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How much of your life are you selling off?

Note: This is a long post (3000 words) but it can easily save you years of your life, so take a lemonade

break halfway through if you have to.

When I was a TV-watching child in the 1980s I’d see a lot of commercials for something called “Freedom

55.” It was a financial planning service, offered by a life insurance company, but at the time I didn’t know

what any of those things were. I knew what retirement was though. I also knew that companies in

commercials always try to make themselves sound as good as possible. So the message I took from those

commercials was that age 55 was an ideal age to retire, a few years earlier than the norm.

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That stuck in my mind as a pretty universal benchmark, throughout my gradeschool life and working life,

and it was steadily reinforced by how the working adults around me talked about retirement. It was

something for old people.

I pictured the typical career-fueled life as settling out into three distinct phases: pre-work, work, and

post-work.

Pre-work lasts about 16-23 years, while you live off of your parents, student loans, or both.

Work, the longest phase, lasts about 40 years. During this time you earn an increasing amount, and so as

you soldier on through these four decades, you can afford an increasingly rewarding lifestyle.

Once you are in this phase you also begin to save some of your income for the next phase. The gold

standard benchmark here, culture taught me, was 10%. Save 10% of your income for retirement,

beginning as early on in the work phase as is feasible for you, and you’re cruising. Almost everyone

recognized this benchmark too, yet almost everyone described it as being hard to do. I found it hard.

[A word on cultures: Raptitude is read in over a hundred countries, but it is written by a sole Canadian who

is highly exposed to the culture of the United States. So cultural norms referred to in this post will reflect

the US and Canada more accurately than they do other countries.]

At least in my area of the planet, everyone seems to mostly have the same idea of what they can expect to

save and when they can expect to retire. The average American or Canadian worker retires at about age

63, and this number is rising.

Some people really do love the work part of the work phase but it’s probably safe to say the great majority

prefer its evenings and weekends. We like to be able to decide what to do with our lives. Those of us with

jobs have arranged to sell off large parts of our lives (8 hours a day, 5 days a week, for decades) to

employers, in exchange for money that we can use to build a life that makes us happy. Life is precious —

the only thing we care about really — and finite, so most of us would like to sell off as little of it as possible.

For most people, the post-work phase marks the first time they can do what they like with their days

without the approval of a parent or an employer. The post-work phase is typically shorter than the work

phase. If average life span is a little shy of 80, the typical post-work phase is less than twenty years, and

by the time it begins, the worker’s body can’t do what it used to do.

A good way to be unusual

Through a happy accident, I’ve recently discovered a movement of people who are finishing the clock-

punching phases of their lives far earlier than the status quo. I had no idea what was possible for people

willing to deviate from the norm.

If the “very good” benchmark is 55, then 50 is truly fantastic, and 45 must be bordering on impossible.

After all, to retire at 45, you must save enough money in a 20-25 year career to pay for your living

expenses for the next 35 years — as long as you don’t live past 80.

Yet normal people with middle-class salaries are retiring at 45, or 40, or even 30.

Tim Stobbs is on pace to retire at 45. One of his readers, “Dave”, retired at 40.

Mr and Mrs Money Mustache retired at 30.

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Jacob Lund Fisker reached financial independence at 30 — after a five-year career making a mid-five-

figures salary.

When you retire that early, you’re shrinking the work phase in order to lengthen the post-work phase,

which means you have less time to earn the retirement fund, and more years of living expenses to pay for.

If you retire at thirty, you need enough money to live on for fifty or more years.

This is why early retirees advocate reaching financial independence — saving enough that you can live off

the interest alone without touching the nest egg itself — before you shut off your career income. This

means you can live to be 200 if you like, but you’ll need to save more than a twenty-year burn-off fund.

Realistically though, most people who retire that early are going to have some kind of additional income

during the post-career phase anyway. If you’re done your career at 35, you’re still in your prime physically.

You need to put your energy somewhere, and there’s no reason not to put it somewhere that makes money,

like maintaining rental properties, building a small business, writing books or working part-time at

something you love.

But that still leaves a lot that has to be put away in the mean time.

How do they save that much?

They observe the relationship between their happiness and their spending, and they stop wasting their

income on things that don’t return much happiness.

They also make a point of becoming financially literate, which means they understand (for example) that a

single $20-a-week habit can add a year or two to the work phase of your life.

When you compare the amount of happiness we actually derive from our unnecessary spending habits to

the amount of happiness that can be derived from years of paid-for freedom (not to mention a clear and

secure financial position the whole way there), most of those consumer habits come to appear glaringly

absurd.

