"Perceived" Freedom vs. "Actual" Freedom

[ducky19]

I play Forge of Empires on my phone for some free entertainment and have gotten to know another player relatively well. We talk finance and retirement frequently. Recently though, he made some comments that struck me as worthy of being shared here.

Now let me preface this by saying he's well on his way (if not already at) financial independence, but our views about what "counts" as retired are clearly different.

He made a comment about the recent pullback screwing with a lot of the FIRE crowd. I suggested that most had a safety margin factored in and could adjust lifestyle, use liquid funds, etc. to combat drops in the market. When I mentioned having multiple income streams (such as rental income, side hustle, etc.), he came back with that being "semi retirement", not "true" retirement. He mentioned earlier that he is likely not going to retire until age 67 (another 10-12 years) so that he can be "truly" retired and not rely on other sources of income. He said he is "willing to work a little longer to actually have real freedom instead of perceived freedom".

I was totally flabbergasted that he was willing to trade 10-12 years of his life just to be able to say he is "completely" free when he retires, instead of implementing other income streams that take very minimal work to have "perceived" freedom... 10-12 years sooner. I guarantee I'm going to probably travel just as much as him, just plan to start when I'm young enough to enjoy it and be active. I can't imagine waiting until I'm 67 to start living the retired life just to say "I rely on no external income streams".

Sorry for the rambling post, but I just found it very curious. He's banking on the fact that he's going to make it to 67 and still be healthy enough to enjoy his wealth.

[Sibley]

Sounds like he's internalized that retirement means you do nothing. That's a great way to die within a year or 2, because we're not meant to do nothing.

[Metalcat]

Yep, the Internet Retirement Police have a lot of opinions.

[deborah]

Let’s pretend that I’m the retirement police for a moment.

Retirement means not having to work, so changing your lifestyle and using liquid funds are ploys that do keep you retired. But managing your RE and having side hustles is still working.

However, it depends on what you’re aiming for. I personally retired to never work again. I’d just had my best friend die, and several other major disasters to people in my life. It was important to me when I retired to ensure that I could be there for the people in my life, and any work would entail conflicting priorities. So my retirement would be a failure if I felt I had to work at any point.

Someone else might retire to dive every coral reef in the world. I imagine that there would be times that they couldn’t do that, so a seasonal job would fit very well into their retirement, without compromising it at all. I worked with someone who had retired to a tropical island and who took work elsewhere in the nasty season.

Others retire to a job - there was an article yesterday about someone who claims to be retired, and still works part time as a scientist but who wanted to do his own research at home, and had just developed a major breakthrough in the field he was working on at home. He was only working part time so he had access to some equipment he couldn’t buy himself.

However, if you need to change your lifestyle to remain retired, maybe that isn’t retirement, because it’s not really what your retirement is about.

[getsorted]

he was willing to trade 10-12 years of his life

This phrasing always strikes me as odd (as in "Your Money or Your Life!"). You still have your life while you're working. Sure, working isn't as much fun as not working, but it's hardly the same as not being alive!

Maybe he just prefers his job to trying to figure out landlording or some other side business. I can see why someone would feel that way.

[lifeisshort123]

I think for many people retirement means truly “retire” as in “i will retire to my chamber for the evening”.

Today’s world is quite different than that.  To me, retirement means not being beholden to any activities or events beyond those that give me joy and a sense of purpose.  Some may come with financial enumeration, and some might not.

[ChickenStash]

In the context of side hustles, rentals, etc. I'm actually on board with that being better-called semi-retirement. Not to the extent I'd expend much energy arguing the point, though. Everyone has their idea of what retirement means to them, so there will be some mismatches.

[Chris Pascale]

Yep, the Internet Retirement Police have a lot of opinions.

If people didn't break retirement laws, we wouldn't need them!!!!

