Yes...we might have been an anomaly, but your final career years are usually the most lucrative. I think a lot of people who think it's easier/better to just work a bit later if needed aren't really considering that you will likely be making pennies on the dollar at the PT barista job compared to what was being thrown at you in the last few years of your "real" job.
After 3 years of FIRE, I'd be miserable if I was freaking about about the stock market and inflation and had to seriously consider going back to the stress of working...even if it was just a PT gig.
Yeah, I think this is underestimated. For high earners omy can equal 1-10x more money. For me the fallback of getting a $15/hr job to offset some SORR was completely unpalatable.....so I can end up working omy for like 0.2x more.
I'm not understanding your numbers. what money is 1-10X more for high earners? and what money is 0.2x more?
Earnings at the regular job today are 1-10x greater than earnings per hour at future part time gig.
But why would a high earner be limited $15/hr gigs?
I totally get it that some people, once they stop working, never want to ever have to work again. But I seriously think that's more of an anticipatory fear than an actual problem in reality. At least that's what my lived experience tells me. Most people in my life who work part time in retirement command high compensation for it.
Industrious people who already put in the work to develop valuable skills tend to be so well equipped to make money that it's really not that hard to find ways to extract money from the system in the future.
When you have A LOT of time and A LOT of resources, it's just not that hard.
So the very people who have the most to "lose" by leaving highly compensated jobs are also often the people who have the most capacity to generate opportunities in the future.
I personally wouldn't leave a job I enjoyed at the height of my income, during fucked up economic times. Of course I wouldn't. I'm just saying that this sad, hard to find, shitty paying, part time boogey man job that so many people here invoke just isn't as much of a reality as people tend to think.
Obviously, if someone is being heinously over paid for mediocre skills and doesn't actually have skills of real value, and if they leave, they can never hope to ever get that income ever again, or anything close to it, even if they were to retrain, then sure, that person should be much more cautious about un-latching from the golden teet. 100%.
However, I also think that many, many highly capable professionals have blinders on to the myriad possibilities for being *highly* compensated for interesting work outside of their specific professional experience. And having free time makes generating those possibilities so much easier.
Industrious people tend to be industrious.
The truth of it is that for many of us, there just isn't much difference between tapping into our human capital early or throughout our lives. It's more of a personal preference.
If the preference truly is to never, ever do anything ever again that is worthy of compensation, then cool. Plan accordingly, and definitely don't bank on only 25X reasonably estimated expenses. That's just batshit nuts.
But if that preference is driven by fear of being stuck slinging burgers for minimum wage, I think that's a consequence that could only result from incredibly poor planning, and people who make high incomes don't tend to be poor planners.
I just don't think this dichotomy of work now or be doomed to work for pennies on the dollar later is very realistic for most people in *this* particular community.
Gen Pop? Perhaps moreso, but not the kind of folks who get up early and make financial graphs before going to work at their highly paid side gig that they're trying out while on sabbatical from their elite academic job, right
@maizefolk?
I would bet my more functional leg that half the posters in this thread could generate equal or higher hourly equivalent part time incomes if they really wanted to. Yes, it would take work, but as I said, it's personal preference whether that's more appealing than staying put a few more years.
And I think I'm being pretty conservative when I say "half."