In an era of two income households struggling to make ends meet, my story sounds extreme. I retired from my career as a physical therapist at the age of 41 while my wife cut back to part-time work five years earlier at age 35. Some might think we spent a lot of time thinking about money.
That assumption would be wrong. We achieved financial independence by our early 40’s because we spent less time thinking about money than most people. We embrace financial simplicity.
We focused on getting the big things right from the beginning – advancing in our careers while not overspending for college degrees, housing and cars. We then put our financial lives on autopilot so we rarely had to think about money.
This worked amazingly well for us… until it didn’t. I recently wrote a post about struggling through the first year of early retirement.
Autopilot works well when cruising at 30,000 feet, but the pilot needs to take control of the plane for landing. Similarly, having your finances on autopilot is great when cruising along through the accumulation phase. But making a stressful transition demands taking control.
For the first time in years, we had to devote frequent time and energy to financial decisions. Frankly, it’s something we’re not good at.
We’re working on automating our finances for this new stage of life, including developing tax strategies and systems to manage cash flow. But this is challenging while fluctuating between net saver and spender from month to month and likely from year to year going forward.
So I’ve been reflecting on how putting our finances on autopilot got us to this point. I question whether playing to this strength is possible in early retirement.
