Living free NOW. It is for the likes of you!
We have a guest post today for you from my venerable namesake Andy @ liberate.life blog. I’ll keep the intro short and sweet as don’t want to give away any of the goodies contained within! I’ll just mention that as Andy didn’t provide me with a picture to lead with, I decided to just put up a picture of a cat, he looks like he’s living pretty free to me, so there you go.
Anyway without further ado, over to you Andy…
I’d like to stop you from wasting the next 10 years.
If we’ve not met before, allow me to introduce myself. I’m Andy and I run a website called liberate.life which is the voice of the anti-financial-independence movement.
Well, that’s probably going a bit far: I’m pretty frugal, I’m a keen investor and nobody shouts the words “Money’s not for stuff, it’s for freedom!” louder than me. So I’m a massive advocate of using the accumulation of money (that the rest of the world thinks you should be spending instead!) as a tool to build freedom in your life. I think that makes me a ‘FIer’.
However, besides the FI community, I’m also involved with another weird cult. These guys are even crazier than you lot!
Believe it or not, I’m currently sat in a room full of people who aren’t financially independent but they still have freedom and autonomy. These people don’t have bosses. They don’t have commutes. They don’t have performance reviews. They don’t even have specific working hours.
I mean seriously, I live quite near the sea (in Devon) and you can guess what the surf/wind conditions are like by looking at which seats in our co-working space are empty.
The most interesting thing about my friends here is this: they’re all nice, ‘normal’ people, just, I’d imagine, like you.
I want to convince you to come and join our cult, but we’ll get to that a bit later. First, a bit of background…
Getting free soon
I got really interested in personal finance several years ago. It didn’t take long to discover the concept of financial independence.
I was in the early stages of what has since become a well-paid career and I was sick of the 50 hour sacrifice that I was making every week, so I started saving like crazy. I became addicted to the idea of becoming independently wealthy whilst I was still very young.
However, I pretty quickly came to the conclusion that I’d arrived at the party too late to have a chance of joining the ranks of the financially independent this side of my 40th birthday.
Once I’d factored in a few of life’s realities (like being 30-something, having kids and becoming the main family breadwinner) it became clear that, if my only options were working for somebody else full-time vs being completely financially independent, I would be suffering in the rat race doing the former for a long time!
The problem with that is, I want to live my life NOW!
At the moment I’m young, fit and healthy. My hair is only just starting to go grey. I’ve got 2 kids under 3. I can still (just about) get away with being in a band without it being forced to play Status Quo covers. Why on Earth would I voluntarily subject myself to the quite unnatural ‘standard working week’ for however long it took for me to save enough to never have to work again?
I decided to try a different way instead.
I reasoned that, when the aim is to win back your time and self-determination, perhaps it’s best to just focus directly on achieving that, rather than killing yourself for 10 (20?) years to build a Rube Goldberg contraption to get you what you want.
I had officially come to the conclusion that (in most cases) saving your way to FI, in order to live life on your own terms, is the canonical example of using a sledgehammer to crack a nut.
I’ve written at length about my journey to that conclusion here.
Anyway, I changed direction and am now enjoying a life of freedom and autonomy, at the age of 33, despite not being financially independent.
How?
I built the life I now enjoy by following a very simple recipe:
- I analysed what value I am able to provide to other people and worked out some methods for providing that value flexibly and efficiently instead of having a job
- I carried on living on far less than I am capable of earning
- I built a safety net to catch me in case I got it wrong
…and then I ditched my job and vowed to only work as much as I needed to (or as much as I enjoyed!) for the rest of my life.
I make the majority of my income as a freelancer, but, and this is the most important statement in the entire article, that particular detail is completely irrelevant.
But I could never…
This is where I usually start to lose people.
As soon as I mention that I’m a freelancer and I have a well-paid professional skill, the complainypants‘ come out of the woodwork:
This approach obviously works for you Andy – you’re an engineer. There’s no way I could ever apply your principles to get free almost immediately because there’s no such thing as a freelance X.
