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.