Articles with financial independence

Goodbye FIRE, hello FFLC!!!

That’s right, we are looking forward to achieving FFLC! “What is this FFLC?” you ask. Well – I’ll tell you! It stands for Fully-Funded Lifestyle Change! “Uh, huh….” you’re probably saying to yourself. “So how is that different than ER or even FIRE?” you ask. The differences are subtle I suppose, but they’ve come from some realizations we’ve had over the last couple months, as Mrs. SSC and I have been seriously investigating places to live, things to do, and the underlying reasons why we want to quit our current lifestyle.

Here’s what we realized:

  • We don’t want to drop out of the workforce totally, but rather find something we can do that we are passionate about — regardless of the pay
  • We want more time to spend with family. We don’t want to fit in family around our jobs, but have our jobs fit in with our family life.
  • Full retirement wouldn’t be fulfilling to either of us, but volunteer work, teaching, mentoring… that is what we dream of

All of this led us to realize that we don’t want to retire– we want a Fully Funded Lifestyle Change!

No Free Time

In short, our current lifestyle sucks in regards to family time and free time. It’s great in that it allows us to save for the upcoming FFLC, however, there is SO much more we would both rather be doing with our lives than grinding away, day in – day out, for a corporation that will not notice one bit when we leave. Having 11-12 hour days from leaving the house until getting home 5 days a week just isn’t what I bargained for, or envisioned as “success!”.

The Talking Head’s song Once in a Lifetime really sums it up for us:
      And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile
      And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife,
      And you may ask yourself
      Well… How did I get here?

If you’re not familiar with the song (I don’t know how you couldn’t be) check it out on youtube  here – you’re welcome!

We are hoping we will have a view like this from our porch!
We are hoping we will have a view like this from our porch!

To us, the song represents what your dreams and vision of success were when you were younger, compared to the reality of the sacrifices you make to have them be what they actually are today. As music critic Steve Huey better describes it, the main theme is “the drudgery of living life according to social expectations, and pursuing commonly accepted trophies (a large automobile, beautiful house, beautiful wife).” a  Although the singer has these trophies, he begins to question whether they are real and how he got them. This leads him to question further the reality of life itself.b

This is Success?

This is exactly how Mrs. SSC and I came to investigate early retirement, pre-tirement, FIRE, and all the trappings associated with pulling the ripcord on what is a fairly “successful” life. Sure, it’s nice and comfortable and we’re the “model of success” but to whom? It sure as hell doesn’t feel like that to us. To us, it feels like we’re just grinding it out for the man until we can hit that retirement point. We end up so tired from the long days, that it makes it hard to have energy to put towards the kids. The weekends arrive, and we are catching up on all the errands that need to get done, find something fun to do with the kids, and restock the pantry for the next week. Next thing you know, it’s time to crawl in bed Sunday night, set the alarm, and repeat… endlessly… We don’t want this lifestyle, because this is no way to live. How did we get tricked into this situation? Better question, how the hell do we get out of it?!

Well, we’re figuring that out as we go. Instead of living according to social expectations, we choose to live how we see fit to get the most out of life and make the happiest most satisfying life we can. For ourselves and our family. For us, this is bailing out on our work and careers and making a major lifestyle change to fit this new dreams and expectations.  Until then, we’ll keep planning, saving, and discovering what it is we truly want to do once we walk away from this lifestyle.

I don’t know about you, but viewing it as a “Fully-Funded Lifestyle Change” instead of “early retirement” has me excited more than ever to see what the future holds.

Do you feel like you’re stuck in the hamster wheel of life and want out?
What have you done to change your life to focus on what you deem important?
Do you think we are just bat-shit crazy and dealing with a mid-life crisis?

 

 

a: Huey, S. “Once in a Lifetime”. Allmusic.
b: Gittens, I. (2004). Talking Heads: Once in a Lifetime: The Stories Behind Every Song. Hal Leonard. Pp.68-71. ISBN 9780634080333.

TGISB! (Thank God It’s Spring Break)

SUCK-ville! Don't worry, we were stopped. For a while...
SUCK-ville! Don’t worry, we were stopped. For a while…

These last 2 weeks have been awesome! First, Harris county was on Spring Break, and then the outlying counties have been on Spring Break! Hopefully next week some other set of schools is out on Spring Break also. Why do I care about Spring Break since neither me nor my kids are even in school? I’ll tell you, because “Traffic has been great!” (a phrase rarely uttered anywhere near Houston freeways) I’ve been getting to work in 30 minutes, traffic is flowing well, and even when it is storming outside (which normally causes HUGE delays everywhere) traffic is still moving fine.