Suffice it to say that this is an epic failure to think even slightly outside the box.
Allow me to illustrate what I mean with a slightly silly made up example.
Quitting the zoo
If you are, for example, a zookeeper*, it may well be true that you couldn’t just build a life of freedom and autonomy based around earning income as a freelance zookeeper because…
Waaahhh!!! Nobody hires freelance zookeepers.
[Note: I have absolutely no idea if there is such a thing as a freelance zookeeper. Please leave a comment below if you know!]
But, if you wanted to get out of the rat race quickly, switching from employee to freelancer would only represent the most obvious choice.
What about taking a step back and being open-minded about how to solve this problem?
What exactly does ‘being a zookeeper’ mean anyway? Well, certainly more than the job title, that’s for sure.
I’m certain you have administrative and operational duties which have caused you to become very good at organisation.
You’re no stranger to spreadsheets (you use them to analyse feeding trend data). You’re an expert at dealing with the public. Perhaps you’ve even been involved in marketing the zoo.
You know a lot of people in the industry, and many more in related industries such as food suppliers and companies who make fashionable collars for lionesses.
And we’ve not even got to your specialist animal handling skills yet…
Think about all of those skills, interests, contacts and personal qualities you have as components. Other components you have at your disposal include your personality traits and your positive habits.
* [Who the fuck would want to quit that job anyway?]
Throw away the instructions!
Now, the easiest thing to do with a pile of components is to build the model that they were intended for. That is, the path of least resistance method for turning your skills, interests, knowledge and personal attributes into money, is to have a job.
It’s a tiny baby step down the imagination continuum from traditional employment to becoming a freelancer. I freelance because it’s an obvious option for me, but maybe it’s not for you.
However, it is possible to use your critical faculties and all of that incredible creativity that you pour into solving problems for your current employer to solve your lifestyle problem directly, rather than keeping the job and saving like crazy for as long as it takes.
Here’s the problem with your job.
Jobs are shit
Well, at least as far as building an autonomous and flexible life goes.
Jobs in general have two positive attributes:
- The income turns on as soon as you start working
- They are a good way of learning skills while somebody else bears all of the risk and pays for your mistakes
Beyond that, jobs are a horrendously inefficient, inflexible way of being compensated for (a fraction of) the value that you produce.
It’s true that exceptions exist (i.e. there are certain incredible things that you’d struggle to do without doing them as a profession – possibly zookeeping), but for the most part, jobs are a bad economic bargain.
Now, obviously we FIers are ultimately interested in having the power to do what we want, when we want. We’re all working hard to achieve that.
The unfortunate thing about having a job as part of the strategy to achieve it is that there are only really two positions that the switch can be set to:
- On. Having a professional job and saving like a mad (wo)man. A number of hours (usually greater than 50) of 45 weeks of every year must be sacrificed to doing what somebody else wants us to until we can move the switch to the other position…
- Off. We have successfully endured the first stage. Now we don’t need to produce any economic output at all for the rest of our lives.
I suppose there are a few tweaks which can be made here and there. I worked 80% of full-time before I quit. Our host, The FIREstarter has got a pretty sweet part-time pattern worked out too.
However, neither of these variations give you the freedom to just say
Bugger this. I’m having 3 months off to record my debut album.
at least until you’ve banked enough to throw the switch to ‘Off’.
If you’re not OK with that limitation, I’d suggest that you embrace my philosophy of ‘thinking outside the box’ and get involved with the cult that I warned you about at the start of the article: The Cult of the Small-Time Entrepreneur.
That filthy word
I feel like the ‘E’ word gets a bad rap amongst ‘normal’ folks with good, honest 9-5 jobs.
The faces in the following rogues’ gallery represent the range of opinions which a lot of people I know (who aren’t entrepreneurially-minded!) have of ‘business people’:
[Image credits: Arthur Daley – ITV, Mr Burns – 20th Century Fox, Del Boy – BBC, Scrooge McDuck – Disney]
Now, don’t mistake my meaning. As much as I love capitalism for some of its qualities, there are some unsavoury characters in the world who are basically crooks and swindlers. But that’s not what the majority of entrepreneurship is all about.
