I love my career, in other words, I am a very happy rat in this boring rat race. For a while I was wondering what would I be doing if I hit FIRE and don’t ever need to work anymore. To be honest that life would be meaningless to me, I wake up thinking about challenging problems and I go to bed thinking about them. I love the intellectual challenges. You know, vacationing more than two weeks actually makes me bored. But so does not vacationing for more than three months. I like the balance. I just don’t want to get stuck in either work or vacation. I like to have the flexibility of experiencing both.
That said, my career hasn’t been always fulfilling. At times I had faced real morons as my bosses, or been in toxic situations that I wanted to get out of. And because I did not have the financial means, I had to stay longer in those situations than I wanted to. I honestly think bad situations at work lowers your IQ and I avoid them religiously. You should too.
That’s why the following video by JL Collins resonated. My wife and I live on an annual expense of $110K and my FU money is having twice that (I am not bragging but we have surpassed that many years ago). Meaning that I can quit my job, go do nothing for two years but vacationing in Sydney, Lisbon and Singapore, maintain my current life style and still come back with all my retirement and house equity intact. This is the worst case scenario which assumes both myself and my wife quit at the same time which is extremely unlikely. But again if that happens, our current assets can easily support us for 4 or 5 years. Because we have reached our FU money.
I don’t need to retire, I just need to sleep thinking that if I lose my job I can still wake up happy and content. I take that over an eternity of frugality and FIRE lifestyle any day.
Mark my money 