Somewhere between daydreaming and planning our early retirement
It was a grim but somewhat common story in the Air Force: Some crusty Senior NCO would retire (at roughly 40yo) and everyone gathered around the free cake & punch would place bets on how long he’d last. The prevailing theory being you can’t just go from a career where your work is your identity to suddenly sitting around in your PJs waiting for the mail to be delivered.
The good news is: you don’t have to! You don’t have to look very hard to find FIRE (financially independent/retired early) adherents that ‘retired’ from the daily grind and found some more personally fulfilling way to spend their time. For some it’s travel, for some it’s a scaled-down version of the work they used to do, only now on their terms. For others it’s a radically different approach to earning, or to not earning.
I don’t think anyone in the depths of their treadmill career knows exactly what RE looks like. For now we’re trying to get serious about emptying the jar, and to really achieve the goal we need to get a handle on our spending, so I don’t spend a lot of cycles drawing up concrete plans for the ‘after times.’
Our Early Retirement Wishlist
For us, we have a scenario that’s half escapist daydream and half plausible scenario. It’s what we like to call “Imagi-Planning.” Right now, in the infancy of our FIRE journey, it looks something like this:
- Put everything we own into storage, use a property manager to rent out our condo
- Set off for Spain and walk the Camino de Santiago as a sort of demarcation between the old life and the new
- Find a rental in some mid-size Spanish city like Toledo and live the next year or so exploring the region
- Pick an affordable mid-sized city in another country and do it all again; rinse, repeat
Now maybe that couldn’t go on forever. Maybe we need or want to work or to have some purpose beyond enjoying life (it sounds silly now since most of us don’t really find any purpose in our work…it’s what we do to survive!).
If all work paid the same (and had the same effect on my body), I’d probably still be a mechanic. I loved working on cars, so maybe I’d fix up cars for needy people. The point is, early retirement doesn’t mean you sit around twiddling your thumbs waiting to die. We may not be able to plan for exactly what will happen after RE, but it makes sense to Imagi-Plan.
In the…eternal words of Eisenhower quoting some other unnamed soldier: “Plans are worthless, but planning is everything”
Those of you still working, what’s your daydream scenario? If you’ve already retired early…how does reality match up to what you’d imagined?