After all, they sort of do the same kind of thing, act in the same sort of space and need to merge IMO. Before 2009 I had been a member of English Heritage for a while, largely to get into Stonehenge for free[ref]free once I’d gone about three times in a year ISTR[/ref]. It was a good staging post on the way down to the West Country, and usually picked up enough visits to make it worthwhile. It’s been a while since I was part of this, but now I have returned to the land of those with a regular income, I need to go out and put some of that to work.
I want to see more of Britain, and take my time
One of the remarkable things about Britain is that a lot of the place is like a history theme park, and that it has all sorts of bizarre things scattered around the landscape. Take this oddball triangular building. It challenges you a bit being inside, we are so accustomed to rectangularity in rooms that it’s quite disorienting.
Rushton Triangular Lodge. It’s not a funny perspective, the groundplan is an equilateral triangle
The aristocracy of this country was eccentric that way, and fortunately the reforming post-war governments dispossessed enough of these folk of their undeserved wealth gifted them by that varmint William the Conk that we have the opportunity to see some of them.The general principle was since so many people got slaughtered in service to King and Country in the World Wars it was considered a bit rough to have the toff dynasties lording it over the proles like they used to.
There’s no need to get the violins out for the aristocracy – the landed gentry still own about half the rural land this sceptred isle, because the crafty devils struck a deal with the reforming post-war governments. Of course, Mr Attlee, they said, you wouldn’t like to break up family farms now, would you, after all we have just survived a war and had to dig for victory? So give us an exception on agricultural land for inheritance tax. Which still stands, but of course our landed gentry can’t be arsed to drive their own little Fordson tractors or get their hands dirty. They take public money in the form of subsidies to the tune of about £245 for every British household to reduce the costs of carrying their unearned capital stored in agricultural land, get huge contracting firms to farm the land, and flood it with chemicals, poison our birds while they of course keep the ancestral wealth in their dynasty free of IHT, because it’s agriculture, innit? To add insult to injury for the great unwashed, Gerald Grosvenor, who owned £9bn of ancestral wealth when he carked it recently, moaned that it didn’t make him happy. Well, Gerald, you know what you should have done then, you miserable git. Spread some of the love around, then maybe your kids don’t get to moan the same when they’re 64 😉 Seriously, you couldn’t make it up.
In the UK there are two heritage organisations, the National Trust and English Heritage (and the Historic Wales and Historic Scotland equivalents to EH). The overlap is notable – for instance EH run Stonehenge and the National Trust own the site, and Avebury it seems the National Trust run the site, even if they did upset Bill Bryson. Cynical me wonders how he managed to shell out £31 before seeing a stone, and whether his role as an English Heritage commissioner had something to do with his discombobulation. I’ve had the same dilemma as Bill whether to take a fleecing from the National Trust or observe from the sidelines but if he really did manage to miss one of these great big things
One of the massive stones at Avebury, of which there are many
while he was so busy chasing comestibles then I think he needs a visit to the optician. Personally, I don’t expect to pay anything even for parking when I go to Avebury, but I guess I have more experience of the site than Bryson had 😉
The Telegraph’s Money Makeover is a rich seam of entertainment for a grizzled mustelid observing the triumph of hope over experience in the human condition. It seems to be an endless tribute to wannabe buy-to-letters wanting to retire on a woefully small portfolio, thirty-somethings with a tenuous understanding of just how much money you need to have to retire before midlife and the oddball doctor with a massive salary, none of which ever seemed to stick to the sides. I could generalise many of the tribulations as “if you are asking whether Buy-to-Let will solve all your problems, the fact you are asking the question tells you the answer is no”. As a respite from this folly, this week we have a paragon of financial rectitude who is debt-free by 37, but there’s still no pot of gold at the end of his rainbow.
Consider this plangent photo of domestic bliss and unachievable dreams, a comely couple and two preschool rugrats with their associated plastic paraphernalia.
with two young sons, JM wants to retire as soon as possible to spend more time at home.
Our man has done an awful lot of things right in the search for early retirement. He appears debt-free in the true sense – paid down his mortgage on a Cambridge semi at £300k, which is a very respectable achievement at 37[ref]a cynical Ermine wonders exactly how he has managed to pay off £300,000 on a household income of £77k within’ say, 10 years. One assumes the untimely demise of a rich aunt may be a factor[/ref]. But he’s done two things wrong for his dreams of early retirement, and they’re in the foreground of the picture.
