Regardless of which form of early retirement you’re interested in pursuing—full early retirement, semiretirement, or career intermission—the principle is the same: You want to invest as much as possible, as early as possible, in investment vehicles that will grow to give you a steady stream of income for life, long after you’ve stopped relying on mandatory work to provide for you. And those income streams keep coming whether you ever lift a finger (magic!), freeing you up instead to spend your time on more meaningful pursuits outside of normal employment and entrepreneurship structures.
