Fluffy question alert! Keeping motivated on fire

michaels

I like to think of each £x saved as being one extra day of retirement.  Count it on the way in and assume something like 2% real terms growth.

So for example a £3 coffee a day for 200 days a year for twenty years or two months extra not having to work.

ex-pat_scot

anonmoose said:

Once I hit my number I am hoping to travel for a year or so and then come back and restart my business on a part time basis. So from that point of view being self employed does lend itself well to that.

My aim is to be at my basic comfortable number before I go so that I am not reliant on having to work when I get back if things change and I don't want to go back to work or just want a longer break.

But realistically I expect to want to work part time which would hopefully provide a bit more for luxuries and give me time to persue hobbies that I never find time for now. 

I'll be able to pick and choose contract work quite happily; as much or as little as I wish. It's not likely to be traditional "part time" (ie 2 or 3 days a week); more likely a few weeks / months full time on a contract, with gaps between if I fancy a break.  Similar in spirit to your thinking.

I just need to get through another 2 years and then I can treat my pension as the war chest, dipping in if I fancy some time off.
The nearer I get, the harder this last section feels.
Not quite within touching distance. Not yet. 
But not too far from that.
Only another two busy seasons left. Only another two annual appraisals. 20 - 25 monthly pay packets (*).  2 more tax returns. 

I know I'm fortunate that I have highly valuable skills, and have a complete contacts list of clients who really rate me, and keep telling me they'd love for me to come and work for them to help them out from time to time.
I think I'd like to be at my basic number first though, which is fairly likely but not certain. 


(*) in my ideal plan, I'd work perhaps until April, then hand 3 month notice in, which would coincide with school holiday. It would unlock another year's NI credit, and give me a quiet handover of work before the busy Autumn peak becomes someone else's problem.

savingholmes

I can't control the value of my investments (pension) - so I track how much my mortgage is reducing and any extra £ going into pension.

At one point I was obsessed with FIRE - but I felt like I was missing life now. When I started allowing myself more £ for time out / days out and art I was happier again.

It sounds like what you actually need could be to slow down your fire journey - and allow yourself more time off now. Working 7 days a week is gruelling - for most of us anyway. There are lots of talks on youtube about coast fire or having mini retirements or just working less rather than deferring your living until you hit your number. None of us know if we will make it to our number - we have to find a way to enjoy life along the way

anonmoose

That is very true Savingholmes, in fact I just found out this week someone I know through work has passed away before they reached retirement recently. We don't know what is round the corner.

I was also reminded this morning that my job isn't so bad. My partner is struggling at the moment with office politics and dealing with people he would rather not have to deal with on a regular basis.

One of the big joys of being self employed is that being the boss I don't have to work for idiots. I haven't done it very often over the years as I am quite tolerant but if a client is very unreasonable or just a horrible person to work with then I suddenly become too busy to fit them in anymore, sorry (not sorry). 

So that does give me a huge sense of being in control even though as said before I do always take on too much. 

Sea_Shell

michaels said:

I like to think of each £x saved as being one extra day of retirement.  Count it on the way in and assume something like 2% real terms growth.

So for example a £3 coffee a day for 200 days a year for twenty years or two months extra not having to work.

That's similar to what my signature used to be here...

That £ I save today, is a £ I don't have to earn tomorrow.


Served us pretty well 😎

SouthCoastBoy

I really enjoy tracking my investments, and constantly thinking about them. I enjoy it a lot more than spending money. Never really been interested in material things.

I started tracking my investments and road to retirement in 2007, when aged 42 and had a goal of retirement in 2018, that has been and gone and now tracking retirement at 60 (2025). To me the enjoyment is knowing financially I am in a relatively good place, and if I get made redundant tomorrow to should not be an issue.

I think my obsession with saving and investing stems from my experience as a teenager when the bailiffs knocked on the front door to repossess our house, it was an awful experience, my mum pawned her engagement ring ( in floods of tears), we managed to keep the house. It is an experience I would never want to repeat.

There are no rights and wrongs it is whatever suits you, we are all different and have different experiences that shape us. IMO one of the dangers of a forum is people respond without knowing the person they are responding to or their life experiences and what makes them comfortable.

anonmoose

Yes I do think our childhood experiences do shape our attitudes. This is something I have been thinking about a lot recently. 

I made sure my children wanted for nothing growing up as I had a very different experience and I guess it was natural to want better for them.

