a bank of computer screens scratching your head over why things are not working right in addition to travel to a lot of remote plant sites.  Frankly not needing to ever earn another paycheck makes that kind of work unattractive.  I know it probably sounds crazy to avoid work that pays $250 an hour in this frugal and hard saving community but the simple fact is that if you have all you need then money ceases to have much incremental value.  I suppose I could earn it solely to give it away but that is not really very motivating to me right now.  I am not a kid any more and I am running out of time way faster than I will ever run out of money.  I think I’ll get enough calls from my old employer going forward to do one or two jobs like this a year and that’s plenty to keep my skills sharp.  And my other, steady, consulting will continue to generate the six figures that keeps my withdrawal rate at zero.

I got off “work” in time to go home and change for the party.  It was fun for my wife and me to see a lot of old friends we haven’t seen much of since I retired.  I was heavily quizzed about what retirement was like since many of my former coworkers are within two or three years of pulling the plug themselves.  Great I told them!  Some were puzzled by why I was still working at all and it is hard to explain. To many in this blogging community escaping the jobs they detest is their whole point of focus. I’m not sure I can answer that question yet, I am still a rookie at this retirement thing.   Who knows?  I might stop working altogether once I get it figured out.

But for now, it is fun to occasionally fly to the rescue like Iron Man, solve the problems, and fly off into the sunset.  And it is fun to get overpaid.  And it is fun to be the “expert” that everyone in the room turns to even if you know deep down inside that you are not that special.  It still feels special. And in a nice way it closes the gap on some questions I had about what my relationship was with a company I had spent over 30 years at.  I know how people blame current problems on the former boss who is not there anymore, they can become a convenient scapegoat since they have no voice to defend themselves.  Calling me back when they need help puts the stamp of approval back on me as having value in that company’s culture.  And that feels pretty good.  It does disappoint me a little that I felt I needed that, it is a slippery slope to base your own self esteem on the opinion of others.

All in all a pretty fun day and I just had to write about it to you, my anonymous friends.  I have had a plethora of fun days in the last three years and I highly recommend early retirement or if you can’t swing that, at least shoot for slightly early retirement like I did.  Preferably with a few side gigs.

 

What about you, would you ever go back to your former employer after you retire if a former coworker called you desperately needing your help?

 

If you’d like to leave a comment just click on the title of the post.  

 

Have you ever thought back to how your life was totally changed by a single seminal event in your youth?  Maybe you can remember in excruciating detail what it was like when your parents sat you down as a kid and told you they were getting divorced.  Or maybe you were the quarterback on your high school football team and you threw the winning pass to clinch the state championship.  Possibly you knew at that instant, whether it was a moment of pain or joy, that you would never be the same person again because this was so major, so impactful, dare I say so HUGE that life would no longer follow the same path that brought you to this point. I’m not sure if this will resonate with most readers or only with a few but it does with me because I can trace the path of my entire adult life from one single moment with absolute clarity.

Now let me say, before I tell you the story, that I don’t claim to be Mr. Successful.  I’m not all that and a bag of chips.  I’m a reasonably accomplished financially independent side hustling guy with a great lifetime spouse, awesome grown kids and slightly early retirement from a career I thoroughly enjoyed.  That isn’t special to anyone but me but I consider it priceless because it has so completely exceeded the expectations I had of my future before that day…

You might be expecting me to hit you with a Hollywood crisis moment at this point.  An armed robbery and hostage situation, a 70 mile per hour bus roll over crash on the Interstate, a fall off of a 40 foot cliff or hitting a car head on while riding a bicycle.  All of those things did happen to me but the one that made the most difference was something you would miss if you were watching my life’s highlight reel.  It was the music minister at my church walking up to me and saying, “Steve, I’d like you to play a leading role in this musical play we are going to take on tour this summer.”