Basically, the main difference between the ER (early retirement) crowd and regular working people is that

they strive to be rational with their money, in terms of what it actually does for their quality of life.

Most people’s financial decisions are driven by what the people around them decide — which, in this culture,

typically ranges from thoughtless to completely backwards — and conscious thought about the getting the

best deal on happiness doesn’t enter the picture. Would you rather have five all-expenses-paid years off to

spend with your family, learn a language or build a business — or drive a big car instead of a small car? It’s

shockingly normal for people to choose the latter, because they have no idea that they’re making that

choice at all.

The long-term effects of a single financial decision

The biggest re-calibration for me has been the shift in what it means to be able to “afford” something. In

my culture, to be able to afford something seems to mean, “to be able to acquire physical possession of

that thing in a socially acceptable way” — if you have to steal it or take out a payday loan in order to buy it,

you can’t afford it. But to borrow money from a bank to buy a car, rather than saving the money first, is

normal.

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My first car was $15,000 and I only had enough money to put $1,000 down on it. As far as I was

concerned, I could “afford it” because the payments didn’t put me in the red.

The car is getting old and has been paid off for years now, but my next vehicular decision will be much

more rational. A contractor at work asked me why I drive a little Civic — it’s normal in my industry to buy a

full-sized pickup truck once you can “afford” it, because we work on construction sites and it’s just

altogether more manly and awesome to be able to drive over curbs onto muddy new developments than it

is to park your hatchback on the nearest pavement and walk.

I can imagine a few other benefits. You also get to spin your tires angrily, you get to sit up high, you can

haul snowmobiles and other expensive toys out to the lake, if expensive toys are your thing. But all of these

minor thrills seem pretty frivolous for my life, plus you have to help people move all the time. Still, those

advantages may be worth more to others.

But how much more? The extra monetary cost is astounding. When you’re saving to retire at some point, as

all workers are, any unnecessary costs should be seen as being sucked from your retirement fund (along

with years of corresponding investment gains) which is tantamount to adding to the length of time you

have to spend working.

The difference between a new, loaded half-ton and the small car I would otherwise buy is about $35,000, in

terms of purchase price. Plus financing. On top of that, conservatively, another $50 a week for gas (and

that’s at today’s prices) for the life of the vehicle. Then more expensive insurance, tires, oil changes and

repair costs.

If that money was socked away in investments instead, after only ten or twelve years it could easily make a

hundred thousand-dollar difference, which at my level of living expenses would allow me to take four years

off work.

That enormous increase in freedom represents the fruits of only one financial decision. Imagine if you

applied this kind of clarity and rationality to every area of spending in your life, and invested the savings for

long-term.

The most important number

The math might seem murky, but there’s really one main factor that determines how long you must work

until you reach financial independence, and that’s the percentage of your take-home income that you invest

for retirement.

Aside from that percentage, it doesn’t even matter what your income is, and here’s why: your saving

percentage indicates both how much of your money you can save, and how much you can’t — which is how

much you need for your annual living expenses. The proportion between the two determines how much

paid-for time off you can buy with each year’s savings, regardless of income.

Example. If you take home $40,000, and you save 50% of that, it means you’ve learned to live happily on

$20,000 a year. This means for each year you work, you put away the other 20k — enough to live for a

year without working.

If you save 75% of your income, it means you’ve cut your living expenses to a lean $10,000 a year, and

every year you have enough left over to live on for three years. You invest this 30k, and after a decade or

so it’s grown into almost five years of living expenses. Plus, in each of those years you’re putting away

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three more years of living expenses. You won’t have to work for long.

Obviously by saving more, your retirement stash grows much faster, but each saved dollar goes so much

further, because you need far fewer of them to pay for your living expenses. Add in compound interest, and

you are creating some enormous personal leverage every single time you can cut costs in your life.

Think about it this way: if you decide to live without your daily Starbucks, not only do your savings grow

that much faster, but you need to save less overall, because your retirement fund no longer needs to

include a thirty-years’ supply of Starbucks.

On the other end of the savings scale the leverage is very low. If you save 10% of your 40k income then it

means you insist on spending $36,000 a year on your lifestyle, which means it takes nine years of saving to

pay for one year of living without a job. Your nest egg will grow far more slowly, but worse, it will need to

be huge compared to your apparent ability to save.

