Early-retirement wannabe

mgdavid

ermine wrote: »

BTW I was quoting from this excellent post by The Escape Artist, and TBH his post made me think too.

I came within a whisker of damaging my health by simply failing to lift my eyes to the distant horizons of what the hell is life all about - I loaded the gun and pulled the trigger under pressure. I was an absolute numbskull. I had a decent job for a reasonably long time, I do not have any outrageously expensive tastes and I derive satisfaction and entertainment largely from learning new stuff and honing the art of living. I should have done it 5 years earlier. There's an RSA short on Youtube about research into what motivates people

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc

You, and I, are lucky enough to be in a first-world country and have enough earnings under our belts to be financially independent - you are a fellow of finer tastes and greater commitments than I so your requirements are several times mine but not an order of magnitude. But T.E.A. who worked in finance I believe and became financially independent in his early forties did something that I very notably failed to do. He asked himself the very simple question

and he lived intentionally. The manager who stiffed me in 2009 did me the greatest favour, I have come to see. Although the path was harsh - in three years I saved roughly half of my total pension savings to date, and cost me five years between the start and recovery, let's take a look at the alternative - I could have been a corporate zombie for the next 6 years from now, finished work at the prescribed age and then started to live. I'd be richer in cash, but with fewer years to live...

It was a desperate failure of imagination - thirty years of working for a living does that to a chap, it's just too easy. But it didn't happen. I was forced to think - about what I wanted and how I wanted to live. That RSA short is so true. I didn't really need the salary I was running, I didn't need more consumer crap, I didn't need an iPhone. It's the people in your life, it's who you know, it's helping them realise their potential and in doing so realising some of your own. As T.E.A. so eloquently said,

I start getting red spitting letters from the TV licence people, because I didn't renew it. Not out of some deep religious reason, and definitely not because I can't afford it - I could. It's because I took my TV up to the city dump because I don't watch TV any more - I don't need to do such things to dull the pain of working any longer. The only way I got to hear about stuff work watching is from other people, and that's what iPlayer is for.

Just as life is too short to watch TV without recommendations by people you know, it's too short to flush your life away working for The Man once you have enough. It's people who lend meaning to your life, not Stuff, and I say that as an extreme introvert compared to most

The old saw about nobody wishing on their deathbed that they had spent more time at the office has some basis in fact. I bet there are a lot of people that wish they'd spent more time with the kids, and with their partners. I despair that we are building such a beastly economy where we are locking up more and more of our earned capital in the stones that make up our houses and making people spend more time earning money than spending time with their children, their partners or simply thinking, like the people in Keynes' Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren. But that seems to be the way we are going

In six months you will most likely look back and kick yourself for not doing it earlier! How many early retirees do you hear on here who moan about how dreadful it is, assuming they got the overall financial planning right and live within their means?

*** Post Of The Year Award ***

:T:beer: :j

itm2

Re. the sense of purpose question: I figure there are two types of people:
(a) those that enjoy their work
(b) those that don't.

I'm pretty clearly in the (b) camp, and no end of salary or promotions would ever give me a sense of purpose. The job was just a necessary evil, to pay the bills and save for retirement. For me, retirement was the purpose of work.

Marine_life

itm2 wrote: »

Re. the sense of purpose question: I figure there are two types of people:
(a) those that enjoy their work
(b) those that don't.

I'm pretty clearly in the (b) camp, and no end of salary or promotions would ever give me a sense of purpose. The job was just a necessary evil, to pay the bills and save for retirement. For me, retirement was the purpose of work.

You know what.......I actually enjoy my job but the whole corporate environment in which we operate is so jam packed full of *bs* that it sucks the life out of me every day.

I could rant for hours about what drives me crazy but the fact is that now I just want to write "the letter". The letter that gets me out. But I need my forthcoming sabbatical to give me the space to write the perfect letter. I could write a novel about why I want to leave but I want to condense it into three or four lines of perfectly postioned prose.