Really, a role in a church production?  Kind of underwhelming is it not?  Well, you’d have to have known me back then.  I was shy.  No that is simply not big enough, I was very, very horrendously shy.  I was not good at sports (except tennis, which hardly counted in Arkansas), I was not popular, my friends were not popular and my self image had me as being just a smart little nerd kid that kept quiet and stayed out of trouble.  I constantly day dreamed about being a cool kid, but felt deep down I never could be. I struggled to even make the simplest book review talk in school, I was terrified of being in front of my peers.  There is probably a clinical name for being that dysfunctional in front of others and whatever it is called I had a serious case of it.

And this was a big church, we had over 100 high school kids in the youth group including many of the most popular ones.  The four leads for the play were three popular guys and me.  I felt like I was in one of those kids puzzle books where the question is “Which one isn’t like the others?” and of course it was the shy nerdy kid who could not get a word out of his mouth in front of a group.

But I said yes.  I’m not sure where that courage to take what felt like an awful risk came from but I said yes. Even knowing and imagining in exquisite detail how I could flub up my lines or freeze with stage fright in front of thousands of people and forever solidify my place as a loser, I said yes.  I learned my lines and I learned that the popular guys were just like me, full of self doubt and scared of failing.  I saw them see me as an equal because I was every bit the actor they were and in fact was given the leading role in the production.

 And I was pretty good at it.  Amazingly everyone in the youth group started to see  me the way I had always wanted to see myself.  And from that summer on I never saw myself as inferior to anybody.  Sure I knew some people were better looking or had more extroverted personalities but there really wasn’t any social situation that I could not handle.  I felt like I could win, I was smart and I could step outside my comfort zone and be rewarded.

One thing after another started going my way. I met a popular and beautiful girl who loved me.  I picked a college major that fit me like a glove and I began to say yes to every opportunity I came across because I recognized that taking chances was the only way to grow and that deep down I was as good as everyone else in the room.  In fact I was just like everyone else in the room but because I could say yes without hesitating I could get to the front of the line.

 I was good at work, no, better than good, I was a rising star in the company.  I’d get notes from senior vice presidents congratulating me on my progress as a junior engineer.   And my entire career and civic life kept building by being able to step into roles I’d never filled before, with optimism and courage. I wasn’t naturally brave and fearless but my experience showed me undeniably that the risks were actually very small and the rewards very large for stepping out into newer and bigger challenges.   Certainly I found out that  I was better at some things than I was at others but either way I learned  that the prime quality required to succeed in life and business was the courage to take action.  And  once that became a habit, then it did not require much courage anymore.  It actually became fun to embrace new responsibilities!

Years later when I testified before Senate and House subcommittees in Washington DC I thought back to that play.  I remembered learning that role and realized that while I accepted it with sheer terror at the time, that now, facing off against hostile, professional politicians on camera I was no longer nervous. I was excited and thrilled to be there and to be in the game. The congressmen were just like the popular kids in high school, full of the same self doubt as the rest of us. In short they were just like me, no better and no worse.  And I think that is when it hit me, how my whole life changed on that answer I gave back in high school.  A simple yes, I’ll do it, I’ll be in that play.   And what if I had said no?  To tell you the truth it frightens and unnerves me to even think about how saying no to that one single opportunity might have just as easily become my life’s defining “go to” answer and how very sad and different my life might be now.

I’m not sure if anyone else would want a life like mine  spent solving puzzles of math, science, people and politics, but I love it, my past, my present and my future.  I feel like I got to do and be so much more than I ever expected and one possible definition of happiness might be exceeding your own expectations? Your expectations are your own, and if you are like I was way back then they may not be that inspiring.  But trust me, you are not locked into a mediocre life unless you choose to be.  You can say yes to a better future.

This community is all about turning financial lives around.  Thousands of people have changed their stars by stepping out of old comfortable, but destructive, spending habits. Because they took action their financial lives have been forever changed.  Most of them can think back to that one moment when they decided that what they were doing wasn’t working and that if they wanted different results they would have to try different answers.  If you are at the point of wanting a better financial life then do something you haven’t done before, say yes.  Sometimes a single yes can make all the difference.

