Saving Money is the Key to Early Retirement

I hope I wasn’t too harsh yesterday in bashing Money Magazine. It just gave “all the feels”, but it won’t matter, because you aren’t going believe what I have to tell you anyway.

My wife had an epiphany yesterday… saving money is the key to early retirement. My response was essentially, “Yep. This is why I’ve been doing our best to limit our big expenses.”

I love that she’s taking an interest in personal finance. I’d like to say I’ve had some influence on her over the last 10 years, but that’s probably not the case. Instead I think she’s feeling what I was feeling in 2006… work burnout. I fear that the minutiae of this work environment is getting to her. I’m only surprised it didn’t happen before now. How many days of fighting over 32 cents can you take, right?

There’s only one problem with this epiphany. There’s no fat to cut… no water to squeeze from the stone. My wife did mention one big expense, but it was a once a year thing and we were likely to eliminate it anyway. (It’s also an “investment in yourself”, so it’s not like buying a candy wall.) I hope I didn’t extinguish the spark in explaining that it wasn’t going to lead to early retirement.

That’s one strange part about writing personal finance for 10 years. The traditional advice doesn’t seem to apply to us any more. That’s a good thing, right?

For everyone else, “saving money is the key to early retirement.” It’s not overly complex. Save money, invest it, wait, and then retire. Right? How do you avoid that pesky Tom Petty problem?

On the bright side, I think I may have helped her with a work issue. I chuckle as I think that maybe we should switch jobs for a day. I’ll do pharmacy and she can write about personal finance. On second thought, let’s not go down that rabbit hole. I’d just be setting myself to be embarrassed twice.