Lazy Man and Money

Set Your Kid on FIRE

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Kids with MoneyThere are lot of good things you can do with the FIRE (financial independence, retire early) acronym, but that title is certainly not one of them. Of course, I mean set your kid on the path to FIRE.

There’s a lot of talk in the media about the FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) movement. You can find several stories of people who retired in their thirties. That level of extremely early retirement has some people claiming that it’s dangerous and too many things can go wrong with that plan over the next 50+ years. For this article, I’d like to put that debate aside. It is a valid debate worth having, but let’s assume you are in the pro-FIRE camp. After all, why else would be here reading this?

Before we get started on whether you should start your kid on the path to FIRE, we have to tackle an important question:

Does Kid FIRE Make Any Sense?

Unless you are Ryan Kaji of Ryan’s World fame, Kid FIRE is unlikely to happen. It’s common sense that most kids won’t be making the big money necessary to support 80 years of living. So, Kid FIRE, on its own makes no sense. However, building the foundation for kids to reach FIRE later in life DOES make sense.

Everyone I know who has been interested in FIRE has always expressed one regret. They wish they had known about it before so they could have gotten started earlier in life. Outside of winning the parent lottery and having Beyonce as your mom, starting out as a kid is as early as you can get.

So what could a blueprint for “Kid FIRE” look like?

Getting your Kid on the path to FIRE

There are many different paths to FIRE and working with a lump of clay fresh-minded human gives you access to many of them. I looked at a few ways to Starting Your Kids on a Financial Independence Path more than a couple of years ago. Two years normally doesn’t seem a long time to me, but it was pre-COVID and, as we know, time after that stopped working normally. It’s also quarter of my kids’ lives.

Here are a few things to start with:

Learn Cooking

Back then I had mentioned a desire to get my kids interested in cooking. We signed them up for an after-school class. At the time, no one new that everyone would become cooking experts. The kids had a lot of opportunity to learn and it’s gone well considering they are 7 and 9. I love this core life skill because it can save you thousands of dollars in food costs vs. restaurants. Some of my favorite FIRE bloggers (such as Retire by 40 and Root of Good) show off their cooking expertise about once a month.

Be Handy

I’m not handy at all. I can barely fix anything. I wonder if my mother still has those old Time-Life Fix-it-Yourself books. Maybe they help. It can save you a lot of money being able to fix things yourself. It can also be a main career or a side-hustle to make very good money for a few hours work.

However, being handy can shine in other ways. We have three rental properties and it would be great if I could fix everything instead of writing a check. Let’s take it a step further. Carl from from 1500 Days writes about how live-in home flipping built his nest egg. Essentially, he and his wife buy unattractive houses and fix them up while living in them. When they sell, they can legelly keep up to hundreds of thousands in tax-free profits (though usually it’s closer to tens of thousands in reality). They’ve managed to make ~$650,000 over several flips. Of course they have invested that money and it has compounded over years.

House Hacking

The live-in flip described above is one way to house hack, but there are others. The best house hacker I know is Chad Carson and he has a free guide to house hacking. The main idea is to buy a multi-family and live in one unit while renting out the other units. The rent from the other properties, in some cases, can pay for the whole mortgage. In a lot of ways it is like paying for your own home by being a live-in superintendent.

I have Carson’s book Retire Early With Real Estate and it’s a great read. (That’s also an affiliate link, so I’ll make a small commission if you decide to buy it.) There are so many different types of house hacking available and you don’t need hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy a multi-family to get started.

It could get a little tricky, but I think it’s possible to combine the live-in flip with house hacking. It’s obviously going to take a lot of time, but it could lead to significant profits in someone’s early-mid 20s.

Getting and Early Start with Learning About Money

All the above are some concrete examples of things that can help them reach financial independence. However, a couple of weeks ago, I wrote how to teach your kids about money and financial education at a young age can go a long way. My kids aren’t going to be retiling a bathroom, cook us dinner, or hack housing costs for some time. Until then, they can learn about financial concepts, so they build great money habits at a young age.

