Image by Steve Buissinne from Pixabay
Some years ago I ran into a blog about retiring early. Real early, as in your thirties or even late twenties. I was so fascinated by the guy who wrote the blog that I read everything in his archives in less than a week. So, yeah, it resonated with me.
The main reason I was so attracted to the blog was the romance of freedom it exuded from every pore. It literally never occurred to me that you could survive in life not working. Don’t you have to pay for a car? A place to live? Cable? Don’t you have to have a job? And the answer was right there: sure, if you want to. But you could simply not have a car (and live close to work or a bus stop); you could simply not have cable; you could simply not have a ginormous mortgage (or you could have none at all). In other words, you could do stuff differently than what you had been conditioned to do and your life would be dramatically altered. And in my opinion, altered for the better.
So it got me thinking about my job. It isn’t bad; I’ve had way worse and I know how fortunate I am. I’m respected and trusted; I get good reviews every year; colleagues seek my opinions; I’m heard. Not everyone can say that and even as I write this I realize that I have it even better than I thought. So, why not coast along and keep doing what I’m doing for as long as I can?
I’ve thought about that quite a bit lately and my answer has evolved slowly but consistently toward one realization: because I’m a paycheck, I’m living a big part of every day according to other people’s rules. I have to say what they want me to say. I have to behave and dress the way they dictate. I am subject to their whims. And sometimes, not all the time, but definitely sometimes that really pisses me off!
Sure, I can play the game and put in just enough effort to make it look like I’m all in. That doesn’t bother me that much because I can cope; I’ve learned how to endure. The real problem is that I realize I’ve been trading an inordinate amount of productive time each day to do things that earn other people money and accolades. My first and best hours of each day are spent serving the requirements of management and the customers they attract.
That’s not all bad; I’m a teacher, so I’m serving kids and their families as well as my principal, administration, and colleagues. They’re good folks. Still, having heard enough people say things like, “I don’t know what I’d do with myself if I didn’t work” I’ve realized that is the problem, at least for me: I came to believe that spending so many hours teaching mostly irrelevant math facts and practices to kids is somehow a better way to spend my life than anything I could come up with on my own.
When I was in high school, no one mentioned that any of us could build our own businesses or support ourselves through self-employment. I never developed a paradigm other that that of holding a job (a good one, of course) and collecting a paycheck. As an adult, if I found myself disappointed with my pay or my working conditions, I always looked for other paid employment that was better: fewer hours, indoor environments, benefits. It wasn’t until I started reading these early retirement blogs that I realized I had been completely unaware of so many other opportunities. Which is more weird when you consider that my own father was self-employed during my whole life.
Dad set tile and stone in private homes, apartments, and commercial buildings. He was great at it and he managed to send six kids to Catholic school from first grade to twelfth. He did not, however, suggest that any of us might want to do the same. In fact, he wanted all of us to have a better life than him and to earn our livings with our brains. To him, seeing his kids graduate high school (he had to drop out to help support his parents and siblings) and move on to white collar jobs was the pinnacle of success. Maybe it didn’t occur to him that we could create businesses where we used our brains for ourselves. It sure didn’t occur to me.
And over thirty years later, I realized, after reading those blogs, that I was stuck. As a paycheck. Yes, I had some savings and some assets, but I was still beholden to that check. I decided I didn’t like that but didn’t know what to do about it. So I began to observe others when I was out in public to see how they handled it. I watched the manager at the grocery store; the tellers at the bank; the host who seated us when we went out to eat; the receptionists at our veterinarian’s office. They were all polite; they all seemed well-adjusted and capable; they seemed content. But were they? Were they really?
Because when someone is a paycheck, he can’t ever really tell the truth. If you need that check, you have to play the game. So at your kid’s school open house, when the teacher says, “I’m so excited to be here with you tonight!” Is she? When the clerk at the department store says, “You look fabulous in that color!” Do you? When you thank the cashier at the drive thru and he says, “My pleasure.” Was it? There’s no way to know. Although I would wager that in most cases such proclamations are whitish-beige lies at best.
On the one hand that sounds kind of depressing. And it is. Think about it; if you’re a paycheck (and sadly, many of us are) then most of your waking, working hours are an act. You’re playing a role; you’re filling a part; you’re not the real you. C’mon, is anyone actually excited to work a cash register?
On the other hand, however, when you realize you’re a paycheck, you have no one to blame but yourself if you stay that way. They say there’s nothing like having a bad job to show you how much better a good job is. Once you realize that there are people out there who manage to retire early enough to still live a great life, you have no one to blame but yourself if you remain a paycheck. Just like sticking with a difficult class or studying to pass a professional exam now means you have a much better job later, sticking with a savings plan and learning all you can about investing and increasing the number of income streams you have leads to a much better, and earlier, retirement.
And retirement doesn’t necessarily mean what society thinks. Typically people picture retirement as playing golf all the time or babysitting the grandkids but the new blogosphere of younger retirees is not about that at all. These people are trading careers that may have been lucrative but not particularly fulfilling (and certainly not fun) for work that is actually interesting and/or valuable in ways other than just financial. One of my favorite early retirement bloggers built his following online and monetized it sufficiently that he was able to quit his engineering job and write full time (www.raptitude.com). Another was a software engineer who retired at thirty and now spends most of his time building and remodeling homes, usually by himself, and only occasionally subbing out the most difficult parts (www.mrmoneymustache.com). So neither of these men have quit working, but they have quit the game. Every choice they make, every difficulty they opt into, is something that benefits them. They’re not just doing it because someone told them that if they don’t they’ll get fired or their pay will be docked. They’re doing what they do because their actions lead to a bigger, better, and more optimal result. For themselves.
And that’s what I really want: to reap the benefits of my own labor myself instead of filtering it through an employer. Of course that means I have to figure out what labor is going to yield enough benefits for me to reap. Without any particularly marketable skills, I may have to follow a different path. Not everyone in the early retirement online community switched to being self-employed and then non-employed. Some redrew their lives to minimize their expenses and stashed the savings into investment accounts or rental properties. They built nest eggs considerably faster by forgoing lifestyle inflation when they got raises or other windfalls and before they knew it, they were in their forties with dividends pouring in faster than their bills. That’s the closest I’m probably going to get to a Cinderella story. The fact that I didn’t start really saving until recently is not relevant. What matters now is that I know why saving and investing are important and that makes it so much easier to commit to.
So I’ve learned to live with my job; I continue to do it well but I leave it behind when the day is over. I’ve become more interested in living simply and quietly and have developed a real flair for transferring big chunks of money into my IRA and other accounts. I know that a time will come, not too far from now, when I will have more dividends flowing in than expenses flowing out. I can get there but I will have to stay focused on the goal of gaining independence rather than just spending now so I can feel better about having to give up my days for work.
Here I go.