Financial Freedom is Not an Illusion

For today's entertainment, I want to address the trolls that dwell in the jungle surrounding our Village, who I've noticed like to stop in once in a while on various sites like mine in an attempt to rain our peaceful financial parade. These "trolls" are the cynics who try to rob us of our illusions of investing and retirement grandeur.

You come here to read about money--how to keep it, how to save it ... basically, how to make it work for you so you can spend your life not worrying about it, and doing what you want.

I've shown you the simple math behind my claim that even a household with an average income of $52,000 or less can retire in less than 20 years. Sounds like a dream to me!

But if you hit retirement by the time you are 42, what do you do with the rest of your life?

The answer is simple, as I've explained: you do whatever you want. You're free... as long as your money is growing at a rate faster than you are spending it.

Maybe your passion is "building" something, like a business... so you might end up running that business. Or maybe you'll start writing books, and launch a publishing company or something similar. Or maybe you just want to buy houses, fix them up, and sell them, so you start a real estate holding company. No matter what you do, it seems you'll probably end up "working" again.

Here's where the jungle trolls swing in to rain on the retirement parade. "But wait! That's a job! So you're not really retired! You just have a lot of money."

I've followed the antics of a few guys who retired early in life. They wear their badge of retirement with pride, while they laugh at the cynics that make the above argument, and who, ironically, still work for a living.

Any of you who seriously make it a goal to "retire" young will be targets for these cynical party poopers. But don't worry: party-poopers work for a living all their pitiful lives.

The thing is, we all have some sort of desire or pursuit which we can't pursue in normal life for one reason or another. Maybe it's something that involved too much financial risk, or it didn't provide enough income to support a family, so we couldn't pursue it. The cynics claim that even if you have tons of money, but go on to pursue these other dreams, if you're doing anything that involves money, somehow you aren't really retired.

Please.

Thanks to these cynics, I thought it might be worth it to spend a few minutes defining or re-clarifying my thoughts about what it means to be "in retirement." I'm talking right to the people who like to troll this site and condemn my simple, fulfilling philosophies on life, my self-evident 5th grade math, and my incredibly simple investment strategies, saying they are un-credible or unrealistic.

A word to the wise: Don't listen to them.

Retirement Is a Choice

I've decided that retirement isn't so much a stage of life, as it is a state of choice.

But the retirement trolls have only one understanding of retirement--having tons of money, and not working. According to them, being retired means not only having enough money to live on and being financially independent, but having hoards of money you can waste with reckless abandon....it also requires that you do no work of any kind. Any departure from this--work you engage in on the side, pro bono, for-profit, volunteer, or otherwise--makes you disqualified from being "retired." It means you are a working stiff. They get upset and tell me that the entire premise of this site--managing money wisely in order to retire early and live a good life--somehow comes crumbling down.

Let me say it again: retirement means you don't have to work, but you can if you want to. Retirement can further be defined by the following logic:

I'm not dependent on a paycheck for my livelihood, and consequently

If I even want to have an "occupation", my choice of what I'll do will not depend on how much money it makes me--it can even make me lose money, which means I have the power to

Give "money" the middle finger when it tries to tell me that I need to earn more of it, leading me to the conclusion that I have

Complete freedom of choice with my life, and also

Complete fulfillment in my pursuits in life, which is really the definition of

True happiness.

So, retirement is defined as doing that which makes you happy, not whatever gets you a paycheck.

Simple, right? I can't think of any better way to describe what we're trying to achieve here. And really, I've met no one with an ounce of sense that disagrees with this if they've actually thought it out.

Since most of the mocking retirement trolls still won't understand, I'll explain more. My definition means that, if I wanted to, and it made me happy, I could spend every day living as a hobo king in the mountains, as long as I have enough money to independently pay for all my expenses. Retirement means not having to show up at 9 a.m., not attending unproductive meetings, working with people who are complete fools, trying to penetrate ridiculous corporate bureaucracies in order to meet profit goals that have no bearing on your life, or climbing some invisible career ladder that won't make you a better person or give you real happiness.

Even after I'm "retired," I still plan to do work of some kind. I look at the lives of some of the most successful and happy people I know, most of whom are advanced in age, and see them still "working." Why? They have hoardes of money. None of them even worry about having to draw retirement, don't care about how much their salary is, and don't need it.

These people know that when you stop working, you tend to start dying. Your mind goes. Your body gives out. You get flabby, dumb, lazy, and stop living the life of a Villager.. Then you really do have to "retire".... into the grave, or into the prison of an assisted living community. How depressing!

Conclusion: What It Means to Retire

This post may have come across as a rant. For that I apologize--but I hope the Retirement Trolls don't mistake: I'm not sorry for my definition. I'm only sorry that the Trolls don't get the vision of what we're achieving here. I'm sorry that they don't yet understand that living a satisfying life does not mean having fancy crap in your garage, your boathouse, or your normal house. Happiness is having freedom of choice, and using it to better yourself and others, to do fulfilling things in life. That being the case, I'm partially living a retired life right now. I've just got to pile up a bit more money to be there 100%.

I know that you can come to this understanding. That's why I've written this post today--I have hope for all of mankind, even the Retirement Trolls.

Next up.... some follow-up discussion on "illusion vs. reality" Don't miss out.

Real Luxury, or Stupidity Disguised as Luxury: Which Will It be?