Earning a High Income

The ultimate “cheat code” to FIRE is having a high salary. There are plenty of people who make a lot of money and spend it all. However, if you can avoid that trap, and live fairly frugally FIRE finds friendship with you. (I may have went overboard on the alliteration there.)

How do you get to that high salary? Traditionally, it starts with education and choosing a career that pays well. It’s not a secret which careers are the most lucrative. However, nowadays it makes a lot of sense to pay attention to the cost of college. A lot of college debt can push that FIRE plan back quite a bit.

Final Thoughts on “Kid FIRE”

Kids should be kids. It’s fun for me to write about them managing rental properties and swinging hammers, but they’ll have time before those days come around. For me, it will happen in a blink of an eye and I’ll wonder where the years went. It’s important that they enjoy these years.

I like to think that I can push them towards a certain future. It feels like I can because they are still very young. As they get older, they’ll develop their own interests and go down a path that they choose.

I hope that they’ll be interested in FIRE and if so, I think some of these ideas could be useful. If you were trying to create a blueprint for FIRE from scratch, what would it look like? Let me know in the comments.

Frugality and FIRE Friends

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It’s still a very busy summer for dog sitting, so rather than be 80% blogger and 20% dog sitter, it’s close to 95% dog sitter and 5% blogger. I expect that to change when kids go back to school in September and families stop traveling.

Last week this Tweet caught my attention:

It’s simple and straight to the point. However, I read it and think of it from a historical perspective. My blogging mentality is still stuck in 2006 and 2007 when I started.

Frugality Bashing Over Time

There were bloggers in 2006 who were into extreme frugality. I remember reading an article where the person calculated that opening the refrigerator costs four cents. So before opening the fridge, he planned his attack to grab all the items as quick as possible. There were also jokes that if you by 2-ply toilet paper, you can just pull one ply apart and “BAM!” double your toilet paper. Some of the extreme frugality got a little weird.

In general, though, people were just doing common sense things to save money. Make coffee at home, bring lunch to work, that kind of thing. However, people have started attacking those kinds of frugal suggestions. Their argument is, “No one got rich making coffee at home.” That may be true, but brewing coffee at home makes sense.

One decision repeated many times over a long time can make a significant difference. However, it’s more than that one decision. That one decision can grow into creating many mindful and frugal spending habits. When I developed these habits, I had more money left over to max out my 401k at a fairly young age (the maximum allowable contribution was lower then). This 45-year-old is thanking his younger self for doing that.

You have to have money to invest money. Not everyone can have a high-paying career (I did, fortunately), so frugality can be the path to having that money.

If you read a money guru and they are against frugality, it’s probably a good idea to shop for a new guru. They have not walked a mile in your shoes. I haven’t either. However, I’m not going to shut the door and bash an idea that mathematically is proven to help so many people.

Bashing of the FIRE Community

When I read “FIRE community”, my 2006 dinosaur brain interprets it as “personal finance community.” For all practical purposes, they are synonyms. FIRE is a better marketing term and “Financial Independence, Retire Early” evokes a sense of freedom to do whatever you want in life. There are no new money tips and tricks in FIRE that weren’t already in the personal finance community. We could call it all a “money community” and everyone would know what we are talking about.

The thing about defining a money community is that it’s nebulous. There are money communities in website forums (Bogleheads for example), blogs (this one for example), Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit. Sometimes the people in one community don’t know who I am, but in another community, they know me quite well. Finding the community that supports you as you work towards your money goals is what’s important.

I don’t understand why anyone would bash a supportive group. I suppose I can imagine a person with enough hate in their hearts to do that. I imagine the bashing happens mostly on social media where people may just be trying to get attention (even negative attention) or entertain themselves. That used to get me going and angrily responding. Now, I just feel a little sad for that person, because he/she does not seem to have a focus and/or a community to help themselves move forward.

Final Thoughts

Frugality and FIRE communities are tremendously useful money tools. They’ve worked for countless people for decades. It makes no more sense to bash them than it does to bash being in a high-paying career or investing. My 8th-grade math teacher used to say, “There’s more than one way to Moody Street” (a big street in my hometown). There are many money tools that can get you to financial independence. Use the ones that work for you.