[Villanelle]

I would rather work 10-15 hours a month, on my own schedule and from home, than work FT for an extra 18 months in order to have more  of a safety net, which I'd need if I wasn't willing to work at all ever again, no matter what.  It still feels pretty "free" to me to have to work a few hours here and there.  I'm absolutely great with that trade-off.  But is someone isn't, they can make a different decision than I do.  And they can characterize my choices however they want, I suppose. 

I don't want to be the Retirement Police Police. 

[Metalcat]

I would rather work 10-15 hours a month, on my own schedule and from home, than work FT for an extra 18 months in order to have more  of a safety net, which I'd need if I wasn't willing to work at all ever again, no matter what.  It still feels pretty "free" to me to have to work a few hours here and there.  I'm absolutely great with that trade-off.  But is someone isn't, they can make a different decision than I do.  And they can characterize my choices however they want, I suppose. 

I don't want to be the Retirement Police Police.

Same. Well before I was anywhere near FI, I figured out that even just a single year more of full time work was a bad idea compared to many more years of part time work. My health was a major factor, obviously, but I don't regret for a second downshifting when I did.

[ixtap]

I find side hustles and real estate exhausting, but to me, financial independence is the freedom to make choices.

I find a surprising number of people prefer to refer to DH's downshift as semi retirement. OK, if that is what you want to call it. We currently call it the best of both worlds.

[ducky19]

OP here. I subscribe to another ER blog coming out of Australia. While some of what she posts is not relevant for the US FIRE community, I found this article to perfectly resonate with my original post. Trading an additional 10-12 years - arguably when most people are in their prime - just so you can say you are "truly" free just doesn't make sense to me considering the odds of you running out of time grow every year. The article references the Rich, Broke, or Dead calculator found elsewhere here, but I found the point the author makes to be spot on.

https://www.moneyflamingo.com/the-biggest-risk-of-all/

[PDXTabs]

He made a comment about the recent pullback screwing with a lot of the FIRE crowd. I suggested that most had a safety margin factored in and could adjust lifestyle, use liquid funds, etc. to combat drops in the market. When I mentioned having multiple income streams (such as rental income, side hustle, etc.), he came back with that being "semi retirement", not "true" retirement. He mentioned earlier that he is likely not going to retire until age 67 (another 10-12 years) so that he can be "truly" retired and not rely on other sources of income. He said he is "willing to work a little longer to actually have real freedom instead of perceived freedom".

If you manage your own rentals or have side hustles I think that it is fair for the average English speaker to point out that you are still working to some extent. As such you might not be "retired." I don't see the problem.

[ducky19]

My point with the entire thread wasn't to debate the terminology, I just found it incredible that he would trade an additional 10-12 years of time (that's not guaranteed) just to be able to say that he was "fully retired" and had "actual" freedom. My argument was that semi-retirement with a couple of side hustles that usually take less than a couple of hours a week still has a lot of "actual" freedom, as opposed to just "perceived" freedom. By waiting to retire until 65 just to check that box, you're making some awfully big assumptions about your health and longevity. I dunno, just doesn't make sense to me.

[Cassie]

I agree since some of my friends have died before 65. I semi retired at 58 and taught a online college class for 8 years. After the first year I probably spent about 10 hours per week working and loved it. Definitely better than working full time.

[six-car-habit]

  Some folks are not entreprenurial, and have not worked for themselves, and probably don't want to figure that out - paperwork / taxes / licensing. Nor want to hustle to make their brand new business profitable, or have competencies that don't seem to translate well to self-employment, or just aren't good salespersons of themselves.

  Certainly i get your point of 12 yrs more exertion full time , compared to part-time work.

 But maybe if he's not a "client finder" - whether that be finding a real estate tenant for his newly acquired rental property, or a purchaser for his homemade woodcrafts, etc. -   than he feels it is better to "stick with the devil you know { current employer}" , than deal with the vagaries, and different expectations, of a new part-time boss  { the devil he doesn't know yet}.