Sometimes we have to adapt to difficult and changing circumstances. As people are being forced to reevaluate their retirement plans and careers, it’s easy to get hung up on the perceived safety of coloring within the lines of traditional definitions and norms. For many it may look impossible to figure out a way to financial security. Maybe a mental shift is needed and perhaps my retirement story will provide ideas. Even though what I did was characterized as early retirement, my leaving my career at the age of 51 was never about retirement. 

Everyone has a mental picture of what retirement is. I had a retirement image too and I knew that someday I would reach an age that the traditional definition of retirement would materialize. But that vision of retirement was decades away. My early retirement wasn’t that. Not even close. I wouldn’t accept that there was just one way to go. 

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I Retired Early But It Was Never About Retirement 

I do understand why I got the heat I did about my early retirement not being considered retired. I’ve gone with a different solution to counter the dregs of youthful work life. I wanted to ditch the rat race much earlier than waiting until a traditional retirement age. So I adopted a “retire early and often” mindset. I then created and executed a plan to achieve it. Taking a different direction where I wouldn’t have to wait until old age or having a million dollars in the bank. 

My Employment Liberation Motivation

After decades of relentless and unrewarding work, living under the threat of downsizing and the resulting financial ruin it could cause me and my family, I was motivated to reach a point of employment liberation. A financial condition where I never needed to kiss Corporate-keister or if forced into long-term unemployment have to rely on stingy safety nets to survive.

By the time I decided to work towards early retirement I had already made an interstate relocation to keep my job. Then came the long days in the office, 24X7 on-call duties, business travel, and constantly increasing workloads. There were harmful economic market bubbles and the recession that cruelly added more grief by providing easy excuses to further hammer workers. Sacrifices were made for the workplace promises of something better later. But as I and many people know, you can’t count on corporate world promises. 

What My Early Retirement Plan Targeted

I knew from day one of my financial plan that I was going to retire early and often. I later found a retirement definition that better captured that same mindset: Retirement is the absence of needing to work, not the absence of working.

It all came down to deciding that I’d commit to saving enough to cover living expenses and be free to pursue opportunities of interest and passions. I would welcome paid work in my early retirement but only on my terms. I’d only accept work that meets my criteria and always free to walk away at any time without threat of financial ruin.

What I Did To Reach Employment Liberation

Instead of trying to save a million dollars or more, which at my salary would take me well into old age if ever, I decided to go a different route: 

• Create a sustainable happy lifestyle without wasteful spending. A frugal lifestyle that may not have included months of exotic travel, expensive cars, or second homes. But it also didn’t include feeling like we were living a deprived life. It was all about simpler living. 
• Ramp up savings to save enough to cover that lifestyle in retirement. 
• Maximize income with eyes wide open to leverage wins in the corporate world’s game. 

It started with cutting waste from our budget. 

We adopted a smart frugal and balanced lifestyle. It does take time and practice to figure out what a sustainable and happy frugal lifestyle is. We perfected it during our journey to early retirement. It was the lifestyle we wanted to live before and in retirement. 

Next was eliminating all non-mortgage debt. 

That effort further reduced our cost of living, that reduced our required budget, which equates to less needed saved for retirement to support it. 

Redirect excess income into savings.

It was then all about ramping up our savings to hit the portfolio target sooner than later. Once expenses are cut more money is freed up to invest. There was nothing extreme in my early retirement story. Just the same basic stuff everyone else in personal finance talks about. 

Always recognize opportunities to increase income and continually gain marketable skills. 

This is an effort that we all should do in our careers. Increased income results in more money to save. Increased skills adds to increased income opportunities now and after early retirement. 

My efforts also required me to better play the corporate world’s game. 

I focused on what management valued. They happily load us down with important but non-valued work. All the things we worked hard to do but meant nothing to management during our evaluations for raises and advancement. Tasks that management seldom loaded onto their pet employees. 

That stuff ate time. Usually eating into our personal time and always taking time away from game winning opportunities. I used their own values to decrease my efforts on that segment of responsibility and put all effort into their home run values. 

I then used their own values to challenge any of their objections to my work priorities. It was clear that the issue comes down to every personal success I could leverage into better raises for me equated to management taking some credit and reward too. 

How I Viewed My Portfolio

I did run my numbers through a retirement calculator to get a feel for my success chances. As for how much I saved, I didn’t have the luxury of shooting for a sizable portfolio that would perpetually generate enough passive income of dividends and interest to totally live off of. I knew I’d also spend down assets as part of my retirement funding bucket strategy. 

I simply thought of early retirement as a condition of unemployment. Whenever I saved money I thought in terms of how many days, weeks, months, and years of being unemployed would be covered. This thinking continued even when working in my targeted retirement gigs. I looked at my earnings that same way as I set the money aside to increase my net worth. 

I just had a different early retirement vision.

It was always my plan to retire early and then freely pursue opportunities of interest that were outside of what my first career allowed. Once that itch was scratched, I would then go on to the next one when the opportunity to do so presented itself. 

I was also content to sit out doing any paid work at all. It was an early retirement plan born of the hope for freedom through employment liberation. That and being shielded from the economic cycles and the corporate world decisions that seem to always mess with the working class. 

I didn’t have the luxury of a fat salary to pad a huge portfolio. 

Although it sounds wonderful if you have the bucks, I never even considered an early retirement of nothing but pure leisure and neverending travel. To tell the truth, that wouldn’t appeal to me regardless of money. We travel as much as we want to but enjoy where we live. I didn’t have to work in my early retirement to live our lifestyle. But I planned on being open to opportunities. Knowing I would most likely take on a paid gig at times. 

Wrapping up-

What having this mindset and plan did was allow me to take on rewarding work in retirement that I wanted to learn and do. Since I stayed on a budget funded by my portfolio, I funneled all earnings back into my net worth. After 11 years of portfolio funded early retirement, with a few working adventures thrown in, I now have a fatter portfolio to go along with my ability to live a better and freer lifestyle. 

Retiring young means still having all of the energy, spirit, and discipline that brought us success in life and career. I’ve found that we’re happiest when we can direct that energy towards something we value. I simply took what I had saved, created a way to access it to fund our frugal living lifestyle, and freed myself to accept opportunities when they were available to me. My early retirement was never about retirement as it’s hardly what many would call a retirement. Not unless the same retirement mindset that I have can be accepted. There’s always more than just one way.