Has your financial life changed because of a single point in time when you made a decision?

Did you have a pivotal moment in your youth that has had a huge impact in who you are now?

 

If you’d like to leave a comment just click on the title of the post.  

In our slightly early retirement my wife and I both play on a couple of tennis teams and most of our matches are about 100 miles from home.  What can I say, it is a rural flyover state and there just aren’t enough tennis players to have competition unless you gather the whole state in one place.  At least sometimes our matches are in the same city at the same time so we can go in one car.  That was the case two Saturday’s ago when I was through with my men’s doubles match and running errands while she was still playing.

I was driving along the interstate at 75 mph when suddenly my ten year old Infiniti sports coupe’s engine blew up.  Well that wasn’t the technical term for it but smoke and steam started coming into the passenger compartment through the air vents so it is close enough.  AAA came and got me and towed my little speedster to the dealer, twenty miles away.

 

Due to the age and the pretty high mileage on my car the blue book value was only about $7,500 so I was pretty sure it would not be worth fixing.  The high performance engine alone would cost close to $6,000 to replace and nobody in their right mind is putting that much in repairs into a $7,500 car.

 

So, what to do?  Even though we are fairly frugal with the cars we buy, the Infiniti was a splurge.  Not because it was expensive, because it was not at all, but because it was a third car for two people.  You could easily make a case that two retired people could share one car so having three is, by most counts, a little excessive.

 

And it is, but the sports car is crazy fun to drive and we can afford it with no problem so it is a luxury we (OK I) chose to buy.   In our defense, all three cars have well over 100k on the odometers and only one of them is worth over $10,000, and that’s maybe barely over.  Our hobbies have us needing larger vehicles with more cargo capacity often so neither of us was willing to have a small coupe as our main car but both of us like having it as a fun ride on solo trips with limited baggage.

 

So we had a decision to make, go back to two cars or look for a replacement for our little rocket sled.  The model we had is pretty rare with less than 4,000 of them produced.  It wasn’t limited edition, it just was not a very popular car and was dropped from production after a few years due to lack of demand.

 

We came up with a plan, to see if the dealer would give us a trade in on the dead smoker for something similar on his lot.  Oddly, he had a virtually identical car with similar mileage and age for $7,000.  The only other used car he had that was in the same category was much newer and lower mileage and cost $22,000.

 

I weighed the relative merits of a nearly new slower sports sedan that cornered poorly with what I knew to be a fun little beast and wrote him a check for the $7,000 replacement Infiniti, exactly the same car I had before mine melted down.  They towed my sad old car to an auction where it will be sold  for parts that I might get $700 for, or about $500 net after paying the tow and the auction fee.  (Update, I netted $850!)  Any lessons in this?  A few I think.

 

One, if you drive old cars you need to expect to have a few issues and on rare occasions a catastrophic failure is possible.  I fully expected 200,000 miles out of that car but got less than 150,000 miles.  It happens, and that’s a great thing about being financially independent.  We had $20,000 in checking and just wrote the $7,000 check  for the replacement car and it made exactly zero difference in our financial state.  We didn’t have to move any money from any retirement accounts because we always keep enough money on hand to handle emergencies, or in this case an inconvenience.

 

Two, even though old cars come with a reliability risk they can still be very nice.  Our new/old Infiniti for $7,000 has a huge horsepower to weight ratio so it goes way fast and can pass another car on our Arkansas two lane roads with only a very small amount of space needed. It sticks to the road like glue with awesome handling characteristics.    It has independent climate control on both sides, heated leather seats, all wheel drive, Bose sound with a subwoofer, massive disk brakes, memory on  seat, mirror and steering wheel position for two drivers, and because it is such a weird looking car of such a small production run nobody has any idea that it is not new when they see it.  People seem to think I’m driving a $50,000 late model sports car instead of a $7,000 near antique.  One friend of mine who drives a $68,000 pick up truck thought it was a 2018 model!