In fact, to become a member of our cult, you don’t need to learn to be a sleazeball, bend the truth or polish any turds.
Actually, there’s only one essential requirement.
What’s the problem?
To build a system for producing income which isn’t ‘having a job’, you need to find one or more problems which people are willing to pay you to solve and then solve them.
Simple as that.
If you have a job, you’ve already done this at least once in your life. You probably didn’t frame it in those terms, but, in order for you to be, for instance, an accountant, somebody obviously had the problem of a lack of a full-time professional accountant at some point which you have since solved.
If you’ve only ever been an employee, it’s not that you’ve never looked for problems that people wanted solved. Rather, you’ve limited the class of problems that you’ve been willing to solve to those which are usually dealt with by hiring a full-time employee.
All you need to do is dig a little deeper. Stop thinking about job titles and start thinking about specific problems that you can solve.
For example, if you work with complex spreadsheets in your day job as a financial analyst, maybe you should be looking for problems which could be solved most effectively by somebody with advanced numerical and spreadsheet skills.
On the other hand, if you deal with the public on a day-to-day basis, I guarantee that there is a tiny enterprise out there somewhere which is good at providing its core product, but is terrible at presenting it at trade shows.
Just use your imagination!
In truth, there is a veritable infinity of unsolved problems out there, all of which are just waiting for somebody to solve them and make the world better.
And the great thing is, it’s not compulsory to spend 40+ hours of every week solving problems.
You only need to solve enough problems to pay your way. If you want more money, you look for more problems to solve. If you want a rest for a couple of months, you live on your savings and stop solving problems for a while.
It’s pretty simple when you think about it.
Sounds dead easy. Where do I sign?
OK, OK. I made it sound a lot simpler than it really is (maybe it’s the salesman in me ;-)).
Making the transition from being somebody who has only ever earned income as an employee to being a micro-business owner is a tough slog. To make this approach work, you will have to put in a ridiculous amount of effort. I failed my way to succeeding at running a very modest micro-business over the years between my teens and my 30s. I’ve literally spent a third of my life working this shit out!
The key is to keep going. Learn to accept embarrassment. Think of failure as feedback. Know that you’re building the skills you need to be able to generate income independently for the rest of your life.
You’ll probably find that most of the effort actually goes into generically learning how to be an entrepreneur, rather than solving whatever problem(s) you’ve chosen. It doesn’t really matter if your first attempt isn’t the most successful business you ever run, just that you start learning how to do it as soon as possible.
Hard, but in a good way…
I can’t deny it. Building even a tiny enterprise which makes a profit is really fucking hard.
However, I predict that if you combine the effects of doing this with your already very advanced personal finance skills (and for many of you, I’d imagine, 6-figure stashes), you can break free from the rat race and do whatever you want (most of the time) in a couple of years or less.
No 4% vs 3% SWR bollocks required. No concerns about down markets at the beginning of your retirement. No second guessing your allocation to bonds.
Just a nice healthy cushion in the bank and the ability to turn the tap back on when you need to. Oh yes, and most of the next ten years to spend however you want to instead of sitting through annual reviews and pointless meetings.
Perfect!
Convinced?
I’m pretty sure that I’ve chosen my Pareto Financially Independent lifestyle in part because of my personality. I accept that learning to ‘eat what you kill’ is not for everybody.
On the other hand, I strongly suggest that you don’t just give yourself a pass on this one because you think that you’re too introverted or you don’t bring anything to the table. I guarantee that you have something unique to offer and your life could be so much richer if you just chose to capitalise on that fact.
Anyway, I hope I’ve at least managed to rouse some curiosity and that this article has helped you in some way.
In conclusion
I’ll leave you with these thoughts: I am going to die. So are you.