I’m not saying that having children means you can’t retire early, but JM has a fairly pedestrian job for early retirement ambitions, and kids will seriously hamper his ability to reduce his outgoings, which is the other route to early retirement – being able to sustainably reduce your spend. Which is pretty much what the Torygraph had to say to him. To wit:
JM is doing well in retirement provision but the challenge for him will be getting enough funds to enable him to retire early and provide for his family.
followed by the coup-de-grace
I would sound a note of caution, as one parent to another: children tend to get more expensive as they get older.
The other lot aren’t that much more encouraging
Mr Massey’s primary goal of retiring early to spend more time with his family is unrealistic given his current financial planning route.
and
should concentrate the bulk of his pension savings into shares-based investments as, realistically, retirement is at least 18 years away.
A quick tappety tap on the Ermine abacus tells me that 37+18=55. As for spending more time with the fruit of his loins, in 18 years time they will have just come of age. He’s not gonna do it before then unless he does something very different. Having children is going to be a big project for anybody- if we say JM is exceptionally frugal and gets his two for the £230,000 they say it costs to raise one child, then clearly in 20 years time his pension pot will be down that much[ref]a DINK couple usually spends more on other things, so the difference may be less[/ref], or at a 4% SWR down about £9000 p.a.. That’s not the sort of thing that early retirement dreams are made of. Of course some people with children can retire early. But you’ll usually find they were in a different class of earnings to JM – The Escape Artist for instance, worked in the City. He probably earned a little bit more than JM, who doesn’t even pay higher-rate tax, which makes paying a fixed sum into a SIPP much less painful than for basic rate taxpayers.
There are other minor aspects of JM’s carry-on which could make it less of a stretch. Let us take this oxymoronic statement
He takes risks where he understands them and has £17,000 in a stocks and shares Isa invested in Greggs, BP, Poundland and Tesco – companies he is “familiar with”.
Mr Massey is satisfied with his investments so far, although Tesco has delivered some losses.
He said: “Everyone always goes to Tesco – I thought how could the shares fall? Well, they did.”
JM, you got frickin’ soaked on Tesco. I’m not particularly having a larf, so did I. I didn’t buy them from a careful consideration of the company, but figured if I paid less than Warren Buffet I would be okay. Turns out this was one of the few occasions when WB didn’t know what he was doing. So I got soaked too. I didn’t understand the risk, and nor did you. The big difference between us, bud, is that Tesco is less than 1% of my portfolio, whereas it’s probably more than a fifth of yours. I also realised within three years of starting along the high yield portfolio route that the global imbalance[ref]that imbalance is less bad for me because many of the FTSE100 firms I have in my HYP make their money partly overseas. Greggs and Poundland seem pretty domestic, looks like JM invests in what he sees on the High Street. From what I see on the High Street I would actively run miles from any firms with a High Street presence, the Internet is eating their lunch. Tesco is in fact my only such firm[/ref] was probably hazardous to my long-term wealth and started to shore it up all round with diversifying index funds, focusing on ex-UK to specifically fight that bias. So go do yourself a favour and listen to Lars Krojer and sharpen up your act. Once my contributory investing career is over[ref]I am reasonably convinced by Lars’ argument you can’t long-term sector pick and beat the market, though I am less convinced that if you only have a few years to get into the market that valuation/when you get into it is irrelevant. I happened to be very lucky in starting in 2009, though of course the effects of the GFC on my job was the reason why I started then.[/ref] I may choose to listen to Lars, so save myself a hunk of time I could be spending on more interesting things to do.
So, JM, you had your two precious little bundles of joy because of all the warm feeling, extra meaning and richness that they add to your life. Good things are worth paying for, and life is full of choices. That particular choice means you won’t get to put your feet up at 55. For God’s sake don’t suddenly decide that your special snowflakes need private education, else you’ll be retiring about never on that salary. Now of course you could go out and get a much better paid job working for The Man, but pushing 40 is leaving it a little bit late to do that. Colour me a heartless bastard but “trust and grant manager at a charity” sounds like a) you’re milking it b) there aren’t that many opportunities for progression and most of them will be dead men’s shoes, the charity sector is notorious for crap pay[ref]until you get to the executive levels where anything goes[/ref] and c) you are just one re-org or restructuring away from redundancy. So better hope nothing goes wrong in the next 18 years, eh?
There are things you could do to make yourself better off in retirement. But you ain’t getting to retire early. Paying your mortgage off was a grand achievement and hats off to you, but paradoxically it was probably a bad move for retiring early. I cocked this up too. At historically low interest rates, you could have carried that sucker for longer and pumped more of your salary in pensions, getting a 20-32% lift and getting longer for it to appreciate, while paying 3% on the money. The 20% uplift plus the ~4% real return on equities make that a win even if you get to put your 25% pension commencement lump sum into clearing the mortgage in 20 years. Think of it as tax-free mortgage saving. Of course mortgage rates will go up over two decades but you will also be paying it off slowly so you’ll take less of a hit, and inflation will erode the principal anyway.