 

Three, although having three cars is a ridiculous splurge I’m doing it for a lot less money than many guys around here spend on one pickup truck or large SUV.  No matter how much money you accumulate if you love bargains it is hard to spend a fortune on a brand new car when driving an older car in good shape is just as much fun.

 

The truth is my wife and I could buy brand new Mercedes or Porsches with cash and never risk running out of money, but that seems incredibly wasteful and the driving experience would be about the same.  And if this car goes “Three Mile Island” like the last one and I have to write it off I’m really not out that much money.  Plus it  makes having that AAA auto club premium membership a paying proposition!  Those tow truck drivers are on a first name basis with me now, shout out to Cowboy!

 

This last week I had a blowout on the new/old Infiniti.  And lest you chalk that up to my driving old cars with lots of miles on them that had nothing to do with the flat tire.  The car had four brand new tires but I hit a piece of metal on the highway that I did not see and shredded one of the new tires.  It was kind of ironic that the only  equipment on that car that was brand new were the tires and that’s what failed!

 

How about it, has anyone else found a way to satisfy their “need for speed” with low cost performance vehicles?

 

Are you comfortable with the reliability of cars approaching 200k miles?

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The financial independence and early retirement community is pretty diverse but if there is a common theme espoused almost universally it is that the way to achieve financial freedom is to spend less than you earn and invest the rest.  After that it splits off into many different factions.  There are those that major on frugal living, those who emphasize having multiple streams of passive income, the real estate investment crowd, the self-employment side gigging crew and the maximize your corporate career people, like me.  But controlling your cost of living by avoiding unnecessary or extravagant spending is generally something almost everyone agrees with.  Why then would any of us voluntarily give up that hard earned money in exchange for nothing, or at least nothing tangible?

Giving to others, for faith based, humanitarian or philosophical reasons is a difficult topic to blog about.  It is self-aggrandizing to talk about how much you’ve given away to non-profit charities if you are a large giver and it feels uncomfortably like bragging.  As a guy who was not a popular member of the in crowd in my youth, but who has had a modicum of success in my adult life, bragging is something to which I am susceptible.  Because I succeeded way past my own expectations in life I sometimes feel compelled to share my success story with others, and that is sometimes OK, but all too often is just me propping up my own ego.  In other words it is me bragging.    On the other hand it is a little like, if a tree falls in the woods and nobody hears it, did it really make any noise?  As an anonymous blogger when you post about your accomplishments are you really bragging if nobody knows who you are?  So if it looks like I’m doing that then I’m sorry, but I’m going to forge ahead into this sketchy territory anyway.

After reading a couple of blog posts about giving I decided a few days ago to estimate what my wife and I had given away to others over our married life.  Since we’ve been married over thirty years that sounds like a huge task, but it was actually very easy.  I already have a spreadsheet that includes my actual income for every working year of my life.  You also have that whether you know it or not! The Social Security web site my Social Security will let you print out your income for every year of your working life.  It does not list what you’ve given away, of course, but in my case I knew the percentage of what we gave roughly based on our gross income.  With a spreadsheet I estimated the annual gifts and then calculated what they would have grown to if they were invested like the rest of our portfolio.  That’s fair if I assume we would have put the money into investments had we not given it away.

The total was a little over $1.6 Million excluding my wife’s income and special gifts we made above our  normal percentage minimum of giving.  Adding those in brings the total up to right at $2 Million.   I have never revealed our exact net worth and while it is more than my wife and I will ever spend it would be significantly enhanced if I could add a couple of more millions to the pot.  In fact when you look at the range of savings rates for this community, which run from maybe 20% on the low side to 75% on the high side, voluntarily giving up a chunk as large as 10-15%, which is what my family chose to do, seems absolutely crazy on the surface.  Another way of stating it is that the largest single expense in our family household for every single month we have lived has been our charitable giving.  It was two to three times the size of our house payment which was the only debt we ever incurred.  So why do otherwise frugal people decide to give away the equivalent of two extra house payments every month for no tangible benefits?