We don’t know when, but it’s coming and there’s (currently) no escape. Go away and really contemplate that. How long have you actually got left?
Now ask yourself whether that long slog to an arbitrary numerical target (like banking 25 times your annual living expenses) is really the best use of what could be an absolutely incredible decade.
Finally, if you think doing things my way sounds good, but you just need a tiny nudge over the starting line, perhaps you should listen to my old pal Ralph:
When a resolute young fellow steps up to the great bully, the world, and takes him boldly by the beard, he is often surprised to find it comes off in his hand, and that it was only tied on to scare away the timid adventurers.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
That’s certainly true in my experience.
Now it’s your turn…
Get into that comments section and tear me to pieces if you like. Tell me why some variation of this approach won’t work for you. It would also be great to hear from anybody who has taken a similar path to mine. What worked? What would you have done differently? Don’t be shy!
Andy is a blogger and coach based over at liberate.life. He lives and works in the beautiful city of Exeter.
In between freelance engineering gigs, he writes about combining the skills of personal finance and small-time entrepreneurship to enable people to live peaceful, self-directed lives.
Drawing on more than a decade of entrepreneurial experience, he also offers one-to-one coaching for people who are looking to build flexible lifestyles based around tiny businesses and expert personal financial management.
So a Big Thanks to Andy for that excellent guest post! Hopefully you noticed all the links sprinkled through the article but in case you didn’t here are a few other posts you might want to take a look at:
Why the financial independence community is wrong
How to work 33% of full-time – all over this shit 🙂
Rolling a boulder over a hill – A nice metaphor of the Journey to FI (or doing anything hard/worthwhile)
Discussion (22) ¬
Bloody excellent post guys. I’m currently in the position of being recently retired early, struggling slightly to come up with constructive ways to fill my days, and still have a desire to develop something that may earn me some side-income ‘just because I can’. I’ve built a small business over the last 3 months where I sell products for testing people and surfaces for illegal drugs. It may seem an odd line to get into but there is a huge market here that isn’t very well serviced at the moment. It’s only going to grow.
At the moment it’s pretty quiet as I still need to be ‘found’ online so am tweaking my site and content to make it findable.
The other thing I did recently was do a couple of days work for a labour hire company I’ve previously worked for. It was a bit of a shock to the system getting up at 5am again but I did it because I could.
I totally get what you’re saying Andy and reckon that this is one of the benefits of early retirement. You can do some work if you want to and it’s works in with your lifestyle, not because you have bills to pay. And keeping a toe in the game also means that you retain the skills learned over all those years of career building, just in case you do need to re-use them.
Cheers Martin. I really enjoyed writing this one.
I think your last paragraph sums up why I made my choices: I was never going to let my engineering skills go (as I enjoy engineering and, well, just in case). That being the case, I’d have to do at least one project every year to keep myself employable.
But, wait a minute, a 4 month project every year would pay my way anyway without being fully FI. So why torture myself for ten years to save the nest egg in the first place?
Your little business sounds interesting. Do you have a link to it (I’m sure TFS won’t mind, but he’ll scrub it if he does)?
Re ‘getting found online’: Obviously you’re FI so it doesn’t really matter how much cash you make from your venture. You can take it as slow as you fancy. However, in my experience, people rarely ‘find’ you (at least in large numbers). You need to go to wherever they hang out and then shout from the rooftops.
Who would benefit from what you sell? Where are they? Is it feasible to get one of them on the phone for a chat?
I hope that was useful – feel free to ignore me completely if I’m teaching you to suck eggs.
Thanks again for taking the time to comment.
Hi again Andy, thanks for the comments. I do spend a bit of time on the phone talking with potential clients but there’s still a lot of with their head in the sand regarding the potential affects on their business. The link is drugdetectionkits.com.au. I’d be keen to get any feedback on the layout and user friendly-ness of the website if you, or anyone else, has some useful feedback. You can leave me a note in the CONTACT page. Always appreciated. And no, definitely not teaching me to suckers eggs.