So listen to the drunk telling the traveller how to get to the city with your unrealistic dreams of early retirement.
If you want to get to there, you don’t start from here.
I am curious that none of the advisers asked this fellow whether his question was wrong. It often pays in life to try and make sure you ask the right question, because once you have framed that you’ve eliminated some of the options. Surely if he wanted to spend more time with his family, perhaps the question should be ‘ Can I afford to go part-time for 10 years and see my family grow up’ rather than “Can I retire early”. He still won’t get to retire early, but perhaps he gets something else of value. His wife has clearly jumped to this option, and by reducing the £700 a month childcare bill he would reduce the financial hit and get to see more of his children rather than more of the office.
We all go through life accumulating experiences, and, inveterate pattern-matchers that we are, all too often we infer the general from the particular of those experiences. In the search to impose order and meaning on our world, we frequently conflate correlation with causation, and build up a mental map of the world at odds with the territory. Some of these beliefs about the world gained from experience are just plain wrong or get overtaken by events after they are formed. To take one
“You need to work”
When I left university I had no money and therefore needed to work. I hadn’t come across the option of dropping out and possum living, and it probably wouldn’t have appealed, a young buck must run with its kind 😉 Peer pressure is strong for young adults.
But in that first year I built a limiting belief, by inferring the general from the particular. I needed to work, at that time and for a significant time afterwards. But not for all time. I needed to earn enough to pay the capital cost of some of the necessities of life. I didn’t think that deeply about buying a house, though I left London because it was clear that I wouldn’t be able to buy a house there and maintain a decent lifestyle. I really should have thought more about buying a house at a market high, but that’s another story. There’s a pattern developing here, an across the board intentional living fail.
A considerable amount of luck saved me from myself – I was enterprising enough to shift myself from boring jobs until I found one that loaded the grey matter enough to be congenial, I was fortunate enough to end up in a company where I was looked after pension-wise and the pay was decent enough. And then got on with the job of spending too much but not more than I earned on consumer crap, partying, beer and travel.
And so across the intervening years, the world globalised and loads more people joined the capitalist workforce, and it started to arbitrage towards cheaper countries. I was protected from that from a long time but eventually the erosion came to my door. There’s an argument that the Millennium Bug work of the year 2000 accelerated this erosion of developed world work in the IT world. The Firm opened a BPO joint in Mahindra and a couple of the localised Big Cheeses instrumental in setting it up benefited handsomely from their shareholdings in that.
I wasn’t passionate about IT although competent, I moved into it and out of electronics engineering because that was what The Firm did. Some people did jump ship at the time, fearful that their electronics skills would atrophy. In the first glimmerings of intentional living I came to the conclusion that I worked to live not lived to work, I was in serious negative equity so I adapted and retrained. I suspected electronics design would go to cheaper countries, and it did – the tide would have gone out on me faster in electronics that it did in IT. 1
Limiting beliefs can seriously hold us back in life. But most of the time such beliefs are invisible to us. They control some of our thoughts and behaviors behind the scenes, enough to curtail our results in some area of life.
His article also proposes a method of eliminating these. I don’t have his particular brand of materialist rationalism, so while I am prepared to acknowledge some limiting beliefs, I won’t fight all of them. One of mine is that something snapped in me mentally in the last few years at work, and that once something like that has broken it will never bear that load again. Since I’m rich enough not to have to challenge this by finding another job, I don’t have to go through the pain of challenging it, or indeed find out that it is in fact true. The evidence that countermands that belief is that people overcome much greater mental challenges than having a really shitty experience of working for a year.
The way this belief limits me is that I will never be able to feel safe enough to deploy any money that I earn in working again to increase my lifestyle, because I will be afraid of losing having the FU nuclear option on work. So while I might well appreciate more baubles and jaunts, no consumer shit tastes as good as financial freedom feels. And I’ve gotten used to owning my own time. So I’ll pass on the extra money and enjoy the extra time.
Over at SHMD Jim has returned to work. While that wouldn’t be right for me I tip my hat to a fellow who concluded a 0 hours week wasn’t enhancing his quality of life, and took the obvious corrective action – go get a job. I’d actually read Jim’s article before it was cited on Weekend reading and just thought good for you Jim, about time too 😉
When I read the phrases selected by Monevator from Jim’s post I thought blimey, did I read the same article? Monevator is a much more pithy and concise writer than I am, but the precise extract and reformatting together with the extra narrative in his post I think says something about both the observer and the observed:
I was struggling a bit with the retirement lifestyle, and finding the change from a full on, full time working week to a zero hour one quite difficult to handle.