What’s Your FIRE Score?

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Fire Score

The other day the famous Sir Mix-A-Lot song came on the radio. The lyric about Cosmo made me wonder if the magazine is still around. I admit that one of my guilty pleasures of my early twenties was reading my girl friends’ Cosmopolitan. It was very different than anything I would typically read. It was certainly not close to Money or Kiplinger’s.

I don’t know if it was pioneered by Cosmo, but one of the signature things in seemingly every issue was a quiz. Usually, it was something like, “Are you compatible with your man? Take the quiz and find out.” By answering questions honestly, you scored points and at the end, you added up all the points and gave you the result. I imagine they still have this kind of thing today… if anyone is still reading magazines.

What if we adapted the concept to FIRE? Here’s one attempt at creating a FIRE quiz. It’s only five questions, so it will be quick and easy. Add up your points and we’ll see what your FIRE score is at the end.

What’s Your FIRE Score?

I’m going to be asking you some questions about income and expenses. Answer as best you can and just try to be truthful with yourself. There’s no judgment here and this is all in good fun.

1. Income

What’s your income look like? Are you much wealthier than the average person in your area? Do you make a lot less money than the average?

Give yourself:

10 points if your income is very high
8 points if your income is high
6 points if your income is average
4 points if your income is below average income
2 points if your income is far below average income

Expenses

Income is easy, it’s just one number. I want to break expenses down into various areas:

2. Housing

Housing costs are typically the high expense anyone has. For that reason, I’ll start here and points for frugality are worth more here.

Give yourself:

4 points if your housing costs are very low
3 points if your housing costs are below average
2 points if your housing costs are average
1 point if your housing costs are high

For example, if you live in a tiny house or have roommates or another kind of house hacking, you can probably give yourself 4 points for this. If you might describe yourself as living in McMansion or “house rich and cash poor”, you get 1 point.

3. Transportation

Transportation is the second biggest expense, so you have a chance to earn a lot of points for frugal behavior here.

3 points if your transportation costs are very low
2 points if your transportation costs are below average
1 point if your transportation costs are average
0 points if your transportation costs are high

If you buy a used low-end reliable car and drive it into the ground your transportation costs would likely be very low. If you are a one-car family that’s likely to be very low too. If you use public transportation and/or a bike most places, that’s a low cost of transportation as well. If you lease a new car that would normally cost 6-figures to buy, your transportation costs are expensive.

4. Food

Next up in the expense hierarchy is food. If you live on rice and beans you can score extra points here. If you buying organic, artisan foods from Whole Foods you won’t get any points on this one.

2 points if your food costs are below average
1 point if your food costs are average
0 points if your food costs are high

5. Extras/Adjustments

You may need to subtract points if you have some extra expenses. One example could be student loans. We don’t have student loans, but we do pay a lot for private school for the kids. I’ll have to subtract some points here.

Add Up all the Points

The maximum amount of points you can score is 19, but that’s very hard to do. The minimum score is 2, but that’s a very poor financial situation to be in. If you have a priority of FIRE, you probably want to be in the 12-15 range.

Let’s see what my scoring is:

My FIRE Scoring

Income – 8 points – I gave us 8 points here because my wife does well as a pharmacist. I’m much more average in income. We aren’t doctors or CEOs so we don’t fit in the 10 area. We are better than average though so 6 points didn’t seem right either.

Housing – 3 points – I could have maybe gone with 2 points here – it’s borderline. We bought our house for $400K about 10 years ago. With a fixed 15-year-mortgage at very low interest rates, it is less expensive than it would ordinarily appear. Also at 1800 square feet, it isn’t a McMansion for 4 people. Zillow says it is worth around 600K now, so people getting into the housing market have a much higher expense. That helped sway me towards a lower than average housing cost.

Transportation – 2 points – This one could have maybe been 3 points, but I rounded down on this one to make up for the housing expense above. We have two cars that are paid off, each 7-8 years old. The Subaru Forester (my car) was cheap, while my wife’s Acura MDX was a little more luxurious. We don’t walk or bike or do anything else to lower our transportation costs much. Most days, I just drive the kids to school and maybe go to the grocery store. We put few miles on our cars unless my wife is commuting.