This works the same with any income. A Wall-Streeter who nets 1 million annually and saves 10% will still

have to build that money pile for 50 years in order to retire indefinitely, because he’s accustomed to

spending most of a million dollars every year on boat parties and restaurants.

So, Wall-Streeter or Wal-Marter, if you save 10% of your income you will need to work for 50 years to have

enough to live off the returns, all other factors being the same. If you save 55%, you’ll only need 15 years

(these lengths of time are starting from a net worth of zero.) If you save 80%, it’s five and a half years.

There are some factors that can stretch these numbers a bit left or right, but the general principle always

holds.

Mr. Money Mustache did a great rundown on this elegant mathematical phenomenon. If the idea of financial

independence interests you at all, read this post.

Having a higher income ought to make it easier for you to raise your savings percentage, but Parkinson’s

Law often whittles it down again. As we get pay increases, we tend to reward ourselves with more

expenses, instead of rewarding ourselves with more years of freedom and autonomy. Because I always

expected to have more stuff next year than I do now, I had just as much trouble saving 10% when I was

making 25k as I did when I was making 50k. This year I’m on pace to save 50% of my take-home, and as

my income goes up I want that to go up too.

The two big rebuttals

Over and over, in discussions on the topic of early retirement you see two major objections:

1) I can’t possibly save anything in my circumstances!

I realize that there is a whole galaxy of different financial situations out there, including those of people

who are unemployable due to disability or illness, or are otherwise totally dependent on others financially.

Obviously talk about how to allocate your income isn’t relevant to you if you never expect to have an

income.

But everyone else out there in the workforce, whether they’re high-income or low-income, debt-free or

underwater, still makes decisions every day regarding where to allocate their money. The financial

philosophy that leads well-positioned savers towards early retirement is the same road that leads people

out of consumer debt, they’re just farther along it.

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Early Retirement Extreme is a fantastic place to start if you’re in a low-leverage situation because it shows

you what is possible even with a very low income. Most career people wouldn’t have to make anywhere

near the spending cuts Jacob did to get his working obligations over with in five years. In his left sidebar is

a 21-day crash course on how a person can adopt a lifestyle that saves $500 a month even on a minimum

wage income.

Whether you must first put your monthly surpluses towards debt, or whether you can start investing it right

away, you are still getting ahead of where you would have been.

2) But I would rather enjoy my life than deny myself everything I want!

From reading angry internet threads between ER people and their critics, it seems that most of the

objections stem from one common Western fallacy: that for you to be as happy as you currently are, you

need to spend as much as you currently do.

As these threads unfold, it becomes clearer that the root of the critic’s fear is always that they will end up

less happy as a result of giving up certain luxuries. Every early retiree I’ve read about says sacrificing their

expensive habits made them happier almost immediately (sometimes there is an adjustment period), and

quickly pays dividends in other ways: switching to a bike commute saves thousands while making you fit

and spry; selling the boat creates an instant windfall, and a load of invisible stress evaporates; limiting

yourself to one drink (most of the time) means no taxis and no hangovers, and teaches you how overrated

alcohol is as a fun-maker.

I am way happier already. In the three months since I’ve been smarter about my spending, I’ve saved three

months’ worth of living expenses, which has an immediate stress-reducing effect. I could get laid off or

fired and have plenty of time to figure out what to do, so there’s much less day-to-day stress about my job

performance, which has actually led to an effortless improvement in job performance. I have a sense of

control over my life that I’ve never felt before. These intangible dividends are immediate, and they don’t

cost a cent because the money is still mine.

Critics of the ER movement seem to believe that saving a large proportion of your income means you live a

life of sacrifice and deprivation. I had always regarded saving like that too — that saving means you are

denying yourself happiness now so that you can have a little more of it later. This is the heart of the

Western Consumer Fallacy: that happiness comes from spending, and therefore less happiness comes from

less spending. So far there’s nothing I miss. I am worlds happier. Right now. I have no envy when I see

people in fancy cars and clothes, rather the opposite, because those luxuries represent to me what they’ve

given up, not what I’ve given up.

Sacrifice is a misleading word, because life is all trade-offs. A sacrifice implies that there is a gain

somewhere, a reason to do it, but the word mainly connotes a loss. To say something is a sacrifice is to

have tunnel vision on what is being given up, and misunderstand or forget what is being gained.

Do I feel deprived getting into my old Civic when I know I could be getting into a big awesome truck?

