Financial Independence is a Mirror
Financial Independence is a Mirror
Financial independence is a mirror, it’s not a door. You may deny the voracity of this statement. You may try to convince yourself otherwise. But bursting through the threshold will not lead to the promise land. The sad truth is that what lies on the other side of financial independence is much the same as what came before. The past is prologue. And your past is strewn with victories and failures. Life building experiences that cannot be wiped away by a reaching a goal post or a milestone.
The tenor of this post may sound negative, but it is not meant to be. If you were a happy person before FI, you will be a happy person post FI. This gives you tremendous power. Build your best life now. Don’t wait until you reach financial independence. It is a false prophet.
So what do I mean when I say that financial independence is a mirror?
Staring longingly at this mirage will neither show you the fruit of your labor nor the dream of what life can be.
It will simply reflect back what you are.
Safe Withdrawal Whatever
I have previously written about how we are kidding ourselves with the safe withdrawal nonsense. If you are aggressive enough to obsess over your own personal target SWR, do you really think you are going to just let it go once you reach financial freedom?
Financial independence is a mirror. Reaching FI will not dissolve your worries about running out of money, it will just reflect them back at you. How many retired people worry about, stress, and wake up at night with fears of not having enough?
All of them.
Enough is a state of mind. If you didn’t feel like you had enough before reaching your magic number, you certainly will not afterward when the income streams begin to dwindle.
Who Me? Work?
You are a workaholic. You maximized the W2 game to the fullest. You climbed the corporate ladder, built a world-class company, or ran that side hustle right into financial independence.
So now you have all the time and luxury to relax. Right?
I think not. Financial independence is a mirror. If you were a workaholic then, that’s exactly the post FI image that will reflect back. You may no longer work for the man. You might change fields, gigs, or number of hours. But it is highly unlikely that you will truly “retire”.
My bet is that you will make plenty of money after your so-called last day at work.
It’s in your bones.
Comfortably Numb
Reaching your number will not bring happiness. It will not bring contentment. Becoming your best self involves building relationships, finding purpose, and enjoying the unexpected pleasures in life. Money never drove this process, and the absence of economic pressure will not get you there any faster.
Financial independence is a mirror, not a door.
If life felt good when you had nothing, it will feel just about the same when you have everything.
Moving Forward
Financial independence is a laudable goal that is part of any responsible adulthood game plan. Having enough money will cushion economic downturns and shield you from making bad decisions based on scarcity.
But it will not make or break your future. Becoming FI will not change who you are nor absolve you from the obnoxious fears that clutter your mind.
It will, however, reflect back on you all that you already are. Finally set free from the all-encompassing worries about having enough, your mind will ponder the deeper more serious questions about existence.
Will you be ready?
I agree that a cat cannot change its stripes. Whatever your personality is after all these decades is ingrained and having money won’t allow you to buy a new one. If you are miserable person than the only thing that will change is you will be a rich miserable person post FI.
Rich and miserable. Sounds like an oxymoron but it is not.
I love this! Totally agree, when i first started pursuing FI, all i could think about was exiting work, and hoping that will make me happy. Being that the road to FI can be relatively long, 7-10 years, along the way i started questioning things. Why aren’t i happy NOW?
I have come to realize that hating work is not a good enough reason to FIRE, plus i’m somewhat of a compulsive worker, i HAVE to be doing something, which is why i am so happy i found Blogging. FI in my opinion just ensures that no matter what, i have more option.
My goal is to at some point get to a place where money matters a lot less, as it is just a byproduct of all the value I’ve created. As long as i’m doing something meaningful and productive, i should never have to worry about money.
You always want to retire to go towards something, not escape something.
I definitely agree.
I think far too often people consider getting to FI to be the escape hatch from a job they hate. Or a situation they find themselves in.
I hope that the frugal side of FI teaches us to be content with what we have and that after a certain bare minimum set of needs is met, more stuff doesnt really make us happy. But if you never got to that point before FI, it certainly won’t happen after.
I can see myself working after FI. It will provide a little more freedom on the job, but I’ll keep working because (for the most part) I love what I do.
TPP
TPP, you seem to like your job, so i bet you will continue.
Is there some type of workaholics anonymous that could slowly wean me off new income in a supervised setting?
Twitter?
In a similar manner… Money overall doesn’t really change people. It makes people more of what they really are. If you were generous to begin with, chances are that money will make you even more generous. IF you were an asshole to begin with, money will likely make you into a bigger asshole (with more riches and power). Reaching FI is probably similar 🙂
Maybe Fi is not just a mirror but a magnifier?
