Well, whattaya know… 7 years ago today-ish I walked out of my office building for the last time.
A lot has happened since that day. We traveled full-time for a couple of years before becoming parents and traveling parents… Jr has now been to 40+ countries. We started a couple of blogs, Winnie wrote a book, and we had maybe 5 minutes of fame when our story was shared throughout the media. We lived large, practiced intentional lifestyle inflation, and grew as people and as a family.
Thankfully, throughout all of this, our investment portfolio has also continued to grow. This is largely due to an extended bull market in US stocks, but also in small part due to blog and book income. (More is more.)
It’s been a good ride.
But… what if things didn’t go so well? What if the stock market crashed and the economy tanked? What if our hobbies never made a dime? What if it all went to hell?
Early retirees are an interesting bunch… on the one hand, it takes a lot of audacity to leave the workforce decades early. I mean, who does that?!
On the other hand, most of us are extremely fiscally conservative. People are even competitive over who is the most risk-averse… “You go ahead and target a 3% withdrawal rate, buddy, I’m going to keep working until I can spend less than 1.76852%!”
For most people though, the debate is primarily internal and manifests itself as One More Year Syndrome. “I’ll just work one more year to cushion the portfolio a bit more, THEN I’ll quit…”
It’s a very reasonable discussion to have with yourself. But working one more year also has some costs.
A couple of centuries ago some people were thinking the industrial revolution would lead to the end of toil and strife. Automation would bring shorter workdays, fewer work weeks, and an abundance of free time. Email would allow people to attend fewer meetings and spend more time outside the office. It would be a new golden age.
Alas, in practice most of the advances just resulted in more work. Culturally, we traded greater productivity for a higher material standard of living rather than greater freedom. We do more for the sake of more.
This is so ingrained in our psyches that many can’t even grasp the idea of retirement at any age… “You don’t work? But… what do you do all day?!”
To wean myself off the drug of perpetual productivity, I started asking how I could accomplish as little as possible.
Well, whattaya know… 7 years ago today-ish I walked out of my office building for the last time.
