A long post, but after a 15 years of my FI journey, It’s my first, so it seems there’s a lot to come out
In 2003, age 40, after years of paying off credit card debt and extricating myself from some very poor investments; I began my true journey to FI by writing down two goals that seemed impossible at the time: to save $1500 per month and to be a millionaire by aged 55. (my net worth at the time was about $100k, so a challenging, but not insane goal). Amazingly, with the help of an awesome community of bloggers I discovered along the way (particular thanks to MMM, Mad Fientist and Go Curry Cracker), plus some serious focus of my own on building a career and some super-dedicated saving, I have dramatically turned around my financial prospects over the last 10 years: Today, I have a net worth of $2.75M, and save about $18,000 a month. I am 1-2 years from early-ish retirement at age 55-56.
Yay Me!... Surely I’m happy; smug even? Actually this is far from true:
Logically I know I should celebrate that over the past 15 Years; I have become a multi-millionaire, blown past every net worth target I ever set and totally rewritten my future. I know I should be happy, looking forward to a blissful FI life filled with joyful things, free to spend time with my family, travel, enjoy a multitude of hobbies, free forever from the burden of work I don’t enjoy…However, this is not the case; in fact, I have found that the last years of my journey to FI have been the hardest of all; I am totally burnt out at work, super stressed and seemingly unable to gain a rational perspective on life. I stress about wasting any more of my best years at my mega-corp; I fret about how much should I save: (FIRECalc says I need $3.2M for my estimated expenses, but that’s going to take me another 18 months, and anyway, who the hell needs that much money to retire on?) Should I cut and run now? Surely I have enough already? No, why the hell would you quit the race when you’re so close to the finish line….
What sort of insanity is this? Does it have a name? Maybe ‘Last Mile-itis’ (LMI) would be a good name. While some seem to be able to enjoy the final coast to FI, I’ve seen many posts referencing this combination of anxiety and doubt that creep in during the final push to retirement.
Here’s my observation – as I get closer and closer to my FI goal, I have started to track everything much more closely; I update my numbers regularly, run through multiple retirement strategies to see where I stand. I devour blog and forum posts, looking for new ideas and perspectives; I look at options for the first years of retirement, should we move to an LCOL area or maybe sell up entirely and travel the world for a year or two? or perhaps live abroad with geographic arbitrage?
Often this seems to help; a good dose of reviewing on a Sunday seems to steel me for the upcoming week of work; but sometimes I wonder if this level of focus is also part of the problem. Maybe this continual juxtaposition of now (working hard at a job that seems to have lost all meaning) vs an awesome but entirely imaginary retired future is actually the root cause of much of my angst?
So I’m wondering about an experiment, an FI diet if you will: Step away from the spreadsheet and instead, just focus on getting the best out of each day. Pretty much all my savings are on autopilot, so perhaps if I leave everything be for, let’s say, six months, and review in the new year, maybe I can let FI sneak up on me while I’m not watching?
Any thoughts or guidance? Has anyone experienced this?