There is much truth in this. The nature of momentum is to not change and to change momentum, it needs to be forced. When you retire you will spend about the same as you always did sans the amount you spend saving for retirement, and after some flashy trips even your travel will become mundane and predictable. KFC in Hong Kong is pretty much like KFC in Orlando. IMHO if you’re smart you will engage your retirement without consideration of further “paid” employment. If you need paid employment you didn’t do it right. If you need paid employment then the momentum of that need will consume your freedom.
My BIL and sister just retired and they are going to spend the summer in Alaska running a lodge for room and board in other words they are going on an adventure. My BIL wants to run the waterways, which requires more boat than he owns and the lodge owner needs some help so the BIL will run the water taxi and do some maintenance and my sister will serve the guests, and they will come away with a deep understanding of what it means to live Alaskan and deal with big wilderness. The immersion and adventure will be their pay. Of course they will get their fill of outdoor adventure as well on a pace that is normal and human and with adequate depth, not like 2 weeks of drinking from a fire hydrant. It’s near 24 hour daylight up there so you can easily work a day and play a day and go to sleep in the “daytime” all in the same day. When they’re done they will figure out something else to do. When I retired I was interested in a software technology called SDR so I found a company and became a software tester. It’s my job to break their software so they can fix it and make it better. The engineering crew is brilliant and so I access world class knowledge well beyond what I would get if I enrolled in a masters engineering program. I don’t get paid, I just get smart in something I want to know about.
Make a big enough pile before you pull the trigger, trim your sails regarding things like taxes and Roth conversion, explore as many nooks as you can trying to tame variance in your portfolio, and any obscene spending habits and then sleep tight and spend your time doing something truly interesting.
Here’s a picture: The target is off years in the future, The target is not to die rich but to die not poor. Your job is to hit the target. You hit the target by behaving like a sniper. You take in every order of variance that would throw you off target. The closer you get to the target the less the variance. A side gig might reduce the variance if you’re far away but so would a couple more years of the more lucrative main gig. You fund every known and predictable cost prior to trigger pull because that’s a source of variance. Today workman are replacing my air conditioners. I’m using money that was planned for 3 years ago when I was working. I’m doing it this month because my daughter graduated last month so the cost of setting her up is now in the rear view mirror. I’m Roth converting all of my IRA to control my tax variance in the future. The necessary tax money for the conversion was planned for a few years ago. I bought a retirement car prior to my exit. Things like this are perfectly predictable and can be funded best when working. I changed my momentum by applying the force of planning and risk reduction and compounding (and medicare) to the point where I couldn’t afford to “not quit”. I needed 4 or 5 income free years to make Roth conversion work before RMD started to clean my clock.
I like the target analogy. Maybe some of the trick is to set it and forget it enough to concentrate on the important things.
You are right on here. Enough IS a state of mind. So when you say, “My bet is that you will make plenty of money after your so-called last day at work”, it is both true and false. We are busy working on projects that could be monetized, but the beauty of having enough is choosing not to.
Turning down money is like a FI superpower. it’s how you know you have truly come to the promise land.
Cash is green. Kryptonite is green. Coincidence? I think not.
Your scrubs are green too!
🤔
🤯
🤑
I used to be of the mindset that once I retire and have a large pile of money, I will be truly happy and do whatever I want. Once the kids are out of the house, I can have peace and quiet and have my freedom back. Once I have more time, I will exercise more, volunteer more, donate more. I was blinded to the fact that I was missing out on my life right now. FI is not going to make my life magically awesome. I’ll still be the same person I ever was. It’s about living and enjoying life now. Thanks for showing that with the FI mirror.
The “once I have” syndrome. I was there too!
“The past is prologue”. Succinct; perfect summary. Love it
Thanks Jeff. Thanks for reading!
Good stuff Doc, although there do seem to be some pf bloggers who completely shut off after ditching the W2 and don’t really work at all or care. The “LivingaFI” guy even stopped his blog and is just enjoying life. But I agree, money or FI won’t change things for most.
Livingafi…a complete Mic drop. Impressive.
I have found this to be very true, I have always been a very happy person with few worries and I’m still that now after retiring. I was no workaholic but I enjoyed my job as a favorite hobby so I work a little side gig stuff now just for fun and I like the way it feels to earn money even if I do not need it. There is more time and less stress now and life is very comfortable yet still exciting and challenging. If you know yourself you can use that knowledge to plan your life after retirement. Great post, I fear there are many people who think early retirement will fix their problems when instead they will carry their problems with them into retirement.
I think you have done it right. It still feels good to be productive and accomplish things. Retirement, apparently, has little to do with it.