theFIREstarter

Welcome to the latest edition of “the thought experiments” which is a monthly series of questions posed by The Saving Ninja for us bloggers to “think about” and then write out our thoughts. The posts should be more “stream of consciousness” and as unedited as possible.

Todays question to think about is:

What would you do if you knew with absolute certainty that you would die in exactly 10 years time? It doesn’t matter how you know this or what you will die of; in 3652 days you will drop dead.

My thoughts on the 10 year death clock

While it’s a little morbid in one way, it is also a great question to get you thinking about what you truly value in life.

In general, there is no doubt that with a 10 year horizon, I would become far more “YOLO” in my outlook on life than I have been over the last 5 years

Here are some initial thoughts on the financial / lifestyle design side of things:

• The financial situation would change somewhat, I only have 10 years to live. However Mrs T and TFS Jr still have to continue living without me after those 10 years and I will need to secure their financial situation.
• However, the lifehacker (or death hacker in this instance) in me can see an easy way around this straight away… rather than waste any of my now limited time working to save up the money for them, I would just take out the best life insurance I could possibly get, a few years before the 10 years were up (you wouldn’t want to leave it too near to the 10 years so as not to arouse suspicion). I am presuming no one else would know about the death clock and it wouldn’t go on any medical records, so therefore would not invalidate any life insurance policy.
• So from that perspective we are now covered and I can focus on living life TO THE MAX while I’m still alive.
• We have about 100K in liquid assets that I could use for living expenses, which would realistically cover about 2 years of expenses at our current rate of spendy spending (eep!), especially if we then decided to do a bit more travel etc… Not that great.

I’d therefore have two realistic options in front of me

• 1: Continue on exactly as we are for about 3-4 years and continue to save (not bothering with Pensions at this point because, well what is the point!?) in ISA’s and probably a fair bit in cash in case the dreaded stock market crash everyone has been predicting for 5 years finally materialises. Once we had about 200K I would feel very comfortable we could make that last to the end of the 10 years (with a bit of side hustling no doubt).
• 2: Just quit work straight away and see how it goes.

I think with some side hustling I could make that 100K stash last 10 years, but if it started to get low after say 5 years of the YOLO life style I could always do some part time work to tide us over.

But what would I actually do?

For a start I’d definitely write up a bucket list! Things I would want to do would include:

• More travelling. There are tonnes of places to left on my list of places to see including:

Much more of South East Asia (we’ve only ever been to Thailand) – Cambodia (Angkor Wat), Vietnam, Thailand again, Laos, the Philippines and many more!

• Hiking to Everest basecamp (not sure I’d have the cajoohnas to go all the way but would be great to explore the general region and see some of those majestic peaks!)
• South America round 2 – Patagonia, more of Brazil and the Amazon, more of the Andes, Chile.
• Central America – All of it!
• More of the US and Canada – The Rockies, Great lakes, and some classic US road trips.
• Africa – Definitely would like to do some safari and other bits in Africa.
• Voluntourism ¹ – I would definitely like to do a few of those trips where you go and build a school or whatever, would be fun and feel like you are helping out as well.
• Golf – I’d probably combine some of the travelling with playing a handful of the top golf courses around the world. Not too many though as they can be very expensive!
• Diving – I’ve always been scared of doing full diving so would be good to get that sea monkey off my back and see some underwater creatures!
• Bungee jump – sounds trivial but I’ve never gotten round to this yet, and is definitely be something I want to do before I pop me old clogs!
• Paragliding – The one where you jump off the side of a hill. I want to do that. I definitely do not want to jump out of an aeroplane. No thank you very much.
• Music – I would definitely go back to writing some songs, record them and publish them on the internet (probably just Sound cloud!). They may end up being rubbish and/or not at all popular but that would not be the point, it’s something I’ve always loved doing and it would be great to leave my mark on the world in a creative way, however small.
• Write a book – Why the hell not!?
• Running – I would definitely continue to run and keep fit. I wouldn’t want to let my body get unhealthy just because I knew I was going to die in 10 years, and I’d want to be as healthy as possible right up to the end so I could enjoy the world as much as possible.
• Charity/Volunteering at home – I would definitely try to up my charity efforts and do some volunteering stuff while back home as well.
• Time spent with friends/family – Of course I would try to spend as much time as humanly possible with loved ones (which might be quite hard given the rather expansive list above!)
• Blog – Of course I’d keep the blog going! I wouldn’t want to ditch you guys haha.

The travelling there could take up a lot of time and money to be fair so I’m not saying I’d get through all of that, but would have to prioritise and get through as much as possible.

One thing is for certain is that I wouldn’t want to be on the road too much because obviously time back home with friends and family is also very important!

Other random thoughts

• Would I tell anyone? – I think I would have to tell my close friends and family, yes. It would be necessary to make all the planning and lifestyle changes actually make sense to people for a start! And it would avoid lot’s of pointless lying about why I’m doing what I’m doing. As long as no one let on to the life insurance company of course 😉
• Another child – Awkward and very sad thing to think about here. We are planning on a second child but could I go ahead with that knowing that they would only know me for slightly under 10 years? I’m not sure to the answer to this one. 🙁
• Don’t stop me now – We went to see the film about Queen and Freddy Mercury “Bohemian Rhapsody” on Friday night ², and it struck me that he was in a very similar situation to this thought experiment. True, he didn’t know exactly when he was going to die but he knew he probably had X amount of years left to live and then that was that. There was a scene in the film where he told the rest of the band members but then told them not to go on about it and carry on as usual, and also that he wanted to fully focus on spending the rest of his waking hours doing what he loved which was making music and performing. I think this is the attitude I would try to have if faced with a similar situation, I would want minimum fuss and just maximise fun and purpose for the time I had left.
• What’s stopping me now!? – Apart from the travel stuff which obviously has money as a factor, there isn’t that much stopping me from doing some of the stuff on my list above right now (music a good example of this). Time is obviously a factor here, but I could always rearrange my life slightly to fit 2-3 hours of making music per week for example. It wouldn’t take much to do this and over many weeks something would be accomplished, I am certain of that. Food for thought indeed 🙂

Right that’s it I think, what do you think guys?!