Now in their teens I am realising I made mistakes in this area and they don't have any financial savvy or resilience. 

They don't really know how to save for things or compromise as they are used to getting what they want pretty much when they want. This is something I am working on rectifying now but I really regret not starting this sooner.

jimi_man

This boils down to how life is lived. If the objective is to save as much money as possible at the expense of everything else (AFAIK that's the principle of FIRE) then it follows that most enjoyment is neglected whilst working to provide for this, with retirement being the ultimate nirvana.

Therefore it would seem that the whole principle of FIRE is to get the 'boring/unpleasant/dull/pick your own adjective' part of life out of the way as quickly as possible as there will obviously be little enjoyment here, so as to get to the 'perceived' nice part of life - retirement. That seems an unbelievably depressing way to live life! I'd rather enjoy all of my life (but maybe to a slightly lesser extent), instead of just a certain section (retirement) at the expense of having a miserable 20 years working every hour with no fun, just to finish work earlier. That's magnified if the person has children since you might be forfeiting time/experiences with them, just to save more money for when they aren't around. 

Personally I think a happy medium whereby one can still save enough for an earlier retirement, but whereby someone can still get to enjoy life and if they want a £3 coffee every so often, but not necessarily every day (actually £3.05 in Neros!) then they can have it if it enhances enjoyment of their working life.

I see the same with people who want to clear their mortgage at all costs and want to devote every penny they earn towards it - often at the expense of everything else; savings, pension, family life etc. 

If the working life is unpleasant then do something else that isn't. 

anonmoose

I listened to the podcast that Jim recommended yesterday and it made a lot of sense to me. 

The buy good stuff but keep it forever I do anyway.  I liked the idea to spend big on stuff that's important to you and don't scrimp on that but save hard and be ruthless on the stuff that isn't.

Its common sense really and stuff people have been doing since before the fire term was invented! 

Anonymous101

jimi_man said:

This boils down to how life is lived. If the objective is to save as much money as possible at the expense of everything else (AFAIK that's the principle of FIRE) then it follows that most enjoyment is neglected whilst working to provide for this, with retirement being the ultimate nirvana.

Therefore it would seem that the whole principle of FIRE is to get the 'boring/unpleasant/dull/pick your own adjective' part of life out of the way as quickly as possible as there will obviously be little enjoyment here, so as to get to the 'perceived' nice part of life - retirement. That seems an unbelievably depressing way to live life! I'd rather enjoy all of my life (but maybe to a slightly lesser extent), instead of just a certain section (retirement) at the expense of having a miserable 20 years working every hour with no fun, just to finish work earlier. That's magnified if the person has children since you might be forfeiting time/experiences with them, just to save more money for when they aren't around. 

Personally I think a happy medium whereby one can still save enough for an earlier retirement, but whereby someone can still get to enjoy life and if they want a £3 coffee every so often, but not necessarily every day (actually £3.05 in Neros!) then they can have it if it enhances enjoyment of their working life.

I see the same with people who want to clear their mortgage at all costs and want to devote every penny they earn towards it - often at the expense of everything else; savings, pension, family life etc. 

If the working life is unpleasant then do something else that isn't. 

I can see how you might reach that conclusion and that is the approach of a part of the FIRE community, as far as I see it that's far from the general approach to FIRE and its certainly not my approach.

My view is possibly more value orientated around providing yourself with a good level of financial resilience whilst working towards the larger goal of being Financially independent (for me in my 40's) and then looking to retire earlier than usual (for me that will be perhaps in my early 50's).

The "retirement" part for most people I think is the bit that perks interest but once you realise that its the dependency on full time, permanent, often soul sucking work that we're looking to escape from then the actual requirement to fully retire often falls away. Its about giving yourself other options and not "needing" to do anything, at least in the short term.

I actually think that many people that set off down the full FIRE path actually end up in the position you're talking about. Cutting all the wasting money out, but as Ramit Sethi mentions in that and other podcasts, finding other more valuable ways to spend it. Whether that is investing in a financial safety net, a fancy car or spending less time working and more on travel or children its very personal.

I think the getting the unpleasant working phase "out of the way" is very level one thinking when it comes to this stuff. Its a very blunt approach that works well initially but you soon realise that its not sustainable and its ultimately not serving you well to live like this. I think coming to that realisation is all part of the FIRE journey, but its certainly not all of it.