Growing Older

How to Retire at 40

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How to Retire at 40

The “4 percent rule” is a bedrock of retirement planning. But does it apply to those who quit working before 65? The rule of thumb holds that retirees who spend only 4 percent of their investment portfolio annually, adjusted for inflation, will be able to stretch out their savings for the rest of their life. For example, a $1 million brokerage account gets you $40,000 a year to spend.

Lately, the 4 percent rule has been under assault, with experts warning that the future could bring weaker market returns, an increased life span, or both. “If you retire at 40 with a couple million dollars, you’re going to worry—about financial emergencies, taxes, inflation, market crashes, and the chance you’ll live a lot longer than you’d planned for,” says Robert Karn, an adviser with Karn Couzens & Associates in Farmington, Conn.

Evan Inglis, an actuary at Nuveen Asset Management, offers an alternative rule: Divide your age by 20—couples should use the younger partner’s age—to get the percentage that you can safely spend. For a 40-year-old, that’s 2 percent, or $20,000 a year on $1 million in savings.

Yeah, I don't think I'll be able to retire at 40 but I'd sure like to retire closer to 55 then 65, so I have some time to enjoy my off-grid homestead and do all kinds of fun stuff on my land before I'm too old.

How to Dream

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Dream Up an Idea

Dreaming and imaging a future is an important as it can be the first step towards making a plan that may take a decade or longer to implement. Dreams are the first step, but one must then follow it up with a goal to back it up, along with much smaller goals to measure one’s progress to it.

Break Up the Dream Into It’s Raw Components

To get towards a dream, one must figure out what it’s made up. What are each part of reaching the dream? How much will it cost? What skills are needed to reach the dream? The numbers might seem outrageous and out of reach today, but every large number is just the sum of smaller numbers.

Figure Out a Timetable

What is a reasonable timetable? Goals are easier to reach if you stretch out the timetable for reaching them, but we all have limited lifespans, and as we get older our health declines, regardless of what we do prolong our health. Longer timetables also have greater risk, as over more time you risk of accident, job loss, or health decline.

Figure Out Major Yearly Goals

Figure out how much must of the desired goal must you reach every year? This actually is not difficult thing to do, it’s mostly math. You should plan on reviewing your goals each year, to figure out how close you are at meeting your yearly goals, and try to exceed your yearly goals to the greatest extent possible, as some years you might fall below your goals.

Automate Smaller Goals

Automating savings is one of the easiest way to get towards savings goals. With modern savings accounts and investing methods, you can automatically save each paycheck. Other small goals are a bit harder to implement, but one option is setting a routine or scheduling time to do something each week. Block out an hour for excerise, or time at the range to become a better shooter.

A Philosophy for Financial Independence and Retiring Early

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Understanding Fire: A Philosophy for Financial Independence and Retiring Early

FIRE (short for Financial Independence, Retire Early) is served in many flavors, all of which are based on core ingredients listed on Reddit’s financial independence sub-reddit.

At first blush, the principles look like they’ve been copied and pasted from your garden-variety personal finance blog: spend less, grow your income, harness the power of compounding. But FIRE really is more of a life philosophy than anything, combining personal finance with a DIY work ethic, opportunistic side hustles, life hacking, and the tenets of anti-consumerism.

I've always been interested in this not because I do the more extreme things by the FIRE people, 🔥 but I do put a priority on saving, investing, and working towards retirement. I would like to retire closer 55 then 65, 👴🏽 at least from my 9-5 job, so I have time in my life to enjoy my off-grid property, 🏡 do a little hobby farming, 🐐 hunt, trap and enjoy life before I'm too old. And maybe even burn some stuff too.

How to future-proof your career path in 2020 (and beyond)

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How to future-proof your career path in 2020 (and beyond)

What hasn’t changed, however, is the advantage of having a career plan—a long-term vision with clear signposts along the way. Critically, a career plan isn’t something set in stone—a course plotted once and followed blindly. Think of it instead as a living document evolving in response to economic factors, emerging opportunities, and even personal interests and family realities. 

I revisited my own career plan every year, and still do. I continually ask myself what skills I need to develop to pursue future opportunities, and whether my career trajectory is aligned with my priorities, health, and personal interests. With the life cycle of job skills rapidly shrinking, regular check-ins are even more critical now. After all, today’s in-demand spreadsheet jockeys may well be tomorrow’s out-of-work bookkeepers. Equally important is a set of experienced eyes to steer you forward. Managers and senior leaders once filled this role, though this is increasingly rare. 

I do all kinds of planning for my life, but I never really gave much thought to creating a career plan with goals and time tables. That's actually probably a really good thing to do -- it's great to have a plan with goals for savings, but if you don't have a way to increase your earnings, get promotions and new opportunities one might never get there. 🤔

It’s 2020 and you’re in the future — Wait But Why

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It’s 2020 and you’re in the future — Wait But Why

It’s finally the 2020s. After 20 years of not being able to refer to the decade we’re in, we’re all finally free—in the clear for the next 80 years until 2100, at which point I assume AGI will have figured out what to call the two decades between 2100 and 2120.

We now live in the 20s! It’s exciting. “The twenties” is super legit-sounding, and it’s so old school. The 40s are old. The 30s even more so. But nothing is older school than the Roaring 20s.

We’re now in charge of making this a cool decade so when people 100 years from now are thinking about how incredibly old-timey the 2020s were, it’s old-timey in a cool appealing way and not a boring shitty way.