Beyond (mandatory) Work: Why Retire Early?

The idea of being able to claim retirement in your 30s or 40s was a game changer.

Early Retirement. I think of it as the point in your life when you can afford not to work anymore. Not work for money, that is. The point when you can truly pursue your dreams and interests without the fear of not having enough money holding you back.

Now you don’t have to work for money but that doesn’t mean that you’ll stop working forever. If you love your work then continue working! It just means that when you reach this point, you won’t have to worry about getting enough work hours to meet your monthly expenses, or having job security, or making sure you have enough PTO for your next vacation, or the dread of approaching Mondays.

When you reach this point, money becomes a non-factor. The only thing now that drives you to work is your love for doing that thing. A shift happens: It’s not you who needs the job anymore; it’s the job that needs you. You get to work on your own terms, your own time. You get to be “The Boss” even if you’re really not.

But more so, I think there is an underrated superpower underneath all this pursuit for early retirement. There is a change that happens when you undertake this path, a shift in driving force. It happened to me. And I’m not the only one. You can see this in the Early Retirement community. But it’s not unique to them either. You start out driven by this force to earn a lot, save up, and be wealthy and successful. But once you reach early retirement, a shift in gear becomes possible. Your driving force now will not be the money you need because you’ve already met that, and figured you don’t really need a lot.

The driving force now becomes that act of doing something purely for the joy of your soul, and hopefully, for helping bring about positive change. This shift in driving force is highly probable and more easily attainable once you reach early retirement.

However, I think it is also possible to experience this along the way. So far, I’ve come to realize that maybe the true power actually lies in the pursuit of early retirement, or financial independence, and not at the end when you reach the finish line.

A big bonus for reaching retirement early is this: time.

The good thing about experiences as being teachers is that it doesn’t need to be your own for you to learn from them.

Take the experience of the person behind the blog Mr. Money Mustache. He’s a 30-something retiree that writes about how they did it. How he and his wife managed to save up for their early retirement. They retired at age 30 just before their kid was born. And were able to stay at home and be with their kid as he grew up; they were there with him all day, all week, all year. Imagine that.

Time. And Time with your loved ones. Isn’t that something worth striving for, worth working towards? This is just one of the big upsides of achieving Financial Independence at a relatively young age.

Vicki Robin, one of the most dedicated advocates of financial independence, and Joe Dominguez – who by the way retired at the age of 31 in 1969 with about $70,000, and never had to accept money for his work thereafter – have been challenging people to rethink the way they view their relationship with money, since the late 1960s. Urging people to trade prospects of more money, in exchange for more time. Time for things that are truly important. Their 1992 book “Your Money or Your Life” contains their practical approach, and is probably one of the most insightful books out there categorized in personal finance.

This passage is taken from “On the Shortness of Life” from the Roman philosopher, Seneca. On extracting yourself from the busyness of work, he writes:

“take some of your own time for yourself too. I am not inviting you to idle or purposeless sloth, or to drown all your natural energy in sleep and the pleasures that are dear to the masses. That is not to have repose. When you are retired and enjoying peace of mind, you will find to keep you busy more important activities than all those you have performed so energetically up to now.

… believe me it is better to understand the balance-sheet of one’s own life than of the corn trade.”

And on the consequence of striving for more rather than enough:

“So it is inevitable that life will be not just very short but very miserable for those who acquire by great toil what they must keep by greater toil. They achieve what they want laboriously; they possess what they have achieved anxiously; and meanwhile they take no account of the time that will never more return.”

I’m sharing all this because I see its value, and I see the overwhelming potential that most of us have of achieving it.

I haven’t reached early retirement yet. But I know it can be done as others have done it as well – through ways that are relatively easy to learn, if you’re interested enough. Because at the core of it, it’s really (mostly) just tweaking your mindset and attitude, which requires nothing more than your willingness to do it.

If you’re someone who truly loves your work and will continue doing it even without or little in return, then you’re blessed to have been wise. If not, or if you’re somewhere in between where you like your work but deep down feel that there’s still something out there that you would like to do or try out (yeah that’s me), then this might be a great way to make your current work more fruitful and meaningful, as I’m finding out.

Let’s think of time as a higher form of currency. If you were given a huge amount of time, what would you spend it on?

I can think of so much. But what if you were given only one more year to live? Would you spend the majority of those days working? What would you spend those days on? I think it’s important to think about.

Because in the end, as Annie Dillard so wisely and succinctly put it:

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”

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