I just couldn’t shake the notion that I was too “young” to put my feet up, that I should be working and that I should be out there earning money.
I might not have “needed” the latter, but it never quite felt that way.
Jim’s evocative description of the problem shows to me an incongruity between his map of how things should be compared to the territory of how they were. He doesn’t need the money, but he needs things to be different to how they are to feel happy about it. This looks like a limiting belief to me, largely because Jim “shoulds himself” twice in one sentence. Two different takes on this issue, one from Psychology Today and the other from the A0M seem to indicate this limiting belief is from an external locus of control in the affected topic. He is measuring an internal state by a yardstick written by other people. Since humans are a social species some of this is inevitable, and there was an easy and obvious solution. Make the territory more like the map and go back to work.
Monevator admits his gut belief later on
But I believe almost everyone will benefit from having an ongoing economic relationship with society while they can – even if only for a day or two a week.
Sadly, by the time most people reach the point of having options, they seem to feel too burned out by the workplace to explore all the various other ways of making money more freely.
Protestant work ethic detector goes off. You don’t have to work to have an ongoing economic relationship with society. I allocate capital, society pays me for the pleasure of using it 😉 Heck, on the other side of the coin the consumers of Britain racking up unsustainable credit card debt have an ongoing economic relationship with society, even if they are on the dole, or reality TV show aristocrats.
Reality TV show aristocrats in an ongoing economic relationship with society
I am thinking of buying a Naim 272 to replace my 30-year old preamplifier, tuner and audio streaming box, surely I still have an ongoing economic relationship with Salisbury then? I don’t even have to worsen Britain’s consumer debt mountain because I have the money.
Now I am a case of the burned out husk Monevator refers to, although I have to say that the proposed alternative of endless hucksterism of selling your wares as a freelancer/contractor gives me even more the heebie-jeebies than the thought of going back to work for The Man. But I’ve already confessed to the potential limiting belief in my case, so far be it from me to criticise either of these two good people for tolerating theirs 😉 We can all afford to pay the cost of our limiting beliefs – I will be poorer by the opportunity cost of the money I could have earned, they will be poorer by the opportunity cost of the time spent working after financial independence. Conversely, they will be richer in money, I will be richer in Time, and each to their own. Neither course is right or wrong, it can only be right or wrong in combination with the individual’s predilections and temperaments, which may change over time.
What’s that burnout process all about then?
Like Monevator, the younger me didn’t understand the burnout mechanism. I saw burnout in enough other people at The Firm, but had been fortunate enough to occupy specialisms slightly removed from the ritual slaughter and yearly cull of too many project managers as the number of projects to manage dropped. I was offered enough PRINCE2 training but I’d rather drink my own urine than be a PM. I have respect for the job and the difficult balances to be made, but I don’t want to be it, and particularly for the Firm. I didn’t realise then that the The Firm employed the same techniques as some Japanese companies on some of these guys – because there were technical reasons why compulsory redundancies were expensive for them, so they needed to mind-f*k people. They created a Redeployment Unit, which was ostensibly to re-educate some of their dead woodold fossils superfluous headcount. It had a terrible success rate – more than 50% of people eventually left on voluntary redundancy terms, because they couldn’t stand the endless Jobcentre style filling in CVs. You had to fill in so many a week, just because. It drove a fair number of people round the bend. In many cases they had been pulled from overworked teams to match headcount targets, it seemed to be a particular irony to then go for a coffee with their ex-team-mates and hear that deliverables were slipping because there weren’t enough boots on the ground. Which conveniently meant they could pull the project, outsource it to India and send the rest of the team to the RU, while marking down their performance management results. Conveniently you were barred from taking voluntary redundancy if your performance management score was needs improvement, so they saved money by sending people round the twist. Nice.
Performance management clobbered me because for the first 20 years at The Firm, appraisal was roughly about how well you did the job. I was okay with that. For an engineer their work usually speaks for itself. However, performance management was a way of introducing arbitrary extra elements, FFS like giving 5 minute seminars at all hands meetings whose tedium was increased by 5 minute presentations on random stuff to tick the box, and it was a bewildering mishmash of capricious targets. Basically you had the choice of meeting the targets or doing the job.
