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even when I enjoyed the work, I was still spending my time and energy on someone else’s agenda, not my own.
That’s what Work Optional is all about: reclaiming your life from our nonstop work culture so that you decide what role work will play in your life, instead of society deciding for you.
We might get more money, sure, but we earn it the hardest way possible, by trading away our brain space and maybe even our dreams.
Contrary to popular belief, there’s also not a “correct time” to retire. Though we think of age 65 as the right retirement age, it was an arbitrary age chosen by economists and actuaries when Social Security was created that happened to make things balance out fiscally, not because there’s anything special about turning 65.3
Saving money just for the sake of saving is not nearly as much fun as knowing that every $100 or $200 that you save will buy you a day of freedom from work.
No one of those expenditures on its own feels over-the-top or like the thing that will stop you from being able to save money. But they gradually pile up, and if you aren’t subtracting expenses as you add new ones, you wake up one day and realize that your life—a life that just feels normal—is expensive to maintain.
You’re allowed to have things in your life that you want, but if your goal is to retire early, one of the best things you can do for yourself is to learn to recognize when your lifestyle is inflating, to sniff out the wants pretending to be needs, and to be deliberate about the lifestyle inflation you choose to spend money on.
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.
Every dollar you can avoid spending per week is at least $300 you don’t have to save for retirement, whether that’s early retirement or traditional retirement
Anyone can save a high percentage of their income if they spend nothing. But a life in which you spend nothing or pinch every penny to spend as little as humanly possible is not likely to be a life that feels worth all the effort you put in at work.
give your money a mission statement that ensures it does exactly what you want it to do.
The idea of retiring early carries with it the risk that you could run out of money one day, but working until you’re in your 60s isn’t risk-free, either. First, folks who work until their 60s regularly undersave for retirement and also risk running out of money. But more importantly, they risk spending all their best years at work instead of using those years to pursue their own passions and enjoy time with those they care most about.
A helpful number to keep in mind when gut-checking your comfortable spending level now, in the accumulation phase, and in your future spending, is 300. That number is significant because if you use the rule of 25x (25 times x, the inverse of the 4% safe withdrawal rate) and multiply that by 12 months in a year, you get 300, meaning that every dollar you can avoid spending every month is $300 you don’t have to save for retirement.
The hard part is everything else: all the tough questions you must ask yourself to envision the life you want to work toward,
That’s because I realized a few months into our work-optional life that retirement itself isn’t about never contributing to society again. It isn’t even about whether you work or not. It’s about having the freedom to control your own time and to decide for yourself how to spend your focus and attention. And the feeling of that freedom goes way beyond all my expectations.
Oftentimes the hardest part of making friends is just finding the courage to ask, but it helps to remind yourself that nearly everyone wishes they had more of this courage. You’re most likely doing others a favor if you make the overture, and many will be grateful you did, in addition to being new friends.
