Work Optional: Retire Early the Non-Penny-Pinching Way

by Tanja Hester

if you’re not one of the lucky few for whom work is a true calling, it’s okay to aspire to do more in life than work until you die.

Retirement itself has only existed since the late 1800s, and even then, very few people actually retired. For most of human history, people have worked until they died, though that work looked almost nothing like the always-reachable, can’t-get-everything-done work of today. Even in the 21st century, with more economic prosperity than ever before and more people retiring than ever before, many people don’t quit working when they retire.

The formal concept of retirement originated in late 19th-century Prussia (now Germany) under Otto von Bismarck, and it was not instituted altruistically to give workers some well-deserved leisure time. Rather, it was put in place to force older, less-efficient workers out to make way for younger, more able-bodied workers.

Instead of using our money to buy us more things and treat ourselves to cope with the stress of working—as the standard script tells us we’re supposed to—we can use that money to buy our way out of the standard work system altogether. You

In school, I eagerly absorbed the promise that if I worked hard and proved myself, I’d put myself on a fast-track career path to happiness and fulfillment. To me, work was never about making lots of money. It was about contributing to the greater good. And surely if I was contributing to something meaningful, that would make me happy. Right? Wrong. I was fortunate to do work in my career that did contribute good to the world, from my first internship at National Public Radio to the job I held for most of my career, as a communications consultant to political and social cause campaigns. I worked hard, I enjoyed the work, at least when it wasn’t consuming every waking moment of my life, but it felt like something was still missing. All these hours I was spending at work each week were ultimately serving someone else’s agenda, not mine. That’s just adulthood, I figured, realizing that the ideas I had as a kid were wrong, and I should carry on anyway.

Mark and I didn’t achieve early retirement because we’re better than other people at money. We did it by accepting our natural tendencies and shortcomings, and by creating systems that set us up to succeed in spite of our worst habits. We had some big advantages that made our journey shorter than some people’s will be, like having gone to college, having graduated without a soul-crushing level of debt, and earning six-figure salaries in our last several working years. That last one especially accelerated our pace, but it would have been just as possible to retire early if we’d earned

The people who are happiest in life and who tend to live the longest are those who have a sense of purpose. Purpose doesn’t have to mean anything super lofty like fixing global warming or closing the gender wage gap. Purpose just means that you know why you get out of bed each morning or what you want your life to add up to ultimately.

In a world without the constraints of work, what would we want to be doing? With luck, your answers will be similar, and it will be easy to create a shared dream and plan that you both feel inspired to aim for.

Divorce rates spike right after retirement, often because couples discover, when they finally have more time together, that they have different ideas about what they want life to be like. It’s far better to figure that out now, when you have time to grow together toward a shared vision,

When we recognize that the money we earn can in turn be used to buy back our future time, it’s suddenly much easier to determine what feels worth our money and what doesn’t.

Reorient your thinking about money to see it as a repository of the time you spent earning it and a tool to buy that time back, instead of as a means of rewarding yourself for your work.

Nearly everyone we know who achieved early retirement hit a patch of impatience or two while in the savings phase. It absolutely happened to us. In our case, the impatience grew out of a feeling of burnout at work, something that plenty of people who aren’t saving for early retirement experience. And it’s possible that our secret plans actually exacerbated our feeling of burnout, because we felt so close to being able to retire instead of having to survive our jobs like most people. The experience taught us a lot, though, and we found some excellent ways to tamp down impatience whenever those feelings started bubbling up, as well as to head it off in the first place.

Institute a work complaint ban: Impatience seems most likely to arise when work is the busiest or most stressful. And it’s in those moments when it’s easy to get into a downward spiral of feeling sorry for ourselves for the very fact that we have to work and aren’t retired yet. This can be harmful to your mental state, but it also detracts from the whole journey to early retirement because it makes you forget how lucky and fortunate you are to be able to pursue early retirement at all. For us, nothing made the journey feel faster than when we instituted a rule that we weren’t allowed to complain about work.

During my last few years of work, whenever I’d do a presentation, I’d remind myself beforehand that this was something I’d miss a lot after we quit, and I’d pour my whole heart and soul into that session. I’m positive that this made my presentations better for those who saw them, but it also made them more meaningful to me. That’s a positive example, but when nostalgia in advance really works well is in the less pleasant instances. In those meetings that got tense, I’d tell myself, One day I’ll look back at this and chuckle, and that thought alone would instantly make me feel more calm. In essence, I’d imagine my future self looking back at those tough work memories and let that feeling replace the stress in the moment.

When none of those tricks work, the best antidote to impatience is simply reminding yourself how few people in history have ever been able to achieve true financial security, let alone a work-optional life. (Even fabulously wealthy royalty still have to work!) Those of us in the early retirement movement are truly some of the luckiest people who’ve ever lived, and remembering that never ceases to make us feel enormously grateful.

It’s helpful to have a phrase at the ready that you can toss out whenever someone wants you to spend money you’d rather save instead.

Do yourself the favor of not having to revisit this question multiple times and choose a phrase that shuts the conversation down more efficiently. It could be “That’s not in the budget,” “That’s not a priority for us,” “Spending less will give us more time together as a family,” or something more pointed like “That would slow my progress.” We went with a more simple phrase that was quite effective at ending the discussion: “We’re not going to be able to do that right now.” •

If all else fails and people in your life are pressuring you to spend money on their priorities instead of your own, remind yourself as often as you need to why you’re doing all of this. To give yourself more time to pursue your passions. To be more present with a partner or your kids. To see the world. That urge to keep up with the Joneses can be powerful for others, but you’ll be less likely to be swayed if you keep your own carefully crafted money mission statement and life vision front and center in your mind.

If you’re serious about reaching your early retirement savings goals, you need to take good care of yourself so that you can keep going until you’ve hit your magic number. Develop coping techniques to deal with your work stress, whether that’s making time for yoga or taking walks during your work breaks, and then prioritize them. Use all your vacation time, and don’t make the mistake we made in our last couple of years of work, thinking that if we worked more, we’d earn more.

Though Mark and I did not initially plan our magic number around the idea that we each wanted to be independently financially independent, instead of financially interdependent, thanks to good luck with market timing we oversaved and happened to end up with enough that we’d each be okay if we split things 50/50. In hindsight, we wish we had planned to save that much, but either way, it’s comforting that, just as we wouldn’t want to have to be forced to stay at a job we disliked just for the money, we won’t ever feel forced to stay together because of it. It might sound deeply unromantic to think that way, but I think it’s the exact opposite. Knowing that we’re together 100% by choice and that money plays no part in keeping us together—not even a little bit—is extra romantic and relationship affirming.

And while that was the day things clicked for me, I’ve since realized that I don’t have to be in the middle of some epic bucket list adventure to feel retired. I don’t have to be in a stone house in the south of France, in a gorge in Taiwan, or atop a 14,000-foot peak in the High Sierra. I feel retired when I get eight hours of sleep, which is almost every day now. I feel retired when I leave the house without my phone or go hours without checking it. I even feel retired when I do things that look a lot like work, because I know it’s work I’m choosing to do. (Though I feel even more retired still when I drop whatever work I was planning to do that day to ski or hang out with friends instead.)