I pre-empted this with the last vestiges of energy I had in reserve in 2009, and fired off speculative applications because there was an opportunity to use some of my legacy electronics engineering skills for the London 2012 Olympics. I was fortunate enough to win that lottery and sweat out three years doing something interesting, time-bound and rewarding. I got a decent sendoff and the guy in charge of delivering the Olympics said I was leaving on a high, and in terms of what I did, yes. But I formed another belief about working then. Which is that working in the modern world of professional jobs is all consuming, over-controlled pissing match that hurts, and I want no more of it in my life.
It took time before freedom from became freedom to, and I realised the value of the prize I had unwittingly taken with me on the way back from the pub at that final leaving do. Eight precious years of my life that I will never live again, and in decent wealth and health, and indeed I still have a few to go before I reach 60 where I’d join the original track of my retirement from work. What’s the point of burning them up working? As Arnold Zack said to Paul Tsongas
Nobody on his deathbed ever said, “I wish I had spent more time at the office.”
Tsongas retired on (physical) medical grounds and cashed in his chips at 55.
It is the privilege of youth to think you will live for ever in perfect health – in general this squares with your experience of life so far, but as they say past performance is no guarantee of future success. I got a long way into middle age on that assumption, and I am still to be to the best of my knowledge in good physical health. But when something existential that you took for granted fails in service, then the knowledge that can happen changes you. I like to think I got some wins out of the negative experience – I deepened, and took the opportunity to jump the tracks of the assumptions I had never challenged since first starting work. I took the glittering prize of my time back with me, but I only unwrapped it and saw its gleam after the first phase of decompression had passed after two years. I had to switch off so much of myself to get through the last three years of working that I had to train myself to see beauty and appreciate music again. It is all the more amazing because I know the emptiness of the burned out years. I have more gratitude for it. It is sweeter for having known the loss, and to discover in the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.[ref]pinched from Albert Camus, Return to Tipasa[/ref].
I hazard that Monevator hasn’t had that experience in the work area of life and I hope he never has, and Jim took corrective action much earlier in his journey out of work, or had greater resilience. Indeed, the younger Ermine knew the feeling of Monevator’s surprise at people’s passivity in the face of an adverse work environment –
Sadly, by the time most people reach the point of having options, they seem to feel too burned out by the workplace to explore all the various other ways of making money more freely.
It’s always a puzzle, why the hell don’t people sort their shit out and improve their situation? The reason it so often happens is that while mental stress may manifest in an obvious breakdown, the seeds are sown and grow in tiny incremental stages beforehand. It is in these days, months and years beforehand that the fightback must commence.The breakdown is the result of feedback mechanisms that are trying to compensate for the stress finally being overwhelmed. While they work OK these feedback mechanisms minimise the visibility of the problem by trying to maintain the norm. So by the time people realise something is wrong they have passed the point of no return, they do not have the energy to start the fight. I was fortunate in having good people around, and doubly so in having a rare legacy skill that was needed for the last three years it took me to buy my way out. There is much more luck than judgement in that narrative. Some judgement, yes – in the switched off nature where I had lost most of the function of the emotional centre I still had the intellectual centre working at half cock.
I was able to see with unclouded vision that buying into a shattered market of 2009 might be a good idea2, and the nonfunctioning emotional elements did not jam that with the ‘run for the hills’ response. But it’s probably the luck that won it. I learned from that experience, charging into the markets in 2011 during the Summer of Rage and again earlier this year. Last year I was into EMs, which was probably jumping the gun, though the addled brains of my fellow countrymen destroying the currency have helped buy me out of that trigger-happiness and even these dogs are starting to perform.
Work meant more for me when I was younger, it was part of how I saw myself, and it took the long process of individuation to de-identify myself against external values and own my values. There is a lot of existential value associated with work for many people – take Ruth Graham’s rebuttal of the deathbed quote. It’s also not terribly surprising that people who suffer burnout break the link between meaning and purpose and work. After all, if I felt like Jim about work I would have to go back into the fray, risking the burnout again. It is easier to change myself than the toxic world of performance management and meaningless metrics.
Jim doesn’t have that link broken. There are hardly that many terrible consequences of working when you don’t need to. But it isn’t totally cost-free. Those are years you won’t get to live again. Work is a way for finding challenge and interest. But it’s not the only way.
How to go nuclear on your career
This is a bigger change that gradually inching down, or switching to a different type of work. If you have any lingering doubts, then don’t do it. Go for the slowly reducing your hours if you can, or alternative employment. After all, that’s the point of being financially independent. You can choose not to work, but you don’t have to. If you are reducing your hours, things are simpler, you probably want to stay in the same location.
But if you are aiming to finish work, or do something else, then you have more options. Moving is one of them – of course if you have a partner/children and particularly if they are not retiring at the same time then this is out, unless moving closer to their work. For many people FI roughly coincides with their children coming of age, which I hear is also a big life change for the parents. It’s a good time to re-evaluate what you want out of life.
