Thanks for the responses! I don't like my job but I don't mind it. It's work from home permanently now due to covid, I don't have any direct bosses, I have my set of clients that I have had for several years, and I have it down to about 2-6 hrs a day of actual work depending on the season. Part of me wants to quit soon because we have a little baby and will probably try to have another one soon and I'd like to be able to have more time in general. But I dont know if I'd regret it later, thinking I should have saved up more. It's a decent 6 figure salary, so it would be hard to make near the hourly rate with such little hassle or energy. But maybe I would also be able to find a job I really liked and or paid more. I wish I could walk away and then come back in a few years if I changed my mind but my boss/owner frowns on that.
I'm in a very similar situation. Reached FI last year, but decided to keep the job, as i'm working permanently remote in a job that I don't love but don't hate. I am getting paid way too much for the amount of work that I actually do. I have 1 kid and another on the way.
Personally, I'm glad I kept the job. Its been an interesting experience trying to shift to a FI mindset while still having the job. Does having the job really prevent me from pursuing the things that I want? No, not really. It can make things more inconvenient time-wise, but I'm able to spend time with my daughter, I am able to run errands during the day, I am able to get the exercise i want, and i can spend time reading and learning new things. If anything is stopping me from doing these things, it is moreso my own laziness and lack of initiative than it is the few hours I put into the job each day. The problem isn't the job, its me.
If I quit my job, would I actually devote more time to the things I say I want to do? Or would I just be more lazy? I suspect it would be a little bit of both, but this cushy job situation is proving to be a good litmus test of how I might handle more freedom. This has given me a better understanding of how I might actually spend my time if I fully retired, and I can work to address those inconsistencies before jumping into it.
Plus, it is also VERY nice to be able to treat all my job income as essentially EXTRA income. If I don't really need it, what am I going to do with it? Thus far, its been mostly shoveling it into investments (old habits die hard), but its also given me the freedom to start thinking about spending from a different perspective.
While accumulating for FIRE, most of my spending decisions revolved around "How can I spend the least amount of money?" Now, that I have a firehose of excess cash hitting the bank account every 2 weeks, I'm re-training myself to think more about "How can I spend money in a way that legitimately makes life BETTER?" This is a much better way to think about spending, but its been surprisingly unnatural, as my default is to avoid spending like the plague. If I had turned off the firehose of cash right away, I would probably still be thinking like this.
Your decision will be your own, but seeing as how there's some similarities in our situations, I thought I'd share my experience.
A quite excellent post.
The reality is that there is precious little you can’t do while still being employed if you really want to and put the effort in to make the time to do it. RE won’t change who you are; we are all ultimately stuck in our own skin.
One of the things that stuck with me from a long time ago was a glib little remark by an old boss I had when he was talking about how do people find time to keep in touch with old friends, and he remarked that you never just find time - it’s not lost down the back of the sofa - if it’s important to you then you make the time.
I'm quoting
@vand, but replying to
@wageslave23 I'm going to agree with this as well, but also speak from the perspective of someone who has both embraced an FI mindset while working and retired.
I wasn't FI when I embraced the FI mindset, I was still enormously in debt, but I enjoyed my work and had studied for 11 years to be able to do it. When I discovered MMM, I just kept thinking "why would I leave a career I had worked so hard to get?"
I stopped looking at *not working* as the goal and looked to Pete's post-"retirement" life as inspiration. He was still working, but on his own terms, and making plenty of money. His 'stache wasn't even relevant, and he even admits that he could have left his day job years sooner.
So I started figuring out how to live FI in my current career. Well the first step was to leave my job. My job was brutal and there was no way to make it not brutal. My job was one of the most competitive jobs in the region, a small army was lined up to murder me and replace me. I had zero negotiating power.
Also, I had no work/life balance. I referred to home as "a lovely place I rest before going back to the clinic." The first time in years that I took a proper vacation was for my wedding, and I could barely give a shit about the wedding at the time, it was more of a nuisance, and I openly admitted that I was cared more about the time off than the wedding. There was no way to have a life and keep that job.
I didn't need to throw the baby out with the bath water though, I just needed a better plan. So I quit that job (no regrets!) and took a massive demotion and pay cut to go from being principal a major clinic, to working part time, secondary to the owner of a much smaller clinic.
However, because I was over qualified for the role, I had massive negotiating power. I learned to say "no" to anything I even remotely didn't want to do, which not being the principal, I didn't have to do everything that came my way. I radically changed the way I worked.
My quality of life sky-rockets, my enjoyment of my work was amazing, and most shockingly, I started being even more profitable than I previously had been. Because I was so demanding, I started demanding things about how the clinic was being run, and eventually took over as director of operations.
By taking a demotion, prioritizing my work/life balance and my enjoyment of work, I ended up even more successful than in my old "more elite" role.
Life was awesome, I could have stuck with that for years, except that the job destroyed my spine. I wasn't expecting that.