Hi Martin,
I thought I’d respond with another comment in case any other entrepreneurial types benefit from our back and forth. I hope that’s OK with both you and TFS.
It’s difficult to make any specific comments about the website as I’m not sure what stage of the buying process somebody might be in when they get there. They might be completely educated and just looking for something that meets the spec they’re after. On the other hand, maybe they’re completely green and are after some info.
However, here are a couple of general things. Take with the appropriate pinch of salt given my lack of contextual knowledge and the fact I’ve looked at it for < 10 minutes:
– Appearance-wise: functional but underwhelming. If the site gets lots of traffic and a 20% increase in conversions would help, maybe that's worth some effort to improve.
– You've told me about what you do very succinctly above the fold (good) but not why I should care. This information is available further down, but, if I'm not interested in 10 seconds, I won't get that far. Our kits detect X is a good description of a feature, but I only care about that if I understand the benefit that it will give me. Again, if your visitors are already educated at this stage, that might be appropriate.
This line jumped out from your comment:
> I do spend a bit of time on the phone talking with potential clients but there’s still a lot of them with their head in the sand regarding the potential affects on their business
Again, get the salt ready as I know nothing about the business, but that makes it sound like you’re trying to convince people that they have the problem that you’re solving.
If people still need to be educated as to the benefits, they’re definitely not going to be searching for you on Google and thus site usability might be the wrong thing to focus on. Perhaps spending energy on chatting to the people who fit your ideal customer profile and asking them how to sell to them might be more appropriate. That would also guide you as to how you might improve the website.
Obviously, the outcome of that exercise could be that not enough people are eager to buy to warrant your ongoing efforts.
Ask yourself this: Can I name 5 people who are in my target market and have a confirmed (by them) desire to buy? If I was you and the answer was ‘no’, my next move would be to do what it takes to make it ‘yes’ and have in-depth chats with all 5 of them.
Then worry about the website.
I hope that helps to some degree and wish you the best of luck with the venture. You know where to find me if you need any more help.
Andy
Hi again Andy, I feel a bit guilty about hogging FIREstarter’s comments section with this so I’m going to close it up and head on over to your site (unless anyone is hanging out for the conclusion to our conversation).
And thanks to Andy (the FIREstarter one) for allowing us to hijack his blog for our chat.
Yep, exactly. This post is exactly the conclusion I came to too, except I didn’t write it down because I’m too lazy. I too am 33, latched onto the FI scene at about age 29 (although was already a saver), and by 32 years old had figured that I’d probably top myself if I had to continue with my ‘career’ until the age of 37. My wife and I saved up enough to last us a good 15 years (no kids, desire for kids, or desire for stuff helps reduce this number), and started travelling around the world.
The FI scene is always quick to point out that if you retire very early, you’re very unlikely to then not earn a single penny given the type of person you are. Yet somehow, they don’t seem to often translate this into not necessarily waiting until you have a 4.3215% SWR (or whatever). I mean, if you love your job, then great – might as well wait for full FI. However I think many who find the FI scene do so out of desperation to escape the 9-5.
So, great post, you beat me to it, will stop waffling now and check out your website 🙂
Hey Alistair.
> figured that I’d probably top myself if I had to continue with my ‘career’ until the age of 37
I think you and I have a lot in common! Except for the kids thing, obviously.
Even with 2 kids and one half of our economic partnership all but completely out of action for a couple of years (wife on maternity leave, will return to work but on massively reduced hours), we’re still confident that things will be OK.
It seems crazy that anybody in a similar professional position to us but without 2 kids to feed would even dream of living a life they didn’t enjoy for a minute longer than necessary. Fear is a powerful force though.
> I mean, if you love your job, then great…
I have another angle on this. I think FI is a good example of a ‘mountain to climb’. If you’re doing it because you want to climb the mountain (not because you hate the 9-5) then I say ‘go for it’.
I’m still (secretly) climbing the mountain too. I’m not rushing, but I know that getting to FI will feel like an achievement.
