A few years ago I posted
some progress updates on a home that my family and I were building ourselves. It was a fairly impressive feat, if I do say so myself. “You’re living the dream!”, someone said. And indeed, I was. By mustachian standards, I was winning. Debt free, self-reliant, learning new skills, getting in great shape. Life was good…
However, I’m not sure how to evaluate the whole project anymore, and here’s why. Since moving in, we’ve been saving up a pot of cash, in addition to continuing to save towards our early retirement goals, to build a garage/studio + breezeway. I’m turning 40 this year. We have been shooting to flip mandatory work the bird by the time I hit 45-ish. We’ve got $230,000 in our investment accounts and are presently contributing 40,000 per year. Once we are not pouring money into construction projects we should be able to save another 30,000 per year, …if current income realities hold.
Trouble is… my wife’s job, which is the real money maker, is K I L L I N G her.
She makes big city money while we live in a small town, due to her scoring a remote working gig. There’s nothing even close to her caliber around here. She knows our goals, and thus feels enormous pressure to keep slogging through in order to liberate us completely in five years. Five years is a long time to ask someone to put up with a soul crushing work situation. It’s hard on her and the whole family.
And so here we stand on the doorstep of summer, construction plans in hand, bids in place, ready to begin work on a $60,000-70,000 addition to the home we began. I’ll be doing much of the work myself again. We have $40,000 saved. We’ll need to draw from a HELOC to finish it off. She really wants a garage. She’s tired of walking though the mud and shoveling her car out of a snow bank. She really wants the upstairs studio, a space to reconnect with her art. And she is very very tired of my “garage” being distributed evenly throughout our house! But this is even more PRESSURE to stick with a work situation that screws with her head on a daily basis.
The typical mustachian schtick would have one live well below one's means, invest the rest efficiently, then say goodby to mandatory work ASAP and get on with more self-actualizing ways of being in the world.
I don’t feel like we’re doing that anymore.
But even more, I get the feeling that there’s a point at which the drive towards early retirement becomes more of an affliction than salvation.
It’s a muddy, cold, windy, sad day here today. I should probably not be thinking big thoughts, but here we are.