I have been lucky. I had the opportunity to engage in periods of retirement in my 30s and 40s. The idea that this was possible radically changed my decision making about spending money. I’m very grateful.
If you have any excess money at all, then buy only what you value, not what you can afford.
Do you mind sharing a bit about how you were able to take a long break? I’m really interested in doing something like this before I turn 30; I’ve been working since 21
I don’t mind. I got very lucky. Your results will vary.
For the book length version, read Your Money or Your Life. Alternatively, You Need A Budget would also suffice.
I should also point out that when I took a long break, I still worked for money, but I got to choose what I did and I went periods of months doing almost nothing. I don’t want to oversell what retirement meant to me.
The ingredients were these:
- high-pay/low-time jobs (software development consultant and trainer)
- geographical flexibility: no fixed office, but instead I traveled to visit clients and conferences
- downsized living expenses: left Toronto and moved to the middle of nowhere, which was riskier when high-speed internet was just becoming available
- wife had compatible ideas and goals regarding money, so almost no big arguments about what to do
- few family ties to keep us in one place: we noticed that after we moved away, when we visited family, the visits meant much more than weekly Sunday dinner
- found high-leverage income streams (closer to “passive”) that fit our temperament and provided background profits to pay for essential living expenses
I got lucky along the way, finding a business partner with whom I worked for about five years and who found us a very lucrative contract that put the whole plan on fast-forward. Even so, I found him by attending conferences, talking to people, organizing my own, and mostly being open to whatever came my way. When we are consumed with day-to-day survival, it’s easy not to take those kinds of risks.
I don’t know how well this overall strategy works in today’s economic conditions. Some of the principles, I think, still apply, but I genuinely don’t know how lucky I really got to go as far as I did by age 35. (We left Toronto when I was 33 and that alone sped up the results a lot.)
Read the books, if you haven’t already. Good luck.