Food – 2 points – I’m the master of shopping for cheap food at Aldi and the military commissary. With a chest freezer, if I find a good deal on meat, I can usually stock up for a long time. We don’t eat a lot of organic foods. For health reasons, we should probably be spending more on quality, but that’s a topic that is outside the scope of this quiz.

Final Total – 15 points

But wait, I didn’t add in the adjustment for the kids’ school expense. I think that’s going to cost me a couple of points, so my real final total is probably closer to 13 points.

This will also change over time. When my wife retires our income will be average (she’ll get a pension). When we finish paying off our mortgage in about 5-6 years our housing expense will drop to a very low number earning us another point there. When major life circumstances change, it may be worth revisiting and seeing where you stand with this quiz.

Final Thoughts

There are a lot of limitations with this quiz. For example, I didn’t include a lot of expenses. I also didn’t include investing. It’s a Monday, so I wanted to make it light, easy, and (hopefully) fun.

I think five questions were about the bare minimum that was needed to get a meaningful result. If you leave some suggestions on how to make it better, I might make this more comprehensive with a FIRE Score version 2.0.

The Financially Independent Baby

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invest baby money
Look at all this money!
Thanks to a tip from Joe at Retire by 40, I learned that Bill Ackman recently wrote about an interesting idea. I joke that Bill Ackman is my best friend because I met him once. Maybe Bill Ackman is a reader of this blog, because his idea is suspiciously close to something I wrote about several years ago.

Here’s is Bill Ackman’s idea:

“There are a number of potential solutions to this [wealth inequality] problem. Among them, the government could establish and fund investment accounts for every child born in America. The funds could be invested in zero-cost equity index funds, be prohibited from withdrawal until retirement, and could compound tax free for 65 years. At historical rates of equity returns of 8% per annum, a $6,750 at birth retirement account – which would cost $26 billion annually based on the average number of children born in the U.S. each year – would provide retirement assets of more than $1 million at age 65.”

To bring you up to speed, but the wealth inequity problem that Ackman writes about it is the fact that many, many Americans do not own stock on equities of US companies. The ones who do own stock, presumably all the readers here, have seen their wealth grow greatly. Those that have not owned stock have not enjoyed compounding wealth. They gotten left behind with stagnant wages, rising health care costs, and other systemic problems.

Mr. Ackman’s idea is simply to have Uncle Sam ensure that every new, tiny American human will be included in America’s corporate financial success.

A one-time investment of $6,750 to (somewhat likely) solve America’s financial retirement crisis?

Count me in. That’s why I wrote about this article five years ago. My projection was that we’d need only $6,622, but I like that Bill decided to round up to a more even number. (I’m leaving the projected growth rates in place, even though they may be aggressive in 2020.)

It’s very hard to get the government to act on an idea that is so big. Millions would complain that it would raise the national debt which is already sky-high. Millions more would say that it lacks fairness as they didn’t get a million dollars at retirement. These criticisms are fair and worth discussing. I think there are solutions to these complaints, but that’s an article for another day. For now let’s agree that the government isn’t going to just approve Ackman’s idea overnight and save every baby’s retirement.

In other words, we are going to have to try to do this ourselves…

… And because I like to go to extremes, rather than trying to solve retirement, why not solve all of a baby’s biggest life milestones.

The Financially Independent Baby

I had a crazy idea yesterday in 2015. Let’s imagine that a blessed baby was born today. For lack of a better name, we’ll call him Baby Gronk.

The parents of Gronk aren’t what you’d call traditionally rich. They live a frugal lifestyle and have saved up some money over time. What they lack in excess money, they make up in wisdom… wisdom of personal finance and compound interest.

These parents decide that they are going to use that personal finance wisdom to spoil Gronk by covering some of his major life expenses on the day he is born. (While I believe that little Gronk should learn to “financially fly on his own”, we’ll leave those personal decisions to the reader.)

The question is, “How much should they put aside to cover all the expenses with life’s major milestones?”

