Hey everyone. 28 year-old guy from the US here. I shot myself in the foot by getting impatient on my quest for FI, pulling the plug from my mind numbing finance job early to start a business with the belief that I would be more likely to succeed if I wasn’t yet at the magic number. My advice in short: keep going with the boring job! Don’t get impatient like I did.
Why quit early? Like many of you, I was interested in starting a business after retiring. My hypothesis was that I would end up goofing around too much if I were fully FI. By leaving my salary behind when only at about half of my FI number, I would force myself to make the business work out instead of just putting a small effort into it.
Don’t do what I did! Now it’s clear that the effect of leaving earlier than FI would be different than what I imagined. Instead of causing me to want to work harder to make my entrepreneurial pursuits pay off, having not reached FI is instead causing me to want to throw in the towel and go back to my old profession to earn enough to last forever. It now seems that I should have had more patience with my job.
I’m going to keep working on building my business through at least August of next year. I have a history of jumping from thing to thing too often, and I can’t allow myself to keep up that pattern. My plan now is that regardless of my attitude, I will put in the time to give my current project a chance to pay off. I also need to be more thoughtful about my next move.
There’s still hope that leaving the salary behind will end up paying off, and there are some days when I feel like I will be able to make this work without going crawling back for a few more years in cubicle-land. For now though, I’ll keep working. At least there will be an interesting story to tell.