Anybody living in London should seriously consider their options on reaching FI. It’s a young person’s city and no place for old men IMO – and you may as well leverage the closeness to massive pool of employment premium on the value of your house or reduce the rent you’re paying. It’s an opportunity to reduce costs, unless you value the lifestyle more than the cost.
For many people work is a huge part of the amount of day-to-day intellectual stimulation they get, they are too busy in their non-work time making all the trappings of a middle class life happen and wrangling kids. Pull the plug on work in that sort of lifestream and there’s going to be a great big instant hole.
If you are going to quit then you have to step up to the bigger change. You have greater opportunities too, simply because you now have all your time to allocate to living your unique life. In no particular order I toss these out as things worth considering, they work for me. I’m not saying they have to work for you
Look to your social circle post-retirement
Early retirees, very early retirees, men, those who move on retirement all have a particular issue with this and ideally want to start addressing it before they leave work. To stereotype shockingly in the interests of brevity
Early retirees (30s-40s) and men often have a lot of their social circle connected with work. Retire early and half your social circle is still working and will be for the next 20 years. You want to at least think about backfilling this, and you’re probably going to have to make most of the effort.
Those who move on retirement may face having to start anew in a different place. If you have an idea of where you are moving to, there’s a case to be made for cultivating social connections there ahead of time.
Retiring is also an opportunity to leave behind people who have become toxic in some way, it’s not all bad 😉
Toss your TV.
Slightly tongue in cheek, but it is a particular form of a general principle. Create, learn and be intellectually active rather than a passive consumer. TV is great escapism to switch off from work. You don’t need that any more. And too much of TV is vapid attention-grabbing pabulum whose main purpose is to be a carrier wave to ram consumerist messages into your head.
Learn something new every day
You probably had to do this at work. If you are retired, then you have the freedom to cover new ground. Learn about new things just because. It doesn’t have to be useful. I am thinking of making a bull-roarer today. It is the diversity of what you learn that makes you a more rounded person, and exposes you to more viewpoints. Read at least two papers from the opposite sides of the political spectrum. Try and open your mind to points of view that you don’t agree with. Are they at least internally consistent? Are your views? Are your views perhaps wrong?
Read books as well as the Web
The Web is a fantastic resource for learning something new every day. But it is shallow, it is bad for your attention span, it is often unreferenced and unauthoritative, and there is always the vile commercial imperative in a lot of writing, which favours the attention-grabbing and the short form. I found too much web reading damaged my ability to take in information from books, I had to slightly relearn that
When I say books, I mean books that have at least some print format that is not self-published. If a publisher had to take a risk on the book it is more likely to have merit. The massive swathes of ebooks written by money-grabbing incompetents are a way of trying to ‘monetise content’ and from my experience that content isn’t worth my time. There isn’t a book in everybody, leastways not a book worth anybody’s time. I wish there were a way of screening out the output of ebook content mills on Amazon. Using your public library to borrow real books is one way round that.
Walk/bike everywhere
I’m a walking guy on this front, but that’s because Ipswich is a relatively compact market town. most places I want to go are within two miles. Over distances like that walking wins over cycling by not having to park your legs outside your destination and worrying some scrote is going to pinch them. I’m of the opinion no retiree needs to use a gym3. The trouble with walking when you are working it it wipes out a huge amount of your small amount of free time, after all if I want to walk somewhere two miles away and come back it’s going to wipe out an hour and a bit of my day. That’s tough if I only have four hours free time. But it’s no beef for a retiree. It’s good for you, and thinking while walking is somehow a different and more lateral experience too.
Obviously there’s space for the car as well, if you are going to haul stuff. But don’t go nuts on it. I walk a mile and a bit to recycle glass, carrying it in a rucksack. You can easily carry 10kg in a backpack, more in panniers on a bike.
Create experiences, don’t buy them
Climb hills, learn about Nature, invent, carve, repair, originate before consumption. Many ‘attractions’ are simply commercial enterprises designed to separate parents from their money because they don’t have enough energy or imagination to distract/entertain their kids themselves. I personally avoid places like this like the plague. But there are similar joints for adults, and, I am sad to say, particularly targeted at men who have a weakness for extreme this and that. There are general trends to commercialise, professionalise and monetise recreation. What did kids do before Go Ape? They climbed the trees and built their own tree-houses from scrap wood. BTDT
Do hedonism, but vary it. Prize diversity and quality over quantity
There’s nothing wrong with going to a decent restaurant every so often, but it should cost you more than £100 for two (Londoners probably need to think £300). Do better, but less often. There are vast swathes of middling and low end joints which aren’t worth your custom, go big or go home, but go infrequently. And spin it out with other sorts of hedonism.