Gronk’s parents proceeded to make a bunch of assumptions, many of which will turn out to be wrong. That’s the nature of predicting the future. Their plan is to use the information they have at their disposal to make the best possible estimates and adjust as time marches forward.

They also realize that if their calculation is a little off, Gronk will pitch in the difference. They aren’t going to let a quest for perfection stop them from a great attempt.

First Car (Age 16)

Gronk’s parents have set up a budget of $6,000 for his first car at age 16. Using the rule of 72, they realize that their money may reasonably double when Gronk turns 8 (a growth of ~8.5%). They also realize that it may double again when he’s 16.

Working backwards from their budget, they decide to put aside $1,500 hoping that it turns to $3,000 (age 8) and $6,000 (age 16).

College (Age 18)

Gronk’s parents decide to make this calculation easy and limit this expense to tuition. Yes, there are going

The big question is whether Gronk’s parents want to fund in-state public college or private college. The price difference between the two is huge. Public in-state tuition is ~$9K while private is ~$31K. Multiply that out by four years and it is either ~$36K or ~$124K.

Since the calculations are so different, Gronk’s parents decide to do the math separately.

Age 18 is very close to the age 16 exercise with the first car above. However, it’s just different enough that Gronk’s parents decide to break out a calculator instead of using the rule of 72. They use the “y to the x” key to calculate compound interest. They specifically type in “1.085”, “y to the x”, then “18” to arrive at 4.34… a key number we’ll use. The 1.085 comes from projecting a 8.5% growth on the current investment (the “1”).

Why pick 8.5%? Your guess on the growth of the market is as good as mine. In 2020, I would adjust this lower. I originally went with 8.5% because it was reasonable enough (near Ackman’s 8% assumption) and it was a convenient number coming from the car example above. Now that you know how to do the calculation, feel free to substitute your own growth assumption.

This tells us that every dollar we invest will yield 4.34 dollars… giving our assumptions and uncertainties in the market. We can mentally check this using the above example of doubling, and doubling again. Double a dollar once and you get two. Double it again and you get four. In this case we have a little more time (two years) so it’s a little more than four, 4.34.

Now that we think we can grow one dollar to $4.34 in 18 years, we just need to divide our total expenses…

… for public in-state college, we’d need to roughly put aside $8,300 ($36,000/$4.34).
… for private college, we’d need to roughly put aside $28,571 ($124,000/$4.34).

What’s interesting to me is that this almost comes out to exactly one year of tuition. In fact, if we used an expected return of 8% it comes out to exactly one year of tuition.

It’s impossible to say whether Baby Gronk’s parents should plan for public or private school. Perhaps they could plan public school, because they are already going far above and beyond what most parents would ever do. It’s not too much to ask Baby Gronk to bridge the gap to private college with financial aid if that’s a decision they make down the line.

Wedding (Age 25)

The average cost of a wedding varies greatly. Since Gronk is just a baby, the parents use this to estimate $30,000, a nice round number.

They use the same math as in the previous example and realize that at 8.5% growth a dollar is worth $7.69 in 25 years. This means that they need to put aside $3,900 at birth to pay for the wedding.

(We’ll ignore outdated traditions of the bride’s side of the family paying for it. Additionally, we’ll presume Gronk’s parents want to pay for the whole wedding instead of half. Or we can keep the traditions and calculate the wedding expenses for Gronkette.)

Down Payment for First Home (Age 25)

Who buys a home the same year they are married? I’m not sure and neither are Gronk’s parents. Sometimes people buy homes before they get married and sometimes they get married before they buy homes.

Since we have the same age and the same interest rate, we have the same growth of a dollar – $7.69.

Gronk’s parents decide to put in the 20% down-payment and not buy the house outright. (They’ve already spoiled him more than enough as it is.)

They think a starter home should cost around $200,000. This depends greatly on where they live and what they agree is a starter home. The parents may have to adjust this to their area of the country. The parents budget $40,000 which is 20% down on that $200,000 home.

Anticipating a dollar grows to $7.69, they realize that need to only invest $5,200 to cover the $40,000 down payment.

Retirement (Age 70)

Up to this point, many would say that Gronk’s parents are ridiculous. They don’t care. Instead, they say, “In for a penny, in for a pound!”