> …4.3215% SWR
This made me laugh out loud! Thanks 🙂
Great post and also a very good challenge. I think to a degree it depends on the individual (I am ignoring the complainypants here!) – and what people want. I’ve done a couple of my own companies and I learnt a HUGE amount from them – well worth it. I also still hold down the steady job. I have considered freelance on a couple of occasions, but chose to try and push my career. Why? At the time it seemed like the right thing to do, and gave me more of a challenge. It also increased my earnings, to the extent now that, even after tax, my income is higher than it would have been as a freelance working the same 45 odd weeks a year. This means I have kept pushing up my earnings to help build that magic pot.
Sadly never quick enough 🙂
Keep up the good work!
London Rob
Thanks Rob.
I completely agree that there’s a big element of personality psychology involved here. I’m a confident self-promoting kind of person and I understand that not everybody is.
However, I’m really keen to point out that, even if people don’t feel suited to ‘Pareto FI through tiny business ownership’, that doesn’t mean that there isn’t some solution that would work for them besides having a full-time, soul-destroying job until total FI.
> Sadly never quick enough
This is the crux of the matter for me. I wrote it in the article, but here it is again: WE’RE ALL DYING! Every minute people spend living a compromise is another minute they’ll never get back.
Here’s how the maths stacks up for me. Assuming that you’re doing the FI thing to get out of the rat race, if you’re on £150k and can take advantage of good tax efficiency strategies, you’d be mad not to just make bank in 5 years and never look back.
However if you’re on £50k or maybe £80k between two partners for a household with kids, then to make the total FI approach work, you’re going to have to live like frugal ninjas for 15 years to get to FI and then carry on living like frugal ninjas* for the rest of your lives.
I’m trying to help people in that latter group to see some alternatives that perhaps weren’t immediately obvious to them.
Thanks again for you kind words Rob.
*[To define a frugal ninja for the avoidance of doubt: not me and not TFS. We are quite well-off people who spend around the same amount as a median-earning household which doesn’t save. If I went to the town I grew up in, told a man in the pub that I was frugal and then told him what my family spends in a month, he would kill me dead for being such a privileged rich prick.]
Hi Andy,
As you say its down to the individual to a large degree but there is always something in there – there is an outgoing person in all of us somewhere though!
There are multiple ways to get to FI – ultimately everyones journey will be different and it will need to suit them – but the fact you are showing people its not always a case of slog your guts out is a great advert for what can be done if someone wants to!
You are spot on – we are all dying each minute we draw a breath 🙂 You have to be able to look back and enjoy your life, as the famous saying goes “Nobody looks back on their deathbed and wishes they had spent more time at work” (or something like that…..). Sadly, Im not on the 150k (yet, give me time, I hope!) – I bank as much as I can although I do have a fair old size mortgage so its not easy – I know a number of the UK bloggers have a better savings rate than me – but you have to look at what you are willing to give up to make it. I do believe it always comes down to what you are willing to do, and how determined you are – you may cope with it for 3 months, 6 months, a year or maybe 2, but doing it for year on year is hard.
Keep it up, and enjoy living life on your terms!
London Rob
Nice one for articulating what I have felt for a while about the FI scene.
A while back there was a bit of discussion surrounding the ‘inconvenient truth’ of FI, in as much as it was only really on the table for very high earners, typically finance/IT work. That thread sort of fizzled out, but there was a grain of truth in it.
I think you’ve rearticulated it, but also provided a work-around, which is handy.
I am a big fan of RIT, smart guy and clearly hugely determined, his blog is routinely brilliant – but I always had a nagging feeling that he was a bit wide of the mark, way too much jam tomorrow. I thought about whether I would be happy encouraging my kids down that route and the answer would have to be hell-no. I couldn’t do it. I think its philosophically misguided.
I think I’ve got a bit of the old mexican fisherman in me though, your mileage may vary as they say..
Hey TR.
Thanks very much.