Travel alone sometimes
You see far more of a place when you travel alone. Conversely the experience of travelling with your partner is a more congenial experience and gives you shared stories. Make space for both.
Be insanely curious
Poke about in the cornucopia of variety that is our world. Take things to bits, turn them over and wonder why. Lift stones and see what’s underneath4. Play
Do one thing at a time, and do it well
There’s a trend towards multitasking – looking at your phone while listening to an audiobook etc. Humans haven’t suddenly become great multitaskers over the last 20 years. If it’s worth doing it’s worth doing well.
Leave the smartphone at home
This is a personal bugbear of mine. I decommissioned my smartphone when I realised it was simply pissing me off for no good reason, and swapped it for a dual-SIM plastic Nokia 150. Why? Dual SIM gives a better chance of getting a signal in the countryside if they are on different PAYG bearer networks, plus I can route outgoing calls and SMS via the cheapest option. I couldn’t stand the touch keyboard, and prefer predictive text SMS. The RF performance of a basic phone is so much better than a smartphone, people can actually hear me and I get to hear them (if they aren’t using a smartphone outside an urban area). Every photograph I’ve taken with a mobile phone is a little bit shit and makes me wish I hadn’t taken it or had used a real camera. I don’t regularly do Facebook, twitter and all that cobblers. A smartphone is a really crappy satnav, because again the RF performance of the GPS is poor in urban areas, which is of course where you really need detailed navigation and good responsiveness. They are great in the open, on motorways and A roads, the sort of places where it’s easy to navigate using map and road signs 😉 I bought a Garmin satnav after realising that I was going to more places I hadn’t been before even in Suffolk and was spending too much time and fuel overshooting, then turning round to back up. It performs properly in urban areas, uses DAB to update traffic reports rather than spying on me by using the mobile network. A smartphone does a load of things, all of them poorly, and I got sick of that in the end.
Reduce unnecessary interruption in your life
Most of these come from electronic devices and social media. You can probably still swim with the hive-mind by connecting every three hours and then disconnecting, and the old saw about connecting to email once or twice a day is also worth noting. Even if you are a social media maven, well, connect every hour or half-hour if you must, and then give your full attention to whatever you are doing. If you can’t be bothered to give it your attention, then perhaps just cut it out of your life altogether. You don’t have this choice at work, because obviously you are being paid to do what others want.
Pursue novelty. For its own damn sake
But try to avoid paying for it 😉 In general any new experience or thing should challenge you, teach you something or make you grow some tiny bit. Too many manufactured experiences are designed to get you to buy something or take part in the sequel, hence try to avoid paying for it. I admit that three years of frugality mean I take this a little bit too far. I should become more prepared to pay for and honour quality and distinctiveness.
Choose diversity in what you do
You may think you want to lie on the beach or play computer games all the time. Too much of any one thing isn’t good for you. Mix it up. You have the opportunity now your time is your own. Seize it. If you’re sitting in the same place for as long as you were at work you’re probably doing something wrong even if it is on the beach or at a computer game.
Does retiring early kill you faster?
Towards the end of his piece Monevator opined,
Incidentally, I also think retiring early is bad for your health.
This is a hard subject to get any accurate research on. For starters, people who retired early in the 1970s and 1980s tended to be be educated white collar workers, which is a shocking sample bias. These guys are going to be richer than the general population, and, surprise surprise, richer people live longer anyway. Pretty much everyone reading this will probably have a longer life expectancy than average all other things being equal, let’s face it the poor don’t read about personal finance and early retirement because it’s not relevant to their lives. There are just too many confounding factors and statistical wrinkles to establish facts with a decent confidence interval. We diverge more and more from each other as we get older – at graduation you had more in common with your peers than you’ll have with them at the reunion year when you all start drawing your State pension. There are more subtle forms of sample bias. Some people retire early for health reasons, arguably I am one of them, although for mental rather than physical health. If you retire early for physical health reasons then you’re loading the dice towards shortened longevity, I don’t know what the stats on that are like for mental health. For physical health reasons it’s probably still the right thing to do – for you, and for the same reason as retiring early was the right thing for Paul Tsongas. You gotta play the hand you are dealt.
“Early retirement is generally good for people’s health and wellbeing unless it has been forced on them,” the study said.
“Those forced into early retirement generally have poorer mental health than those who take routine retirement, who in turn have poorer mental health than those who have taken voluntary early retirement.”