They estimate that Gronk will want to retire at age 70. That’s where the trend is nowadays with improved health care. They start with the rule of 4%. This rule of thumb suggests that one can withdraw 4% of his/her investments to live for 30 years. (This is an over-simplified version for the sake of this exercise.)

They realize that they need to get him 2 million dollars at age 70 so that he can withdraw $80,000 a year (4% of $2M) to live off of.

Getting Baby Gronk 2 million dollars sounds absurd, but Gronk’s parents realize that time is on their side. At 8.5% growth, a single dollar grows to $302 in 70 years.

Let’s pause for a minute. In a previous version of this article, I didn’t calculate the inflation and just added it at the end as an apology. That’s simply not good enough with projecting things 70 years in the future. Inflation is huge over that time.

How big is inflation? Typically it is around 3% a year. That means a dollar growing at 8.5% a year really only has only 5.5% more buying power. So if you do 5.5% over 70 years, $1 can have the buying power as $42.43, not $302.

They divide $2,000,000 by $302 $42.43 and realize that they need to put aside $6,622 $47,136 at his birth to cover his entire retirement. That’s far more than most people have around. However, Gronk’s parents could choose to fund a retirement of only $40,000 instead of $80,000. They could also spread it over a few years.

Final Thoughts

Smart readers should be screaming “Shenanigans!!!” I didn’t factor inflation in any of the examples above. You got me. I also didn’t factor in taxes. These are very significant. Gronk’s parents might end up having to put twice as much in. Or they may have settle with the idea that they are only covering 2/3rd of all Baby Gronk’s major life expenses. My guess is that they’ll sleep well enough at night if it is the latter.

The idea of this exercise was never about complete accuracy. It’s impossible to accurately plan out a person’s expenses at birth. Instead, it was about illustrating how the idea of applying compound interest at birth could work.

Let’s add up all the expenses:

Car – $1,500
Public College – $8,300
Wedding – $3,900
First Home – $5,200
Retirement – $47,136
———————–
Total – $66,036

If Gronk’s parents were able to put aside around $66,000 at Gronk’s birth, he’d have most of life’s major milestones covered. To be clear $66,000 is a lot of money. However, for a lifetime of near financial freedom it isn’t as much as you might think.

This article was originally published Nov 23, 2015 at 12:15 PM

Exploring My Downsides of Early Retirement

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Beach RetireA while back an old blogging colleague of mine named ESI Money wrote about 10 downsides of early retirement.

Yesterday, Joe from Retire by 40 shared his biggest downside to early retirement. I won’t give you any spoilers. However, when you finish reading it, you’ll see that last sentence was a bit of a pun.

Joe covered all ten of ESI Money’s downsides before giving his own thoughts. Since there are few original thoughts in the personal finance space nowadays, I’m going to blatantly steal the idea, while giving him great credit. It will help if you click on his article, so he doesn’t get mad at me. Just kidding, he’s too happy and nice to get mad.

Exploring My 10 Downsides to Early Retirement

Well first you have to retire early to have a downside, right? Depending on your definition of retirement I either retired at 30 or I will never retire. I like to say that I’m self-employed, but my life isn’t that much different than Joe’s who views himself as retired. Just to make it more complicated we aren’t sure if we are FIRE, leanFIRE, or FatFIRE . For the purpose of this article, let’s just assume that I’m retired.

Let’s look at each of ESI’s top 10:

1. Loss of Income

That’s a natural one. However, my wife has a military pension. We also have a lot of alternative income, which includes side gigs like dog sitting and blogging, along with rental properties and equities. In fact we should have more than $200,000 in annual retirement income with many of our expenses paid off. We don’t have that now, because we have about 8 years of rental properties to pay off. It’s also hard to get to the money in our retirement accounts at our age (43).

2. Reduced Social Security Income

My wife has been a big earner for a long time. I was for awhile, but not as long. I keep paying into social security with my side gigs. We don’t need this income and don’t plan for it, so it’s not a big deal. Last I looked it could be $50,000 a year combined.

