Finally Time to Live

Why, at 50 years old, I am jumping off of the corporate treadmill to travel, write, recharge, and find my community

On June 24th, 2022 I powered down my laptop, stowed it in a small backpack along with my company badge and a few other things, and then drove an hour and a half to deliver it to my manager, who was waiting at an Olive Garden near my former office. One order of mozzarella sticks and a few pleasantries later, and I was officially no longer employed.

In my farewell email to my colleagues, I recounted some of the highlights of my career and also wrote about taking some time away. Time to reflect, time for creative destruction, time to empty my cup and perhaps fill it again, time to write, to read, and time to spend with my family.

I’m fifty years old as of this writing. I have a wife, two teenagers, and a Labrador retriever. We named the dog Magic, but his entire life we have called him anything but. “Pep! Peppa Pup! Puppy Pup! Big Boy! Peppa! C’mon you big luck dragon! Let’s go for a walk!” In retrospect, maybe we didn’t need to spend days upon days trying to come up with the name Magic.

Magic, aka Peppa Pup, in one of his more excitable moments

Leaving the workplace at fifty isn’t unheard of. It isn’t particularly blog-worthy. There are plenty of early retirees who have won at life in their twenties and thirties. My wife and I are relative late-comers to the financial independence retire early (FIRE) community, discovering FIRE only about four years ago.

Five years ago, if we talked money at all, we would have told very close friends at dinner that our retirement horizon was “maybe around age sixty-five”, and then we would swallow the anxiety that followed because we didn’t know how even that was going to be possible. Sixty-five seemed to be the number that everyone threw around, so we did too, even though I knew that most of the men in my family worked well into their seventies. We had no plan until we found the FIRE community.

The power of travel rewards paid for nearly all of our trip costs to Arizona

My wife and I had both switched jobs multiple times over the years, and so our retirement savings were fragmented across multiple employer plans and little-used brokerage accounts. As a result, five years ago we had no idea what our net worth was or even how to access some of the accounts.

We didn’t budget because we made good money. Weren’t budgets for people who needed to stretch every penny? Our “good money” seemed to slip through our fingers quite easily. Nicer cars, nicer homes, a camper, a bigger camper, and a big gas-guzzling SUV to tow it. Garage cleanouts were an annual exercise to get rid of old impulse purchases that no longer brought us joy (usually to make room for the additional, newer impulse buys that would soon no longer bring us joy). And food? Well…

Welcome back to Jeopardy. I’m your host, Fear & Anxiety. Allen, you still control the board.

A: Let’s go with Expensive Edibles for $200.

F&A: The answer is “Eat out once during the week, and up to five times on the weekend.”

A: What the hell? We spend $1200 per month eating out and still find a way to spend another $1200 on groceries?

F&A: That is correct! (applause)

We were running full speed on the hedonic treadmill. On some subconscious level, I resigned myself to the belief that this is how much life costs and the only solution was to make more money.

I think a lot of people reach a pivotal moment in their forties and fifties. A sense of mortality begins to set in. Careers begin to plateau. The promises that tomorrow makes become shallow. The bargaining with our future selves is less convincing. The body and the mind grow weary at the thought of keeping this lifestyle going for another 15 or 20 years. This pivotal moment may manifest as an uneasy feeling that something is wrong followed by anxiety or depression. Some people double down and make a big purchase - a huge dopamine boost to shock the system (mine was a Telsa that I literally named The Mid-life Crisis). Tragically, for some, families break apart, because they don’t know another way to keep the happiness going.

We count ourselves among the lucky. Lucky that with age comes a bit of wisdom. Lucky that, as introverts, deep and sometimes painful introspection comes with the package. Lucky that we were wise enough to lean into those feelings of unease, to learn about ourselves, and to have enough courage to make fundamental changes. And extremely lucky to find a community that had cleared much of the path before us.

In the last four years, we have educated ourselves on investing, safe withdrawal rates, Roth conversions, travel rewards, and a myriad of other topics under the FIRE umbrella. We have (mostly) retaken control of our finances and are committed to being more intentional about how we live the second act of our lives.

Everything we are doing now is in preparation for life after our kids have moved on to college, new jobs, and their own lives. This is our journey as we continue to navigate financial independence, become slomads, and live life a little less conventional.