For me it started with my dad.  Dad earned a solid middle-class income selling insurance while my mom was a school teacher.  We had a comfortable life in a small house and my brother and I had our college paid for by our parents, allowing us to graduate with zero debt.  While my dad did not make a lot of money he was a savvy saver and investor.  One place he saved money was on our allowances, there weren’t any.  From the time we could ride bicycles and mow lawns my brother and I had jobs before and after school or we had no spending money whatsoever.  As we grew Dad shared with us his financial spreadsheet that listed all his investments.  It was a real shock, as poor as we felt growing up in a frugal household, that Dad was a millionaire.  I would guess he never made more than $40,000 a year in his working career but he saved aggressively and always had his money earning more money in stocks and bonds.  But the main money lesson he taught, repeatedly and with emphasis, was that he tithed on his gross income without fail.  His belief was that if he honored his faith that he would be financially blessed.  And he did and he was.

Neither my brother nor myself feel like the connection between giving and financial rewards is an unfailing algorithm.  My own theology leans more toward the concept that having faith brings rewards but they are spiritual and not always material.  I also feel that giving 10% of gross or net income is only a  guideline and not any kind of specific command or spiritual directive.  However, I do believe there are solid psychological reasons why giving to others does bring material rewards. Giving a large enough part of your income, say over 10%, is something you can’t help but feel.

Writing out a check that is two or three times larger than your house payment or rent every single month makes an impression on you.  Dave Ramsey would say it triggers the pain center in your brain.  It forces you to reconcile writing that check with your overall value system.  In our case when we gave a large percent of our discretionary income it confronted us each month with the fact that our faith compelled us to give generously regardless of how that felt.  It reminded us that life is very temporary, money won’t be making that trip to the afterlife with us and that everything we had did not really belong to us but was a gift we were to use for good.  It forced us to admit, every month, that money is not our purpose or our end goal in life.

So what does that do for you, the constant reminder that money is not the big why in life?  I can only give you my opinion, I’m not a qualified life expert by any stretch.  Putting money in a subordinate position to your other life goals changes your view of wealth.  Putting money below your care and regard for other people makes you kind.  It makes you generous.  It helps make you trustworthy.  Those are great gifts, priceless really.  My experience in the corporate world is that the people who get ahead in the employment game most often are those who are the most well liked and well trusted.  Sure, you need proficiency at the skills required but after you get to a certain level everyone has the skills.  Being trusted and likeable are key differentiators.  When your value system places people above money then you will be liked and trusted by others.  You will be generous and willing to play fair at work.  You’ll share credit freely and admit your mistakes.  Nothing builds trust and causes others to like you more than those qualities.

My dad credited his amassing a sizeable estate to his giving.  To him his wealth was a gift from above.  I guess I really do agree with him on that, except I see it being worked out as a result of his giving making him a better employee and person, rather than some supernatural miracle.  My dad also thought he got back even more than he gave.  I guess I feel that way as well.  I do not think it is a guaranteed thing, like my dad, but I do think the odds are in your favor if you give a large enough amount regularly that you feel it.  I think I earned at least a couple of million more in my career than I would have if I had not climbed the corporate ladder so fast and so far.  And I do not think I would have achieved what I did in my career without the constant impact of putting money in its place.  Regular and sizeable percentage giving created that impact on our values.

And then when my parents had passed their estate was split between my brother and me.  It was much less than two million dollars each but it was still a very large tax free addition to our net worths.  The inheritance, added to the extra income my career netted me due to having a healthy attitude toward money, more than covered our lifetime of giving.  It really was a “win win” for us to have given out of our excess to our church, the United Way, our college and university and the many other individuals and non-profit’s we have supported. The groups we gave to changed a lot of lives and having a healthy attitude toward money changed ours.