So ...to you point - i think everyone needs to ask themselves, is it the work itself that you hate or the environment in which you work?

Differentiating between the two may lead to a different outcome.

Marine_life

ermine wrote: »

There's an RSA short on Youtube about research into what motivates people

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc

Brilliant. and so so true.

BeatTheSystem

Marine_life wrote: »

Brilliant. and so so true.

Maybe it is true. But I have often seen arguments like this trotted off by serf level MBA corporate managers to their underlings when requesting a pay rise!

ermine

BeatTheSystem wrote: »

Maybe it is true. But I have often seen arguments like this trotted off by serf level MBA corporate managers to their underlings when requesting a pay rise!

The tragedy is that the serf level guys, never mind their underlings, haven't reached the minimum necessary level of $ that was mentioned by the by in that video.

ML (and I) reached that level for our different requirements, and we are both lucky in time and place. The dude that stiffed me had a new born child with his second wife at ~45, although I didn't know that at the time. He had no choice but to squeeze me - he wasn't a bad guy but he had a fist full of bad options in 2009. I still recall his pupils widen and his breathing rate rise as, two years after the initial hit I educated him that he couldn't make me do what he wanted me to do because a) I didn't need the job, and b) The Firm needed my specific skills at that specific time to discharge its commitments to LOCOG. He swiftly shunted me to another line manager who was going to quit when L2012 was done. It was the I didn't need the job that he didn't want to hear. How do you control somebody like that? You can't - you inspire them or you go home. Google can do that. Nobody doubts they get paid enough there I was paid enough, but I couldn't work for a !!!!!!.

That line manager is now in Miami working, because he was ejected from The Firm. He's talented, as long as you keep him away from human beings, that's one of the problems with engineers, good with hardware but lethal with meatspace. No doubt he has a lot more money than I do. Good luck to him - he's arranged his life so he needs it.

But I own my time - I have no alarm clock, and have to use a timer on a lamp if I need to get up for a flight or meet someone before 9am. I'd rather be me than him, but each to their own.

Marine_life wrote:

So ...to you point - i think everyone needs to ask themselves, is it the work itself that you hate or the environment in which you work?

Differentiating between the two may lead to a different outcome.

I'm not sure about that. I loved engineering, I still do, and I still do it, I love getting a whole heap of stuff together and making something work where before there was nothing or chaos. For 95% of the time for 30 years I liked what I did, but in the end the environment, the pen-pushers, the tick-boxery of the performance management BS did me in, particularly towards the end. I differentiate the two, but in the end the result fell by the weakest link. I'm not sure you can separate the variables, though obviously if you can go elsewhere and do the work without the BS then maybe.

In the end my last performance management interview was the way it should be done. The replacement LM said - we're behind, I don't understand this stuff, is it gonna work? I didn't bother to fill in the tickboxes because I already had my ticket out of the firm. But I was able to look him in the eye and say 'Yup, it'll work'. It did.

If the environment is crap, you gotta get out, just as much as if you hate what you do. If you're late 40's 50s then you aren't likely to have many options to get the same elsewhere.

kangoora

I have to applaud some of these recent posts, it's where I am at the moment. I used to really enjoy my job, didn't mind putting in 50-70 hour weeks when the job needed it (without overtime), even occasionally for some fairly extended periods.

Now, performance management is total BS, your manager recommends you a grade, everybodies grades go to some senior team where they all get levelled. I get on well with my director and I know he has to fit a profile of "requires development", works ok and "is excellent" in his team. I have NEVER heard of anyone being levelled UP, so levelling should be termed the "downgrading process"

Getting corporate BS emails every quarter saying we are doing well but everyone needs to do better starts to get demoralising. Entire teams getting outsourced to India, there's some good people over there but there's also a huge amount of jobsworth working off a script who speak barely legible English. Everything I request needs to be chased or it doesn't get done because everybody is feeling overloaded and I'm tired of fighting my way through corporate treacle to get even the simplest things done.