Definitely not, even though I would admit that if it cost the same (both to me and to the planet) I would

prefer the truck. But the personal cost is devastating: four years of work, which amounts to more than

1,000 days of doing what someone else tells me to do. The time I feel most deprived is when I wake up and

remember that it’s Monday, and that my day will not be mine today.

***

If this topic interests you, browse the websites linked in this article, particularly

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earlyretirementextreme.com and mrmoneymustache.com. Canadians will find Free at 45 especially useful

because they don’t have to translate terms like 401k and Roth IRA into Canadian. Brave New Life is also

great. Read these blogs, explore their archives. Get a sense of the mentality and how to apply it into your

own situation. Also check out Reddit’s Financial Independence forum. If the math is intimidating, check out

/r/personalfinance, although you can expect a more mainstream outlook there on the subject of retirement

age and savings rate.

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← P R E V I O U S C O M M E N T S

AnonymousJuly 17, 2013 at 3:11 am

Excellent confident analytical vision designed for details

and can anticipate complications before these people take place.

MiroslavAugust 18, 2013 at 7:41 pm

I have been naturally inclined to think about money like this ever since I started to pay it

any attention. I never formed any actual idea, a plan of how much to save, what to

invest in, etc. It was just an idea lingering there for later use(I’m on college now, and

jobless, so no real income), and a subconscious voice that nagged every time I bought

something I thought of as overpriced and unnecessary. It also gave me little guilt trips

whenever I bought a vending machine coffee of food. Oh, and I also had those “63

years, 10%” benchmarks sitting on some dusty shelf of my long-time memory.

But this article gave that suspicion a shape, a clear form, a direction. No longer is it a

vague “I don’t like parting with so much money in exchange for this particular thing, this

is needless spending” sensation, now it’s a conscious “I’m not buying that, I’m saving for

early retirement.” decision. If it wasn’t for this article, who knows, maybe I would have

been gradually peer pressured to let go and spend for the same junk as my imaginary

future colleagues and friends, even though my gut would be saying “no”, with those old

benchmarks reminding me that I’m doing okay in saving a tenth of all my money so that

I can retire somewhere in my sixties. Thanks, David!

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www.youtube.comAugust 19, 2013 at 5:16 am

Hence, when they’d like to buy an asset like a place or an auto, it becomes very hard to

source good funding. Besides, problems won’t go away

if you ignore them. After all, doesn’t it make sense to get some money back after

spending a long day shopping.

financial adviseSeptember 14, 2013 at 11:59 am

Magnificent website. Plenty of helpful information here.

I’m sending it to some buddies ans also sharing in delicious.

And naturally, thanks in your sweat!

EdithOctober 3, 2013 at 10:04 pm

This post is amazing, however, I just read it and am already in trouble. I spend 25

dollars a month to buy food for 6 stray cats that live in a public garden. I already

neutered them (which cost me around $250 dollars, but was a one-time payment) and I

plan on being their benefactor for the rest of their lives, which can last for, let’s say, 10

years. The numbers don’t lie: I would have to work for 2.5 years to keep maintaining

these cats for the rest of their lives. I already buy the cheapest cat food in bulk

available. How can I justify to myself working this long for cats that aren’t even mine?

But I don’t feel I have the heart to stop doing it. Not all decisions involve Starbucks

lattes and gasoline for a SUV. For some, there are moral implications that come from this

information… difficult ones.

Rob in MunichNovember 4, 2013 at 3:26 pm

“Saving money makes it so much easier to live in the moment and not constantly be

drawn into the future, because you have room each pay period for things to happen —

you aren’t constantly having to connect this pay period and the next one in your head.

Worries about money shrink quickly as your watch your savings outrun your bill”

Wow glad I read the comments, budgeting for us has been akin to dieting, can’t do this,

too expensive, overshot the budget etc. But this really flips the whole budget thing on

it’s head. Creating space is a hugely positive reinforcing message.

So instead of saying to the wife , we can’t afford it because we got a huge ballon

payment coming, I’ll say I’m working to create loads of space free so we can stress free

afford that thingy you want next year.

Takes a negative a creates a postive

Thanks!

Jack MabryFebruary 28, 2014 at 4:05 pm

I retired when I was 37. To me, working for a company is the same as being a

prostitute. You’re selling them your body, for “x” amount of time, for “x” amount of

money. Whenever I thought about it, it sickened me. I decided that living on very little

was far better. Luckily, at the time I was in computers, and making quite a bit of money.

So, I saved a nice nest egg, and retired. That was more than 30 years ago, and I’ve

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