Not being able to return to his career is exactly what my DH fears. And we're not talking like ten years, he's convinced that even after one year out of the workforce, his professional life will be over. He might be right, I don't know. Even though I was in the same field, we were on different career tracks so I don't know much about what he does. So basically if we RE we have to be absolutely certain that he never needs to work another day for the rest of his life.
Well, I can absolutely see many people not being able to return to their specific career, sometimes even after one year. But are his skills, connections, and interests really so limited that he would have absolutely no options, even if he learned a new set of skills while retired???
Would he really have zero options for any future work, even tangential to his particular career?
A 60-something friend left a viciously cutthroat, senior corporate job due to illness in her early 40s, where there was no way she could ever, ever go back. However, within a few years, she was being sought out by a number of her former clients to do small consulting jobs here and there, which snow balled into some major government contracts.
She was convinced her career was over, but her consulting ended up even more lucrative, and was even more interesting and challenging work.
She then gave up on the contracting due to continued illness and was recruited to teach management at the local college for a few years.
After she finished with that, she started a small hobby business that did so well and grew so rapidly that her husband quit his job to manage it with her. It really wasn't meant to be a business, but her executive management experience just couldn't help but make it thrive.
When she first got sick, she was certain her working days would be over and she accepted that she would have to medically retire, because she knew her career would never have her back, and she was right about that. It was a vicious and ageist industry that would never give a severely ill, middle aged woman a second look.
Still...she had A LOT of connections who continued to value her.
That was a few decades ago and ample work has pretty much found her, relentlessly along the way. This wasn't continuous work either, she took 3-5 years off between each of the above projects for her health. Inevitably, something new would always find her.
It's been 20 years since she left the corporate job, and to this day, she could still find consulting work if she wanted to because she stays in touch with her former staff, still mentors their every career move, and these people who were young staff back when she hired them are now VPs scattered across companies that she could provide value to.
If someone is talented and builds a solid network, there are usually endless opportunities to use and be paid for those skills and experience, even if their original career is dead.
She's now saying that she's going to completely retire.
Yeah right. She has plans to take courses in dog training, because she wants to learn how to expertly train her own dogs and there's a dog training program right by her new house.
I'm betting that she has a thriving dog training business within 2 years and wealthy clients willing to pay her extremely well to train their dogs.
It's actually inevitable, IMO.
The beauty of FI, or even FU money, which Suze always fails to see, is that having the TIME to work on new things, to nurture your network, and to learn and research, try and fail, pivot and move forward. These are all incredible luxuries that people with full time careers don't have.
The best way to find a new job is while you are employed, but the best way to re-engineer your career is while you have the free time and resources to do it.
There's a HUGE difference between being unemployed from your chosen career and desperate to re-enter it so that you can pay your bills VS being very comfortably unemployed with plenty of money and time to toy with ideas and options you never knew had.