Here's the very brief version of how today became my FIRE date:
In 1996 when I was finishing up my engineering studies, I jokingly made a spreadsheet to calculate when I could retire. Based on the money I had and my expenses I figured I could retire right away if I offed myself in about three months. I actually calculated this semi-seriously (the offing myself part wasn’t serious) for a little while with some projections about income, savings, and expenses. I was so close to figuring out “the shockingly simple math of early retirement” myself. Unfortunately, I didn’t, and those spreadsheets languished for many years; in fact I didn’t even remember them until well after I had re-embarked on the FIRE journey that led me here.
Oddly enough, I’m the same age as MMM, Canadian, grew up not far from where he did, AND I moved to Colorado within a year of him doing so. That’s where we diverged though. I felt like I was just starting my career and he was half-way out the door. After five years in Colorado I married and returned to Canada, and my new wife and I took a year off work. That year off proved to us that not working while relatively young and active had many pluses, and set the stage for our future FIRE although we didn’t know it at the time.
Fast forward to 2008, but before the world economy imploded, I felt that I was trapped in a very narrow career niche that was risky due to its narrowness, and how difficult it would be to leverage it into a different position. My fears might have been overblown, but they felt real at the time. I was accepted into an Executive MBA program and my employer at the time offered to pay for half. I hadn’t asked for or expected that, but it was a pattern that repeated several times. Employers seemed to think I had more potential than I thought I did.
Around 2012 when our cash flow started to improve again after taking hits from parental leave and my MBA, I started to wonder how to decide between accelerated mortgage repayment or investing. That eventually led to the Get Rich Slowly blog. That eventually led me to MMM. I binged the blog posts in a few days and found them transformative. They fit so well with many of the thoughts and ideas that I had, but hadn’t pulled together into a cohesive framework. I don’t recall what led me to it, but the Canadian Couch Potato blog solved my problem of how to actually invest my surplus income. MMM and CCP got me from there to here.
I stayed with that employer for another seven years (12 total) and left because I found myself struggling with the commute, some psychopathic behaviour in some of the senior managers, and the unhappiness of having two management-level parents trying to be good parents to an eight-year-old boy. There was also an undercurrent of frustration that even with two very good incomes buying a house in Vancouver was out of reach. It wasn’t really, but doing so would have destroyed any FIRE dreams and locked us into careers we couldn’t escape. The new employer solved the commute problem, but the problems of management (in this case the business owner) and ability to be a good parent got worse, not better. I worked myself to the point of burnout.
Once again I felt trapped. We were much closer to FI, but not close enough and I didn’t want to quit and delay it further. My wife also wanted to leave her job so it felt unfair that I do so and leave us dependent on her income. I was very close to fully burned-out though and couldn’t see a way to bridge from where we were to were we wanted to be while retaining our health and humanity. My projections made it look like March of 2021 would be when we could both FIRE. I just didn’t think I could last until then, and my wife was feeling the same way.
Fortunately, my LinkedIn profile led to job offer in Victoria. We jumped at the opportunity and at the beginning of 2018 I started in this new position. It was a strange time as my wife and son stayed behind to finish out my son’s school year and for my wife to exit her job. For six months I lived in Airbnbs and went back to my family on weekends. We were able to sell our townhouse in Vancouver for $1.23M which was considerably more than we expected, and bought a great house and property in Victoria for about $940k. We invested most of the difference putting us well over $1M in invested assets. The math also said that my wife no longer needed to work and I could still target March of 2021.
This new job had some unique characteristics that allowed me to start healing from the burnout rather than compounding it. That shifted after about a year and a half due to market forces, but I had recovered a fair bit. Initially, dealing with the pandemic also helped delay the return of burnout. The three years since starting the new job had seen me making the most money I had ever made while our investments had also done very, very well. Not working allowed my wife to focus more on our son which was very beneficial as he had to start at a new school. It also allowed her to do more of the household work that we had shared when we were both working. Yes, it created a more “traditional” dynamic, but it improved the quality of life for both of us. Despite that, the burnout was starting to return at the end of 2020 and I decided that it was time to act. FIRE at the end of May 2021 seemed ideal for a variety of reasons, so now, more than five years after projecting March 2021 as a FIRE date for both of us, I’m FIRE’d as of the end of May of 2021 while my wife had pulled the plug three years early. Not a bad estimate given the uncertainties along the way.
I can’t help but wonder if some of my “inability” to continue working relates to having set those targets and getting so close to FI as to have solid FU money at the very least. As in, if I had no choice, or hadn’t put this milestone on the timeline, would I have simply powered through because I had no choice? I don’t think so - I was headed for burnout no matter what because I kept making poor career choices.
Poor career choices? Well, financially they’ve worked out very well, and maybe in the grand scheme of things they were the right ones, but what if I had inflated my lifestyle accordingly and and had had to continue for ten or twenty more years? Although I was successful as a manager, I think it was because I actually cared. My sense is that you can’t do that for long, or at least I couldn’t without it consuming me. To be a manager, or worse, a president or CEO, you need some level of indifference or single-minded focus to do it long-term. If I had had to be in my career longer, I would have been better off staying in a more technical role and avoiding management. Of course, the better pay has got me to a point where I didn’t have to extend the career. Something of a catch-22, although even the technical roles paid well enough that with greater frugality we could perhaps have achieved the same result.
At any rate, today was my last day and I don’t ever plan to return to a position with the sort of responsibility that leads to good pay. I could certainly see myself pulling in a few dollars here and there with a wee bit of consulting, maybe some data analysis work, working at polling stations during elections, or perhaps as a bike mechanic. I think that our stash should make all of those unnecessary, but they might support some fun optional activities.
What now? Being able to spend time with my son while he still enjoys doing things with me is my top priority. It will also be wonderful to be able to relax with my wife without the cloud of work occupying a back corner in my mind at all times. Being responsible for the safety of others is gratifying and rewarding, but I found that you can’t take a vacation from it. My mother and in-laws are in their 80’s; they are in excellent health given their age so this is the time to maximize our time with them. Our house needs some DIY love and doing the work myself is fun for me and if I can avoid paying others thousands of dollars to the work, that’s a lot like having an income. And of course I have a lot of biking and hiking that just needs to be done. I’ve also recently found that plogging (walking/jogging while picking up litter) has been highly therapeutic and rewarding. It ticks some of the boxes that work used to tick. I get to do the activity, feel good about it, and keep score by recording each outing. It might also be the gateway drug that gets me into some environmental activism.
So now it remains to be seen how reality compares to expectations. I’m trying to be open to whatever comes up and not be too tied to those expectations though. I’m guessing that that’s a better long-term strategy as it has some resilience built in. If I pinned too much of my FIRE happiness on mountain biking, for example, all it would take would be an injury to “ruin” my plans.
To be continued…..