The Financial Independent

“Now what?”

The Financial Independent is about freedom: How you can use money to buy not just goods and services, but your own freedom – to buy back your very life. This blog is my story of how I got here, the choices I made, the mistakes and successes, and where I plan to go from here.

Now what?— It was the question my mom had asked me a little over a year ago.  She had seen my finances after closing on the sale of my previous home, and the hot topic of conversation was, “Do I keep working?”  Coming out of the fever dream that was the global pandemic, I awoke, early 30s, in a new city with a large house fully bought and paid for with approximately $2.5 million in assets, but like the old guidance counselor canard of “If you could do anything in the world, what would it be?”; I didn’t have an answer.

You see dear reader, I’ve been a long time adherent of the FIRE Movement^[1].  In particular, I first cut my teeth on Mr. Money Mustache^[2] circa 2011 (as I’m sure many others have).  That was the year I started my first job after completing my undergraduate, and I quickly came to the realization that work, even my shiny new white collar job, technically speaking, plain sucks.  Thanks to some vague notions of financial planning I had received from my parents, I knew I could “buy” income, so I thought, what would happen if I bought enough assets to replace my job?  From there I stumbled upon MMM, and I’ve stayed the course more or less ever since.

Coming back to recent history, over the course of those pandemic years I went from maybe I can do this to I have way more than I need.  After a period of hestiation I pulled the trigger: I sold my house in an expensive area and moved back to be near my family.  Unlike MMM and friends though, while I did scale back my hours, I kept my job (for a slew of reasons that I want to analyze in another post).  I Ultimately felt I didn’t have enough to retire to (yet), and by that point in my life I had cultivated a working environment that I (mostly) enjoy.  (People in the know will probably think this is One More Year Syndrome, and yea you got me, gg).

There are two general problems I have with the FIRE community at large:

1) One must live “efficiently” or “frugally” (or derogatorily, “cheaply”)^[3].  I understand why there’s this bias: in terms of reaching the goal of retiring early, living frugally is a double whammy.  It increases your ability to save and reduces the amount you need to save by lowering your cost of living.  However, in practice this devolves into what I’m going to coin an Ascetic Spiral, where people proclaim their superiority for eating lentils in an unheated closet with no lights or running water.

2) Although it’s billed as FIRE, the attention is heavily skewed towards “RE”; “FI” is viewed as the apéritif to the “RE” main course.  Now, you don’t need to remind me how much work can suck.  I understand being financially independent, but still working, is nowhere near as sexy as being retired: doing whatever whenever.  I will contend we should not be speedrunning to the finish line, especially if to accomplish that you have to compromise on things you enjoy.

I’ll use gardening as an illustrative example.

I can’t stand the vast majority of fruits and vegetables at the typical grocery store; strawberries in particular I find especially vulgar.  I was born and raised in a small farming town (population 6,000), and as a consequence I developed a taste for fresh, in season, produce.  Buying strawberries, blueberries, apples, what have you, for me, used to consist of stopping at some rural unattended farmstand.  You’d stuff a five dollar bill in the donation slot and grab a pint or bag of whatever was in season off the shelf.  One time my dad and I stopped, and we only had a $20 bill between us, so we wandered up to the farmhouse to get our change.  We ended up down in the fields and shot the shit with the old man for damn near half an hour, but he was just so excited to show off his crops.  Now in hindsight I completely understand.

Since moving out on my own, I’ve tended small plots of fruits and vegetables that grow well locally.  Strawberries, yes, but also onions, squashes, tomatoes, peppers, corn, cucumbers, etc.  Trust me when I tell you there’s nothing better than eating a jar of your own pickles.  When I bought my new home, I specifically decided on this property because it came on half an acre of land.  Not much by any serious farm standards, but it is within the limits of a major city.

All this to say, I would certainly be better off financially if I just bought all my produce from my local grocer.  Between the extra charges for water, additional property taxes on my extra land, using up my own valuable time, there is absolutely no chance that growing is saving me anything.  Yet I continue to do it, because I enjoy it.

That to me is what FIRE ought to be all about: enabling you to do what you enjoy.

Contact: TheFinancialIndependent@gmail.com