Face it. Early retirement is an audacious act. It is flipping the bird to the conventional work and retirement norms. In the end it comes down to being able to say YES to a big question. Do You Have The Audacity To Retire Early? Early retirement takes financial discipline and years of plan execution to successfully pull it off. But early retirement takes more than having a sustainable frugal debt-free lifestyle, budget and savings/investment strategy. To successfully retire early it also requires having and maintaining an audacious mindset. One that allows us to buck both conventional and traditional consumer, work, and retirement beliefs.
Having The Audacity To Retire Early
Audacity carries both positive and negative connotations. How our audaciousness is viewed depends on a couple of things.
Succeed and we may be admired as bold and daring risk takers. Fail and we are viewed as recklessly defiant and deserved falling on our face.
Regardless of our success or failure there will also be the element of perspective. To our supporters our audacity is praised. To traditionalists and those who are biased toward having people stay within THEIR BIASED defined standard boundaries we are arrogant. Our audacity is considered a reckless disregard of normal and traditional restraints. For most of the consumerist world, early retirement is considered unobtainable and a foolish contemptible pursuit.
The 2 Audacious Keys to Successfully Retire Early
Having the ability to not care what other people think
Not caring what others think begins early in the financial independence-retire early (FIRE) journey. It starts when all our needs to keep up with the Jones’s are set aside. Focus turns to choosing to live with a happiness based purpose, eliminating personal debt, and saving/investing our way to early retirement.
I certainly took some crap from friends and relatives about the cheap cars I drove for many years, our frugal lifestyle and our sensible vacations. They had new cars/trucks, RVs, jet skis, boats and exotic vacations. All paid for with credit. The consumerist world considers it normal to pay for our present lifestyle by leveraging our future pay checks. That to me is the reckless path. Yet I was the one viewed as audacious just for my wanting early retirement to live a free life on my terms. Something they saw as unattainable and different from their traditional view of living.
Overcoming fear and pulling the early retirement trigger
The ultimate act of audacity comes when we call-it and we do retire early. Walking away from a career that got us to this point takes bold audacity. We must have the confidence in all our planning to leave the only work-based life we really know for the early retirement dream. Retiring early becomes our biggest audacious act. It will be met with praise, disbelief, warnings, and envy. It takes strength and courage to audaciously push through and defy our doubters and our own self-doubts and fears.
I announced my early retirement from my long telecom engineer career during the recession in 2009 where I received all kinds of reactions from coworkers. People I worked with and respected couldn’t believe I was being so reckless. Some were sincerely happy for me. While others who lived only for today and could never consider early retirement were betting against me. They were talking smack behind my back. I know because it later made its way to me. When so many were worried about being laid off, were on the chopping block, or already laid off, the audacity of announcing my early retirement was an affront to everything they believed.
In Closing
Audacity and its perceived good or bad view is in the eye of the beholder. Good thing I didn’t care what others thought. If I had, I may have never made the best decision of my life. Financial independence and early retirement is a worthy goal. I knew exactly what I was doing and happily entered my life’s next phase.
Early retirement takes doing many things financially right. But it also takes having an audacious mindset to set and stay on course. It is exactly what made me and many others early retirement winners. It starts with daring to think differently about what is truly important; knowing when enough is enough, and then having the audacity to retire early.
Do You Have The Audacity To Retire Early?
Great perspective. I can imagine for some it can be difficult to walk away from a career, money etc. early. If you really enjoy your job and have a good situation then great. But also now in corporate america many times they just treat you like a number and the bean counters see how much more they can get out of you. You want to put yourself in a position to walk if you want or need to. As you get older, the game starts to get old and you have less tolerance for the bullsh*t. You don’t want to “live it” everyday anymore just for the money. There are better things in life than giving the best hours of your week to the company.
Thanks for the comment Arrgo. The conquered company I worked for just over 31 years in my first career is a corporate american example of being unworthy of wasting any more time laboring for. Employees are not valued. I was extremely fortunate to have had the audacity to plan and make my escape to early retirement 7 years ago. Currently they are in an 8% downsizing effort to complete by EOY yet I was contacted this week for a 6 figure 1 to 3 year contract. Declined! While they justify cutting thousands of people who need jobs on one side they are outsourcing great jobs on the other. Since I am on FIRE, money is no longer the driver for accepting opportunity. I get to be picky about where and what I choose to do. While talking to them I was reminded of the lyric “I don’t mind stealing bread from the mouths of decadence, but I can’t feed on the powerless when my cup’s already overfilled”. That thought came to my mind as I decided both the company and opportunity as unworthy. Being audacious once again.
Tommy