The annoying thing, I work for a very profitable multinational and whilst I get my 10% (6% after tax) bonus plus some other things like Private Health; there's people pulling 25% (or more) bonus + stock options + other perks. Obviously there's people worse off than me not on a bonuses salary with no perks at all.

I suppose you get the idea I'm not very happy from my rant above, recently we got a fairly substantial sum of money - I can clear off all my debts and my focus for the next 6-8 years is going to be to squirrel enough money away so I can take early retirement at 58 (maximum 60). The thought of having to continue working until 67 almost makes me feel physically ill.

I've got a target pot of £0.5m in my head, plus some DB pensions and I think this is possible with some fairly serious savings for the next 6-8 years 😉 On the plus side, with no debts, I can do some enhanced savings that were never possible until this year.

mgdavid

kangoora wrote: »

I have to applaud some of these recent posts, it's where I am at the moment. I used to really enjoy my job, didn't mind putting in 50-70 hour weeks when the job needed it (without overtime), even occasionally for some fairly extended periods.

Now, performance management is total BS, your manager recommends you a grade, everybodies grades go to some senior team where they all get levelled. I get on well with my director and I know he has to fit a profile of "requires development", works ok and "is excellent" in his team. I have NEVER heard of anyone being levelled UP, so levelling should be termed the "downgrading process"

Getting corporate BS emails every quarter saying we are doing well but everyone needs to do better starts to get demoralising. Entire teams getting outsourced to India, there's some good people over there but there's also a huge amount of jobsworth working off a script who speak barely legible English. Everything I request needs to be chased or it doesn't get done because everybody is feeling overloaded and I'm tired of fighting my way through corporate treacle to get even the simplest things done.

The annoying thing, I work for a very profitable multinational and whilst I get my 10% (6% after tax) bonus plus some other things like Private Health; there's people pulling 25% (or more) bonus + stock options + other perks. Obviously there's people worse off than me not on a bonuses salary with no perks at all.

I suppose you get the idea I'm not very happy from my rant above, recently we got a fairly substantial sum of money - I can clear off all my debts and my focus for the next 6-8 years is going to be to squirrel enough money away so I can take early retirement at 58 (maximum 60). The thought of having to continue working until 67 almost makes me feel physically ill.

I've got a target pot of £0.5m in my head, plus some DB pensions and I think this is possible with some fairly serious savings for the next 6-8 years 😉 On the plus side, with no debts, I can do some enhanced savings that were never possible until this year.

sounds exactly like where I just retired from. I suspect it's the same for much of corporate life these days. I actually stuck it out until 2 months before my 65th birthday - my only regret is not finding this forum 10 years ago. Is it wrong to be glad I'm old? I certainly sympathise with those in their 30s and 40s who cannot see light at the end of the tunnel.

itm2

Marine_life wrote: »

So ...to you point - i think everyone needs to ask themselves, is it the work itself that you hate or the environment in which you work?

Differentiating between the two may lead to a different outcome.

I agree with ermine on this - I'm not sure the two can effectively be separated when it comes to making the big decision. I job-hopped in the last 3 years before retiring, doing the same job for 3 very different employers in the final 3 years, and hated all of it. I suppose you may get REALLY lucky and find a dream employer with extremely progressive attitudes towards its staff and performance management, but the chances are you'll get the usual corporate BS that characterises 99% of working environments.

TBH I wonder if things had been different if I'd stuck to software engineering instead of "progressing" into management. I actually now do it in my spare time for entertainment, which is pretty telling! I have a feeling that the corporate BS would still have brought me to the same place, but maybe there would have been some redeeming elements to my daily travails.

jamesd

kangoora wrote: »

I've got a target pot of £0.5m in my head, plus some DB pensions and I think this is possible with some fairly serious savings for the next 6-8 years 😉

It will depend on spending but to give some idea, the current value of my investments is about 87% of my (net pay plus gross pension contributions) over the last eight years.