Hi Downshifters! An aspiring downshifter (maybe) here.
I’m a little bit cautious and a nervous stock market investor. I was a mortgage over-payer for years and found MMM a couple of years ago aged 40. The main thing I learned from the blog wasn’t really frugality but not being scared to invest. So I have no debt (yay) and have invested 80%+ for the last two years (yay) but am scared of a crash (boo) and how to approach the next part of my FIRE journey...........
This is a really useful thread. I was really inspired by happy’s story among others and was hoping to feel emboldened by those actively living the part time life.
It would be interesting to know what gave people the confidence to make the move to part time. It may have been a partners income for example. I’m single so don’t have that. I’m struggling a little to see through the full time to FIRE versus part time fog, and understand what level of expenses is good enough to have saved in order to achieve FIRE inevitability, allowing part time to be a sensible option.
Phew, I can’t believe this post was over three and a half years ago. Where on earth does the time go! After five and a half years pursuing FI I’ve finally summoned the courage to go part-time. I’ve received considerable help from the forum and this thread is a good one with lots of great stories.
Why you did it?

I appreciate the average worker happiness is impossible for me to know but I’ve felt extremely lucky over the years. When I think of my working feel good factor having worked at the same company since I left Uni, I just feel so incredibly grateful. I felt valued, part of a really close knit team, and really well supported. We had a department subculture that just rocked. I’m sure I had above average happiness in my workplace for a sustained period of time. In truth I probably took this a bit for granted. I knew no different, and of course why would I think about the possibility of that ending. I faced a few knocks to my work feel good factor after a minor re-org and the Global Financial Crisis. As bad as the GFC was it didn’t really impact my working environment though and I bounced back pretty quickly in terms of my working feel good factor.
As with life in general, so much is out of our control though. Only about 6 weeks after finding the concept of FIRE a massive re-org came along that ousted my lovely boss I had been with since the start of my career. The department changed beyond all recognition, and my enjoyment at work plummeted. Internal politics became a thing, a more unpleasant and cutthroat working atmosphere developed, and for someone shy like me I was side-lined and undermined constantly. I started to hate work.
Thankfully this didn’t last long. A change of line manager, hours, and work from home all helped greatly. I also had the goal of part-time that I was striving for and didn’t seem to be that far away in the future.
I’m a bit cautious of living off my money for the rest of my life, so the part-time approach is a great way of getting out of the full-time grind earlier, still being engaged in something, having some structure to the week, but ensuring that work doesn’t dominate the week. I want employment to be something I do that fits around the rest of my life, rather than the other way around. I’ve saved hard (80%+) for the five and a half years since finding the concept of FIRE. My expenses have been artificially low here, so I will now be increasing them. I’m not FI but I have achieved enough of a financial accomplishment that I can now reduce my hours and achieve that balance in my life.
What your downshift looks like?
I will now be working four days a week with Monday’s off and will have over seven weeks annual leave too. I’m in the same role in the same company.
What do you like about it?
I start in the middle of next month. I’ll have to come back and give an update after a few months. I‘m hopeful I feel less stressed and have more time for my out of work goals.
What isn’t so awesome about it?
Again, I’ll have to provide a future update. I hope I can avoid some of the less enjoyable aspects of the job and focus on the bits I really like. Working extra hours to keep up is my largest fear. I will do everything I can to ensure this doesn’t materialise. That would be the worst case part-time outcome.
What are your plans going forward around downshifting and FIRE?
I hope to achieve a great work life balance now. My working feel good factor has recently dipped. I wonder if that was because I knew this period would be the end of my full-time era? I'll be interested to see how it responds having now gone part-time. I hope the part-time set up gets me to a place where I’m closer to a 3% WR. I see this as a first stage in my part-time journey. A second stage could see me drop to two days a week which seems ideal, or a part-time role in a different industry doing something completely new. Ideally this would be something I would happily do for free. Earning money, protecting the stache, and enjoying work as part of a great balance where no one individual thing requires more than 15-18 hours a week would be my perfect life set up.