A moot point for me then. Arguably it was forced upon me, although I did not retire using any formal ill-health procedure, and indeed took an active part in the decision to retire early but using voluntary early retirement mechanisms. In that case Monevator’s prognosis is right and I will die younger than my parents. OTOH I can hardly say the ESRC’s narrative on mental health squares with my experience of life post retirement 😉
There’s sport for both of us in Sing Lee’s interesting piece using the pension funds from several big American white-collar employers’ pension funds. I confess that I agree with Lee in that technical creativity is probably at it’s peak in the 10 years around 30. Although he took a lot of shit for it Mark Zuckerberg was probably right that young people are just smarter. If people stopped berating him for his political incorrectness and listened to what he said, he proffers a mechanism which makes a lot of sense to me
“Young people just have simpler lives. We may not own a car. We may not have family.” In the absence of those distractions, he says, you can focus on big ideologies. He added, “I only own a mattress.” Later: “Simplicity in life allows you to focus on what’s important.”
Looking at the other end of the working life arc Sing Lee’s 2002 talk of over-funding of pension funds sounds delightfully naive now – he didn’t realise that the developed world was going ex-growth after the dotcom bust. However, when he charted the years of retirement versus age at retirement, I think his narrative is pretty much along with the narrative what I did, although I didn’t have the strategic vision and just ended in a tactical firefight.
The pace of innovations and technology advances is getting faster and faster and is forcing everybody to compete fiercely at the Internet speed on the information super-highways[ref]how delightfully anachronistic, I haven’t heard reference to Al Gore’s information super-highway for years, it’s so AOL Connie[/ref]. The highly productive and highly efficient workplace in USA is a pressure-cooker and a high-speed battleground for highly creative and dynamic young people to compete and to flourish.
However, when you get older, you should plan your career path and financial matter so that you can retire comfortably at the age of 55 or earlier to enjoy your long, happy and leisure retirement life into your golden age of 80s and beyond. In retirement, you can still enjoy some fun work of great interest to you and of great values to the society and the community, but at a part-time leisure pace on your own term.
On the other hand, if you are not able to get out of the pressure-cooker or the high-speed battleground at the age of 55 and “have” to keep on working very hard until the age of 65 or older before your retirement, then you probably will die within 18 months of retirement. By working very hard in the pressure cooker for 10 more years beyond the age of 55, you give up at least 20 years of your life span on average. Sing Lee does stand somewhat charged with inferring the general from the particular. For starters his stats about longevity are typically from people who retired 30 years ago, so the pressure cooker pace of change wasn’t so bad. Some of the jobs will have been more physically wearing 30 years ago which may have taken a physical toll. There’s no good answer to the delay in longevity statistics, we will find out what early retirement really does for my age cohort in a few decades.
But anecdotally I see where Monevator’s coming from. I’ve seen people retire and then pretty much switch off. My Dad did this. He retired, at 65, from his job as a fitter, and while he didn’t zone out totally he watched far too many crappy TV game shows. On the upside he was also stuck to Teletext and share prices6, he read company accounts and went to AGMs, as well as gardening and the occasional travel. In support of Monevator’s angle, as a non-early retiree, he got to 86 before leaving this mortal coil, which is still 16 years of extra time over his allotted three-score-years and ten.
Retiring early does hit people who get a lot of meaning and self-esteem from work. It’s not inconceivable that if they lose meaning from life they may live shorter lives, and certainly have a lower quality of life. The obvious answer is ‘don’t retire early’.
I still indulge the passion for electronics in making instrumentation, it’s of course different from the purely analogue world I cut my teeth on as a teenager but still fascinating. But there’s no point in trying to make money from it, too niche, too much regulation and too many Chinese copycats ready to eat my lunch. OTOH I would probably still be an employable bench tech/engineer, because there is still some niche instrumentation being made in the UK. But why the hell would I want to drive to Cambridge every day? ↩
I am not a passive investor, because to build my portfolio I had an extremely short timeframe of only a few years. My contributory investing career is almost done now. To me valuation matters for new money, and 2009 was a good year to apply that. I may become more passive after I have finished contributing, though I will leave my HYP in place for the zero carrying cost and the income. ↩
If you get an endorphin rush, have masochistic tendencies or simply like the stale smell of sweat and pheromones, then damn well go for it – there’s nothing wrong with gyms if you can afford the money. I just don’t think they are essential. ↩
Old World only – don’t do this in Australia, where if it moves it wants to kill you ↩
I had the devil’s own job trying to locate this. It is called “Health And Well-Being In Old Age: It’s Still Money That Counts” by the ESRC in 2009 The press can get it from Science Daily↩
Simple Living In Somerset 