So I quit that job with absolutely no regrets because had I stayed, I would have permanently lost a lot of basic bodily function. You don't fuck with spinal damage. Well I did, actually, I was reluctant to leave my career and not yet actually diagnosed with what was wrong, and I toughed it out for an utterly miserable OMY that I do regret. But hey, it was hard to accept training for 11 years to only work for 7.
So I "retired" from my profession once a specialist finally told me the danger I was in, and the pandemic hit at the exact same time. I had several industry-related side hustles and had been determined not to waste my platinum professional reputation. I would translate my career success over to my consulting work and my education and career wouldn't be "wasted."
Well, thanks to covid and a series of other circumstances, that didn't work out. I tried something pretty epic, failed spectacularly, and then finally just sit the fuck down and retired. I let go of it all, embraced decompression, and spent several months just going for long walks and listening to audiobooks every day.
I spent a solid year just embracing my freedom and getting to know myself outside of my professional identity.
Here's what I learned:
I have no interest in not working, that lifestyle doesn't interest me at all. One thing I learned from being retired for a few years is that if I don't have something that resembles "work" I'll just go find some.
I end up doing more volunteering, helping more people with their projects, taking on more challenging home DIY projects, taking courses. Basically, I like having really challenging shit to keep me busy.
If I'm going to be working anyway, why not get paid giant heaps of money to do so? At least for part of it.
That said, I also learned A LOT from time away from structured work. It turns out my likes and dislikes are very different than I thought. My expectations of what I would enjoy with total freedom weren't what I expected them to be. I never in a million years would have guessed at how my life has ended up.
As a result, the career I'm building for myself now looks VERY different than the career I would have built for myself early in retirement. I don't even recognize that person's priorities. She seems rather naive and ridiculous to me in a lot of ways.
So yes, there is benefit in both an FI mindset while continuing to work AND in fully retiring and learning who you are in that context.
I 100% agree with vand that if there's a way for you to live your best life while continuing to make money, that will always be your most robust option.
But what I encourage people to understand is that they don't need to get sucked into the sunken cost fallacy of their specific job and career. I mean, I spent hundreds of thousands on my education, which is a massive sink cost. And my every instinct was to preserve that investment.
However, once I accepted that loss, which was NOT easy, and really allowed myself to broaden my prospects to the larger world of work totally unrelated to my previous career, I was finally able to figure out what my *best* option is, not just my most efficient one.
Especially for anyone who "retires" really young. Starting from scratch in something new just isn't a big deal in your 30s/40s. I picked a new career that I can happily work in until I die. I recently said to DH that this will be my life's work, and my previous big-fucking-deal career will fade away to "something really cool I did when I was young."
As I keep saying, the world of options is MASSIVE. But yeah, if you like your work, then the first option can always be to try and live an FI life while in that same job.
As I said, I can't imagine a more boring life than one without work. Not everyone's dream is to garden, golf, fish, learn piano, fuck I don't know, whatever people do who don't do some kind of work. No judgement from me, sounds great for them, but my point is that's not the "ideal lifestyle" for all of us.
Some people need to leave a job to learn how to assert their own needs, but some don't.
Figuring out your ideal life is a process of trial and error, it's not an equation you can solve in advance, figure out the very best option, and then pull the trigger and BAM live your best life forever.
It's not something you can figure out in advance. Building your ideal life is like building your ideal marriage. It takes a lot to figure out what you want, find the right partner (aka job/hobbies/location/etc) and then takes constant tending and attentiveness to always keep it growing in the right direction.
Maybe you find a way to LOVE your current job by developing an FI mindset and learning to set boundaries and demand a fuck load more. Cool. Maybe then management changes and you lose some of your hard-fought autonomy. Then maybe you leave because you can.
Maybe you figure out your IDEAL career, invest in retraining, find out it's not what you expected, and then bail on that after investing 10K and 6 months of your time. That's cool too (yep, I did that).
The more you embrace the FI mindset, the less you focus on sunken costs and the kind of optimizing you've always done with your career, and the more you focus on optimizing for happiness and well being.
In my old career mindset, I would have seen bailing on a program as a huge loss of time and money. In my new mindset, I just see it as the cost of doing business of building my best life.
I went from "I need to figure out the most efficient use of my existing skills and network so as not to waste what I've already sacrificed to build" to "Why not try this cool thing out? What the fuck else am I going to do with my enormous free time, knit a fucking sweater?"
The reason I'm now so extremely well equipped to figure out what I need to be optimally happy is because of those two years of sampling. The reason I look at my newly-retired self as naive is that my trial and error process was so incredibly informative that I'm frankly more equipped to make decisions than my past self was.
My past self was so fixated on getting it right. My present self now understands that when you are FI, there isn't really a "getting it wrong" to worry about. There's just tons of free time, infinite options to try, and important lessons to learn from each trial-and-error that you simply cannot know in advance.
It's not being "retired" from work that allows you to be optimally happy, it's the mindset that you can do whatever you want that's necessary.
And if you are FI, even if you keep working, you can do whatever the fuck you want. So if you aren't, why the fuck aren't you?