Back in March I promised future updates, but resisted temptation to come back and report too early. I wanted to really settle and for any novelty to wear off rather than report back in the "honeymoon period". I'm now nine months into my part-time lifestyle and am currently at the start of 18 DAYS OFF thanks to my annual leave situation. Full FIRE practice! Woohoo! Happy holidays to everyone!
Here are my key findings/observations since going part-time in no particular order. I've no idea if these are representative of others but hopefully my experiences are useful to any others like I was, struggling to take the plunge and go part-time.
Work Perspective1. Firstly, I don't call it part-time at the office, I just refer it as a "four day schedule" with colleagues. I feel "part-time" suggests a slowing down or a shift away from work being the most important thing. While both of these are true (ha!), I don't want that to be the impression I give my employers. I also want to stay engaged and do a good job, so although this is just a low-level detail thing, I do think this description is important as a way of helping me communicate with my bosses and fellow employees.
2. I am generating the same output at four days a week as I was at five days a week. The efficiency comes from having more power to concentrate on my job and decline pointless/corporate fluff activities, such as ridiculous meetings and other such corporate nonsense. I found it quite easy to remove a days worth of corporate fluff from my calendar by providing the justification that I'm not full-time, equating to the same time each week to deliver my actual work. As I enjoy my work and detest the corporate environment, this is a double-win. We love double-wins!
3. I didn't receive one word of congratulations from anyone at work. Some aspire to be a director or something by a certain age. I aspired to remove the need for full-time employment. It is an equivalent achievement in my mind. It's not easy to eliminate the need to work full-time. Reactions were interesting.
4. 90% of people at work thought me going part-time was a worrying event. I.e. Am I ok? Is everything alright? Has the company forced this on you? Interesting.
5. On the downside, I have occasionally had to work additional unpaid hours to keep up. I hope to minimise this going forward.
6. Interestingly, my work feel-good factor as shown in my graph above has stayed horizontal. I'm less stressed but also work isn't the most important part of the week now, so I haven't seen a rise or a fall here. I don't know what this means.
7. I've adapted seamlessly to the lower salary. My take-home pay is largely unchanged which helps, as it is my pre-tax pension contributions that have taken the hit, with the stache now taking some of the strain here. I never think about what I could be earning were I full-time.
Personal Perspective1. The novelty or honeymoon period is not yet over and I see no end in sight. Every Friday I think to myself, "Woohoo, a three day weekend" and every Monday morning I wake up and think to myself, "Woohoo it's Monday!"
2. The maths is interesting. A four day week is 80% of a full/normal working week. Therefore 20% has been eliminated. Therefore, it should feel like an 80% schedule. However it doesn't. It feels like a 50% schedule. When I added up my Monday's off, weekends and annual leave it comes to roughly half the days of the year. That will explain why it feels like a 50% schedule then!
I think what this is really driving at, is that when working full-time, weekends tend to be life-admin/recovery periods rather than times where we can necessarily thrive. So although a full-time schedule sees work days only accounting for 65% of days of the year, it actually feels like 80-90%.
Therefore dropping down to a four day schedule has given me the feeling I've dropped from 80-90% work to only 50% work. This drop is far more powerful than just losing a single day of work. I'd expect such a feeling if I had dropped to a two or three day working week. The fact that this was achieved by just losing a single day is remarkable, and I still have to pinch myself. That 5:2 working day to weekend split becomes 4:3 instantly. That is a big shift and it feels more substantial in reality, than the logic of looking at those numbers in print.
3. My Mum's mobility has declined rapidly these last couple of years. I'm now able to take her out more and help around her house more. This had become hard maintaining both my home and hers while working full-time.
4. A chunk of the newly gained time-off has been spent on my fitness and I feel a whole load better. Who knew that exercise was healthier than being hunched over a screen all day.
That's everything I can currently think of. I'll remain engaged with this thread as I think it's one of the best one on the entire forum. I appreciate not everyone has the opportunity, or a job that is well-suited, but I do believe that a part-time schedule can eliminate a lot of the worst things about work. It can provide many of the FIRE benefits earlier, reducing sequence of return risk and inflation concerns quite considerably (depending on the stage someone goes part-time at) and allows for a more rounded desirable life-style when compared to slogging all the way straight to FIRE.