As my family and I are just about to begin FIRE and don't want to run afoul of the laws of the Land, I thought I'd start a thread to see if I can get some clarification on exactly what types of "work" are and are not allowed during early retirement.
Apparently, during the accumulation phase, manual labor such as changing the oil in your vehicle, mowing the lawn, cleaning the house, cooking meals from scratch, cutting your kids' hair, helping friends, relatives or neighbors to do work on their homes, vehicles, computers, websites, etc., is perfectly acceptable to most Mustachians and even seems to be admired by many, as it seems to be generally accepted that these activities teach valuable life skills, build character, as well as save money, which can be invested and thus speed up the journey to FIRE. As these types of activities are normally unpaid, most Mustachians seem to not consider them "work."
Part of my wife's and my FIRE plan is to spend the first year or so slow traveling around the world with our, now, 7 year old daughter. Daydreaming about where we'll go and what we'll do on our journey, I've been spending a lot of time poring over sites like
Helpx and
WWOOF where it's possible to connect with hosts from all over the world who are looking for travelers willing to exchange their labor for a free place to stay, meals, and often a chance to temporarily become part of a local person's family in another part of the country or world.
My main reason for pursuing volunteer opportunities on organic farms in Europe, vineyards in South America, with NGOs helping homeless kids in SE Asia, and helping families to build their own homes in the Appalachians, is because I think volunteering my time to help people will be fun, interesting, and it will allow me and my family to meet new people, learn new things and have experiences that most casual tourists can never even dream of. As a side benefit, volunteering my time to help people during my family's journey around the world is likely to significantly lower our travel costs.
For our family of 3, we're budgeting $40K for our first year of traveling the world, which I'm pretty sure will be plenty, so we don't
have to volunteer to make ends meet. We're planning on doing it because we want to and because we believe it will make our travel experiences richer and more interesting.
Recently I've posted in some threads on the MMM forums about our plans to volunteer during our travels around the world, and inevitably one or more members has replied with something along the lines of, "Well, that sounds a lot like WORK to me. If you
have to volunteer to save money on traveling, then you're not
really retired."
I'm wondering why there's this seeming disconnect between what many Mustachians enjoy doing in their "real" lives at home, e.g., solving their own plumbing problems, fixing their cars, helping neighbors and friends to put new roofs on their houses, etc., and the idea that when we go traveling if we dare to lift a finger to help someone and, heaven forbid, we actually derive some small economic benefit from it as well in the form of lower travel costs, that then everyone wants to pile on and declare that our FIRE plan is a farce and we're not
really retired?
This doesn't make any sense to me. Maybe some Mustachians can explain. :)