Retirement, financial independence, same concept, different vocabulary. When a language stops growing & changing then it's referred to as "dead".
Semantic analysis aside, here's the real emotional flashpoint with the concept of early retirement: our credibility.
What if the finances of ER don't work? What if us ERs, especially us
blogger ERs, are
lying to ourselves frantically scrambling to patch up some sort of financial fig leaf to hide the flaws in our financial planning-- or the lack of planning? What if Wade Pfau's articles really do mean that ER doesn't work anymore? What if all of our "leisure" activities are really just a massive coverup to generate the income that we so desperately need in order to afford rubber gloves & facemasks for our dumpster diving, and a new axe-sharpening file to cut more firewood for the stove, and maybe some tarps to cover the holes in the roof of our RV until we donate enough blood plasma to buy a tube of caulk?
What if we articulate ER evangelists are just makin' stuff up?
It's happening even now. While MMM was a speaker at FINCON12, here's the background of one of the panelists at another presentation:
http://www.retireearlyhomepage.com/rob_bennett_know.htmlLook at the creator of one of the Web's most successful personal-finance blogs, Get Rich Slowly. It's easy to form the conclusion that he "sold out" and hid behind a non-disclosure agreement for nearly three years before he revealed (most of) the facts. Then he
abandoned the blog moved on to more fruitful activities. I think he's a good guy who's realizing out what he wants as he goes along. But that's too simple for a compelling conspiracy theory behind the behavior of a public figure.
I'm guilty of ER skepticism myself. The more Jacob Lund Fisker insists that he's doing what he wants, the more I wonder whether he really has the experience & confidence to know what he wants. (Of course he does. But if I'm wondering about it then there must be plenty of others who are wondering too.) The more he protests & defends, the more skeptical I am. He's probably the ER equivalent of Warren Buffett (or at least Bill Miller) but his decisions & actions expose him to accusations of abandoning the experiment before sufficient data was gathered to discriminate between skill & luck. Or maybe I've formed the impression that a certain length of temporal suffering has to be experienced before someone is really motivated to pursue ER-- and stay that way. Otherwise my daughter could have attempted to ERE on her college fund during her senior year of high school.
FI should be even easier for military retirees, with inflation-fighting pensions and cheap healthcare. Yet one PhD thesis (by a military retiree) showed that at least 85% of them go right into a bridge career, frequently earning a civilian paycheck while they're still on terminal leave before starting retirement. If this ER stuff was so easy, then shouldn't the military be able to do it? Surely servicemembers are logical and amenable to mathematical financial persuasion-- if they're not falling for the ER lifestyle, then what flaws are we hiding from the gullible civilians?
One of the ways I persuade people to share their advice & stories for my book & blog is to give contributors a vote on which military charities get the royalties and blog income. It's a nice PR tactic, and it's good karma. But it's also about the only way I've found to deflect the criticism that I'm writing the book to pay my utility bills. The more successful you are at drawing a crowd and generating the income, the more you're accused of being financially dependent on it.
The only way I know to persuade someone that you're FI is to show that you're living on passive income and giving all of your earned income to charity. And frankly, that requires a degree of financial disclosure with which even I am uncomfortable. I don't mind sharing info that's already public (like my pension) but I don't want to make myself an attractive target for charity fundraisers-- or even worse, theft & ransom.
I consider myself retired, and I see myself doing pretty much the same thing in my 70s that I'm doing now.
(Hopefully using a better way to interact with the Internet. A flying car and a personal jetpack would be nice, too.) Yet many of my relatives (let alone my neighbors) consider me chronically unemployable. The humorous part of their perspective is that they're absolutely right-- I don't ever want to work for an employer ever again, even if the workplace offered twice-daily surfing breaks.
The Internet Retirement Police might sound like they're complaining, even wussy, but what they're really asking for is independent verification... and a warranty would be nice, too. I can respect that caveat emptor attitude, even while it proves that they're not intellectually committed or sufficiently emotionally
burned-out ready to retire yet.
Otherwise the probate process is the only way to tell whether we've been financially brilliant... or whether we're just makin' stuff up.
As you can see, I don't have a good answer to this conundrum. But feel free to help me edit this draft blog post, so that I can try to persuade more servicemembers to pursue financial independence.
My brother-in-law receives a disability check each month from the US Navy,...
Would that payment be for a disability retirement? Was he discharged on a set of orders that used the word "retirement"?