How Did You Retire at 43??

Wait ... what???

http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2010-07-15/

Last week I announced to my employer that I was going to be retiring at the beginning of June.  Reactions were mixed, but mostly dumbfounded.  How could I be retiring?  I was only 43.  What did I plan to do with myself?  How would I support myself?  What if the stock market dropped?  Did I win the lottery?

I'm going to give you a sneak peek to the end of the article, so if you don't read anything else, just read this:

Here is the simple solution for retiring:

Stop buying so much shit!!

OK, now that we've gotten that out of the way....

The key is getting out of the consumerist trap.  I'll cover how to do this in subsequent blog posts, but, if you can free yourself from consumer culture, you can easily retire by the time you're 40, or before that if you are a high income earner.  People who say that they "can't retire" usually have one or more of the following:

• multiple electronic devices such as iPads, XBoxes, laptops, iPhones, big-screen HDTVs or other toys that they trade up every year or so.
• unlimited data plans for the $400 phones so that everyone in the family can text, talk, and surf the internet at all times without restriction.
• cable packages for $200 or more per month so they can DVR or OnDemand over 1000 channels.
• shiny new cars, trucks, or SUVs that get terrible gas mileage, that are purchased with 6-year financing (or, perhaps even worse, leased), that they drive 60 miles or more each way to work.  Work, by the way, that they are doing so they can afford to drive their shiny new status symbol.
• giant McMansions deliberately purchased far from the places where employment is located, so that the "owners" of the 30-year jumbo loans can live in the country.  Except, of course, that they're never in their underwater albatrosses because they are always at work to pay for them, so they don't really "live" there at all.  And, naturally, they must have their shiny new SUVs (see above) to drive an hour or more each way to a house with a square footage 3 times or more of a single family home of the 1950s. 
• Coach or other "designer" purses, shoes, and clothing.
• climate-controlled storage units that they rent for $150 or more per month so that all of the stuff they've accumulated that won't fit in the McMansion will be nice and cozy during the winter, and not too stuffy during the summer.

And why do they have all of these status symbols?  "Because I deserve it."  "Because I work so hard / work so much."  They are saying that they deserve to be slaves to things.

This defies logic -- I am miserable because of the job I hate, working with people I don't like, for a boss I don't respect, doing work that I don't care about, and spending frustrating hours in traffic every day driving to and from so I can buy things so I can get in my car the next day to start the cycle all over again.

So the solution to our unhappiness is to buy things that will make us feel better temporarily.  Of course, the things that make us feel better temporarily then trap us into more work so that we can pay for them.  We are like crack addicts who will trade our lives away for the next brief high.

This is the part from the beginning that I liked so much I had to write it twice:

Here is the simple solution for retiring:

Stop buying so much shit!!

It doesn't actually make you happy and it ensures that you will be a slave to your employer until they decide they don't want you around any more.  When that day comes (and it will come as long as you are living in 21st century America), do you want to be sitting in your over-leveraged house surrounded by the stuff that put you in $15,000 credit card debt*, thinking about the career that you still owe $33,000 in student loan debt* for, and knowing that you are only one paycheck away from homelessness, just like 1/3 of all Americans**?

Or do you want to be contemplating your healthy stash of "FU" money that stands between you and whatever life throws at you?


*debt figures from http://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/credit-card-data/average-credit-card-debt-household/
**http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/10/one-third-of-americans-one-paycheck-away-from-homelessness.html