Of course, I don’t want to sound like I’m saying ‘chasing early FI through extreme saving is bad’ in any way. Rather that it’s probably a massively suboptimal strategy for the great majority of people who don’t have ridiculously high incomes.
For instance, if you save 50% of your income, that’s great and to be commended. However, if you’re doing it specifically to ‘quit the rat race’ you’re going to have a bloody long wait.
I have my suspicions about RIT’s motivation. There you have a very smart cookie (and very driven with it). I think there might be something deep down that was just driving him to hit the 7-figure mark as a ‘mountain to climb’ rather than as a means to an end. I mean, 2.5% SWR?
I’m totally on-board with doing that because you want to but it’s not the best way to avoid a 60 hour per week stressful job and live on £25k a year.
RIT, if you’re reading, do chip in with your take on this 🙂
I completely agree about the Mexican fisherman – in fact that’s a much more poetic way of describing my philsophy.
A very interesting post.
I’m one of those people not into self-promoting at all, so wouldn’t whole-heartedly adopt what you have done. Despite >20 years working 9-5, I have never felt like I was ‘working for the man’ – I’ve just been doing jobs that I mostly enjoy for which I get paid for. That said, I’m not a high earner having never chased the big wages and only in one period of my life did I do the 60 hour week before it got too much for my health and I whittled it back down to a more normal 40 hours.
I’ve never thought about working for myself but that’s not to say I would never consider it in the future. I can’t say it’s at the top of my list, this even despite the fact I’m being laid off at the end of the year.
The Rhino is somewhat right though about the ‘inconvenient truth’ of FI. It’s a lot harder to do when you’re not a high earner, though not impossible.
Perhaps I will buck the trend by doing it as a basic tax rate payer and without someone else’s income to help out with bills!
Whats interested me recently is the thought that even MMM would have been better off following andy’s rather than his own advice. With the benefit of hindsight he should ‘retired’ at 20 rather than 30, in as much as he should have got on and done his own thing from the start. Note that ‘retired’ means ‘freelance working’ when used by MMM.
I think in many ways the RIT/MMM model of FI is dead in the water – certainly for me anyway. Its useful as a mental ‘stepping stone’ to living intentionally, but once you’ve got your head round it, the obvious thing to do is just to skip it all together, i.e. do a liberatedotlife and avoid wasting a decade or three of your most able years.
Thanks Weenie.
> I have never felt like I was ‘working for the man’
It’s good that you enjoy your job. Sorry to hear about the impending lay-off.
I think it’s safe to say that if you’re not looking for a quick way out of ‘the rat race’ (as some people see it), then I’m unlikely to be able to turn your head with another technique for achieving that. If I get the gist from your blog, you’re more in this for the long haul in order to have options for ‘traditional’ early retirement if you want them.
> I’ve never thought about working for myself…
The thing I find weird is that everybody sees not working for themselves as a ‘standard’ option as if the universe decided that having a job is just what everybody should do. That’s not to say that having a job is a bad thing per se, just that it shouldn’t be assumed by the adult population of the world that it is normal.
I prefer to start at the beginning, i.e. ‘I need to eat. What’s the best way to make that happen?’, rather than starting with the solution (a job) and then making life fit in with that. YMMV though.
+1 on the ‘inconvenient truth’ angle.
Thanks for taking the time for such a thoughtful comment, even if what I wrote didn’t help you personally 🙂
Excellent post. The root trigger for the 25 x annual expenses (i.e. 4% rule) is the safety margin we all seek in life (that’s why its even called ‘safe’ withdrawal rate). For some, that’s still not enough and they target lower %age; for others, this is plenty if you are flexible and for yet others like you, even aspiring for it seems like a waste considering alternative options – especially, if you can hack some part-time jobs as and when you want. There is no absolute right or wrong answer in life. Good luck in your 10! journey.