What was right for me may not be for you.  Life is complex and I am not sure there is any part of it harder to write a rule for than the act of giving.  And in many cases the gift of your time and your love is vastly more important than giving money.  So please do not take this as judging anyone who chooses to give to a different degree or in a different way.  This was just written for me, to think back over a lifetime of behavior and to try to make sense of it.  And I feel better for having done that.

 

What do you think about the concept of giving and how it helps or hurts the journey toward financial independence?

 

If you are in the camp that does follow a percentage guideline in your giving how does that work once you no longer earn an income?

 

I’m side gigging now and still earning a decent living but at some point I’ll just be living off my investments, should I still give then and how should I figure out how much?

A persistent theme of the financial independence and retire early communities is that 9 to 5’s are a modern form of indentured servitude.  A rat in a wheel kind of hopeless and purposeless existence designed to feed hedonic adaptation until said rat is no longer able to spin the wheel at a proper velocity and is replaced by a younger and more vigorous rodent, in a never-ending cycle.

 

I get that.  I can’t imagine anyone who ever worked in corporate America or corporate Europe or Asia not identifying with that metaphor at times in their career. The usual alternatives to that melancholy life break down into a handful of alternative paths.  One of the most common two of these is saving money like mad to minimize your time in the cage and trimming your lifestyle costs so that you can be free never to have to work again by the time you are 35-50 years old.  There are a host of examples of people who have pulled this off like Mr. Money Moustache, Financial Samurai, Firecracker and way too many others to try to name.  I admire and actively follow  these as well as many  others because they are incredibly inspiring humans.  The other route is to combine aggressive side hustles and/or real estate to build passive and/or active income streams that eliminate the need for a full time job allowing you to transition into early retirement at a similarly early age.  Paula Pant, Joe Saul-Sehy and dozens of others exemplify how this can be a successful route to freedom.

 

As a younger boomer (is that an oxymoron or what?) I never considered early retirement as an option because I didn’t know it existed.  Honestly it wasn’t a thing as far as I knew, I only remember hearing of one guy in my entire industry that actually left the office and went to the beach in his forties because of a huge stock windfall. In fact, as I recall, that guy popped up again working for another company later so if he did in fact retire early he did not stay retired.  But despite my lack of understanding of FIRE as a possibility I do not feel short changed.  I’ve had a marvelous and thoroughly enjoyable life, in part due to the fact that I spent over 30 years at a corporate 9 to 5.

 

So today I am here to defend the 9 to 5 as a valid and possibly fulfilling path to early or even not so early retirement.  I have already established my bona fides as a corporate drone, 30 years is a lifetime after all.  But I can also claim to understand and have experience in the gig economy.  For the last three years since I left the 9 to 5 I have earned 100 percent of my family’s expenses doing five paid side gigs as an independent contractor.  So I’ve done life both ways.

 

So here are the things a 9 to 5 career gave me that may not be as easily gained through being self employed in the gig economy or by building a real estate empire.

 

Free Training:  I had to obtain my college degree first but when I landed my job I was sent, on average, to at least one three day to week long high level training course per year.  These cost the company about $3,000 per year for tuition and another $1,500 for travel and lodging.  I was introduced to the leading experts in my field at these seminars as well as the up and comers at competitor corporations and these relationships served me well throughout my career and continue to bear fruit in my self employed pursuits.

Company Benefits:  I had top notch health insurance, my kids got college grants from the company, I had access to profit sharing and 401K plans.  I had a frequently replaced company car, free gasoline, free car insurance and free maintenance for most of my career as a work perk.  That meant we only had to have one car at home which saved us a lot. Same thing for free laptops and cell phones with unlimited data plans and no restrictions on personal use.   I was shielded from civil and criminal liability in most cases by my status as an employee.  I was granted stock rights that were worth over six figures and bonuses of similar size. I have seen blogs on how rare 401k millionaires are, well, it was very easy for me to grow well past a million in my 401k without even feeling the automatic withdrawals from my paycheck.