3. Health Insurance

My wife’s military retirement comes with a very generous health plan that we can keep for life. We realize how extremely lucky we are to have this, especially in this day and age. We do have to pay for it and I’m sure it will get more expensive. However, it will surely be much better than what ordinary early retirees could get for the money.

4. Mental Decline

Here’s where it starts to go south. It would take a lot of work to be a good software engineer again (if I even was in the first place). I’ve spent the last 7 years focusing on interactions with babies and toddlers. I’ve spent the last 4 years sitting over 200 different dogs. While I have learned some very valuable skills that I treasure, the intellectual challenges are more about patience and understanding, not intense problem solving.

To help combat this, I’m trying to learn Japanese with Duolingo. I’m looking for more things that I can work in to windows of a few minutes of the day. I don’t get a lot of time to sit down and study anything at length.

5. Physical Decline

I’m getting older and that starts a natural physical decline for most people. I try to keep active with lots of dog walks. If I was full-time computer programmer, that wouldn’t be the case. I need to get back to going to the gym and lifting weights.

6. Loss of Social Interaction

This is a big one. I was never very social with my co-workers, but there were adult conversations. This goes back to my main conversations being about Pokemon and Daniel Tiger… or with a barking dog. There’s not a lot of deep peer friendships in my day-to-day life.

I didn’t lose these because of early retirement though. I feel I lost them through a series of moves, my introvertedness, and my old college friends just moving in different directions.

I’m hoping to build some new friendships with other parents through kids’ activities. So far, it hasn’t been very fruitful.

7. Loss of Identity

I very much feel this. I used to be a software engineer who built search engines. It was easy to explain and people understood it in just a few words. Now I’m unexceptional blogger, dog sitter, landlord, investor, customer support specialist, and corporate blog editor. I don’t know if they make a big enough business card for that.

I’m not even “retired” (except for this exercise) and my primary focus is on the kids.

I have no identity.

8. Boredom

You’d think that with all the above that I wouldn’t be bored. If so, you’d be wrong. There are not a lot of “new” things going on in any of those activities. It’s not like I have a new assignment of a special project that requires me to learn a new skill. I suppose that blogging is always changing, but with all the other activities, I have some difficulty in keeping up with the changes.

I’m planning to buy a wet suit next year and take surfing lessons with the kids. The kids joined the Cub Scouts recently so we’ve got a camping trip planned. There are so many new and exciting things in this world, I just need to find them. Many FIRE bloggers love to travel. I don’t like traveling much. Also, it makes sense to wait until the kids are a little older before going to any distant countries. I would want them to remember it.

9. Spouse Overload

My wife already works from home a lot. However, sometimes we do need our space. She’ll go off on a run. I’ll go blog at the library for a bit. We have some different interests, but we share many too. If she weren’t working from home, it might be different. For now we each do our own thing for most of the day.

10. Lack of Challenge/Purpose

This is a little like the identity question above. I did have a good professional challenge in exposing MLM fraud. Unfortunately, we don’t have the freedom of speech in the US that we are taught in school. It’s only available to those who have 3 or more million dollars that they can blow on lawyers.

After being sued several times (and winnning!), I’ve decided that it simply isn’t worth the stress and potential harm to our family. So one of my passions, helping people avoid financial fraud, was thwarted. There’s a happy ending though. More and more media publishers are taking up the cause and awareness of MLM fraud is at an all-time high.

I haven’t found my next true professional passion project. Of course, I have the passion project of the family and teaching my kids new awesome stuff about life.

That’s a very worthy purpose, but it is different from the glitzy career of search engine software engineer or pyramid scheme activist.

Putting it All Together

Early retirement may not be as easy as you think it is. I imagine that’s even more true if it’s pseudo-retirement like mine. If you won the lottery and can hire out all the help you need, that’s a different story.

I’m still hustling quite a bit with all the jobs I’m doing now. As you can tell, there are gaps in my overall happiness, but that’s normal.

Everyone’s early retirement is going to be different. If you are not financially secure, I can tell you that the grass is certainly greener on this side of the street. However, there are at least 50 shades of green and sometimes it can be difficult to compare two.