Ten Factorial Rocks (TFR) recently posted…How to Earn Like a Boss AND Be Treated Like One
I found this post to be particularly useful and motivating. The quote from Emerson is a perfect fit for the post’s message and hit home for me. I’m kicking around several micro-business ideas…am circling the walls with over analysis and fear (truthfully). I haven’t had the balls (yet) to go test the bricks. It’s about time I trust myself and my preparation and get after it.
Do it!
Have a look at this: What’s the worst that could happen?
Seriously OI, you’ll be a long time dead. Be scared of the regret you’ll feel if you never try!
Good luck.
Great post, Andy!
I just wonder, how one would achieve this lifestyle in a much different situation to yours.
I’m female, early 30s, at the moment, a stay at home mum, very low 4 figure savings ( as I’m not earning I can only save small amounts like the tax credits we are getting).
I have a few skills that I could probably use to my advantage. I’ve done photography, translation works and being on stage (entertaining over 10,000 people a night) But I would have no idea where to start or how to do anything with my skills. My little girl is too small for me to go out there and invest a huge amount of time, so I’d probably have to wait a good few years, because nursery is about £800 a month.
I could become a wedding photographer, I guess, but I’d have to heavily invest into equipment first and I also don’t drive and there seems to be an endless amount of photographers already.
I could translate, but I don’t have an official certificate for that, so again it would probably cost time and money to even get that. I loved being on stage, but that was a once in a lifetime thing.
I know all of this sounds like I’m a negative Nancy, but believe me, I’m looking for ideas and ways to make money every day.
There are a lot of bricks in the way. My husbands income is barely enough for the 3 of us (£18.500 a year), I looked for ways to reduce all bills and i never buy unnecessary stuff. He doesn’t have any ambition to make more money, so I would have to do all this by myself.
I’ve been thinking about trading on the stock market, but with little savings the risk is too high. If I already had 6 figures saved, as you assume a lot of us have, it would be much easier to invest and also to do something like property development (which I would love to do as well). I’d really like to hear what you suggest for my situation or anyone’s situation who hasn’t 6 figures saved already.
Thanks for your post again 🙂
Hi Sonja,
Thank you for your kind words.
I admire your tenacity. You’re obviously really putting some effort in to find a way to improve the work/life/money balance that your family experiences.
As much as I’d like to encourage you to keep looking for a ‘different way’, I know how much of your bandwidth being the main child carer on a day-to-day basis can take up so you shouldn’t be too hard on yourself if you can’t simultaneously manage doing that and running a tiny business of some sort. Perhaps carry on brainstorming for now but wait until school starts before executing any big plans.
In most cases, official certificates are irrelevant when compared to having the ability to provide value. If you can do something which somebody will pay you to do, letters after your name don’t make you able to do it better. I’m not suggesting that you should try practicing medicine without going to med school or anything, just that you should focus on value creation over ‘qualifications’.
Stock market trading: do not try this under any circumstances! You broker will be the only winner. You should consider your low-four-figure amount of savings as sacred. Guard it as closely as you can because it represents a nice little cushion of security and may well be the seeds of a much freer life.
The only advice I can really give is that you can’t escape from reality, so don’t try. If your other half stubbornly sticks to his convictions about not trying to earn more than £18.5k, then, that leaves you with a lot of weight to pull. If, between you, you can’t earn enough cash in 40% of full-time hours to live (and save enough to retire eventually) then, unfortunately, you’ll just have to work more than 40% of full-time hours. I don’t mean that to sound flippant in any way, it’s just how the arithmetic stacks up.
My strategy relies on having accumulated a reasonable amount of savings to start with (by which I mean around 1 year’s living expenses). Although you could make it work with less savings, I wouldn’t fancy trying.
You have to be realistic – if you can’t get your income up enough to save up a few tens of thousands of pounds, this probably isn’t going to work for you.
Perhaps working on encouraging the other half to be more ambitious with his income production might be a good place to start.
Good luck with your progress anyway, and thanks for taking the time to leave a thoughtful comment. I hope I didn’t come off as too much of a lucky privileged person who has a high income. 🙂