Experience: As a contractor now my projects are generally fairly small but as a corporate employee I designed hundreds of millions of dollars of equipment and had responsibility for over 700 coworkers.  With that came invaluable on the job training on human resources, leadership, budgeting, cost control, safety, environmental, investment management, insurance and risk management, accounting, financing and transportation.  Those skills are the ones that helped me launch my profitable side gigs and rather than paying to learn, I was well paid to absorb the knowledge that would later make self employment feasible.

Network: The most valuable thing my career gave me was not the technical knowledge or the business acumen but my extensive network.  From backwoods Arkansas to Washington DC to Australia and Germany I know people.  When I decided to leave my job I contacted business leaders in industries totally different than mine but who I knew from business and political circles.   I designed a dream retirement consultancy that I pitched to them and they agreed to fund it because they felt I could save their companies a lot of money. It has worked well for three years now and I may just keep doing it forever because it is fun and it helps me feel relevant while still only requiring  part time effort.  It gave me a base post retirement career that also lets me branch out into some other fun paid pursuits.  I would have had a very hard time landing a flexible part time self employed specialty where I both add great value to others and am well compensated, without the network that my corporate job allowed me to build.

 

Flexible: There were times when work got in the way of life and I missed a vacation or two but generally, as a family owned company, my management made family life a priority.  My morning commute was eight minutes tops.  I could drive home for lunch and often did.  I was never pressured to stay after 5 PM or to come in early even though I did quite often because I just got caught up in some project that I couldn’t put down.  I rarely worked weekends unless we had some major problems and then my feeling of ownership made me want to be there to fix things.  Nobody worried about people taking time to get a haircut or a to have a dentist appointment or to attend a day time school function.  I did not miss seeing my kids grow up and I could take them into work anytime I wanted.  All three of my kids worked there as summer interns just as I had and two of them became engineers, like their, dad partly because they saw that I loved what I did.

 

Fun:  And this one might surprise you.  For most of my career, right up to the very end, work was a terrific adventure!  I really was that guy that looked forward to Monday morning because the projects I had waiting on me were exciting and the thrill of achievement was always close at hand.  My management was complimentary and provided generous compensation along with the previously mentioned benefits. I had many friends at work and at business partner companies.  I was in a position of teaching younger employees which was fulfilling and also spent a lot of time as the spokesman and face of the company in the press, on television and even in front of Congress a couple of times.  The travel on commercial airlines and private jets, generous expense accounts and fine hotels were a lot of fun and meeting the occasional VIP was interesting as well.  I would not have wanted to miss having done all those things, and they were things I would not have likely been afforded if I had been self employed for most of those years.  And it was fairly stress free because at the end of each day, if things no longer felt right, I knew I could pick up the phone and have another job of my choosing.  I never worried about being fired because my phone was always ringing with job offers, in fact it still is though I never intend to go back to a full time job.

 

Admittedly my experience is a little uncommon.  Some of my coworkers did not like their jobs, their pay or their potential future with the company.  I had a blessed path from summer intern to the top corporate position in our company with very few bumps in the road. My observation is that less than half of my coworkers really enjoyed work and I am not sure I ever met anyone that liked it quite as much as I did.    I originally expected to work until 70 but because I was “exposed” to this community of younger FIRE brands I began to think differently in my fifties and pulled the plug much earlier than I had ever thought possible.  And I’m glad I did.  But that doesn’t change the fact that I’m very grateful for my career and if I had it all to do over again I would follow the very same path, of 30 plus years of corporate 9 to 5 life because it was so very good!

 

Am I alone here or are there others who enjoy their 9 to 5 and plan to stick with it for maybe 30 or more years?