I remember last summer when I started my new job. (Initiate dream sequence music and sparkly fade out) It was mid-June, the birds were singing and the commute was nice. Traffic flowed well, there were no major headaches to deal with twice a day. Better yet, it was almost the exact same as my last commute. Then one day, everything changed and it went from “nice” to “SUCK-ville” overnight! Clogged highways no matter which one I took. Worse, the surface streets were just as clogged and slow too! I started looking at different commute routes but it didn’t make a difference overall. Somehow my commute had increased a consistent 10-20 minutes each way. I just couldn’t figure out what changed and then someone mentioned school. Oh… school… Riiiight… Man, that makes such a big difference. I guess people take vacation time off centered around Spring Breaks, Christmas Breaks, Summer Breaks, and other school closures.

You wouldn’t think that a few schools out would make that much difference, but based on how empty my office building and parking garage has been the last few weeks, it seems everyone with kids takes off this time to do something with family. It could be that there isn‘t a vacation, but rather a forced stay at home to babysit the kid. Most people I talk to though turn that into a vacation of some sort instead of just sitting around the house. I never ran into this too much growing up because my mom was home for most of our school age. For us, it was just another week to not have to go to school, which is still awesome in and of itself!

Note the string of cars on the bridge. FYI, they're stopped too.
Note the string of cars on the bridge. FYI, they’re stopped too.

Does this do anything for me financially? No, not really? Does it help me get to FIRE quicker? Even more so, nope. However, if traffic was like this every day, I wouldn’t be in such a rush to pull the trigger as soon as financially possible. I’d be a little more content putting it off for another 6 months, or maybe even a year and build up that comfort factor and savings. Then think, “Well, if I give it a few more months I can stick it out until bonuses get here, and it’d be crazy to give up that much money only a few months away.” This situation still may happen though even with the blech commute. We might have Mrs. SSC going to part-time at her job, and since I don’t think my company offers that, I’ll probably stay full time until things get really serious. Although, I don’t have anything to lose asking for part-time, so I will definitely ask when the time gets here.

From everything I’ve read though, once people pull the trigger and retire their biggest regret is not doing it sooner. Granted, these are mostly older people, but even some of the FIRE blogs I read echo that same sentiment. I’d love to make it sooner, but there are certain thresholds that need to be crossed financially before that can happen. Until then, I enjoy working where I do, with the people I work with and am happy plugging away at our goal until we get there. In the short term though, I’m counting down the days until school is out, and I get this traffic reprieve for a few months!

Why FIRE “Freaks me out, man!”

WHYOver the last few days, I’ve had a bit of a revelation regarding FIRE and my comfort level with it. I realized that I’m pretty uneasy about walking away from our nice paying jobs with paychecks that come in every other week. Trading that to enter a life that depends on a pile of cash not getting drained, and even growing while we whittle away at it year after year hoping we planned correctly and it lasts until we die, makes me a wee bit nervous. The biggest revelation wasn’t that I’m nervous about that being successful, it was the WHY behind me being nervous. After some contemplation,  I realized that it boils down to this: In my childhood, I was always subjected to fears about money, specifically, not having enough of it, and not utilizing what we did have effectively at all. And now as an adult, I worry that I could end up back in that situation, by choice! Gah!!!

Here’s the back story:
My parents fit the typical American model of “no emergency fund so to speak, definitely no savings, no concept of financial responsibility or good decision making with money”. Yep, typical American. We lived literally paycheck to paycheck, and there were times we would have $0 until dad got paid. Sometimes it might only be a day, sometimes 2-3, it just depended on what bills REALLY had to get paid and which ones could be pushed off. The cars were NEVER reliable, so there was always an impending car repair being put off until it really broke as well. This was always stressful, although I’m guessing my parents didn’t realize how stressful it was for us kids. I don’t know if my brother or sister ever noticed or worried about this, but man, it was one of the loudest things in my head. “Where is grocery money coming from? Why are they buying that, that’s our lunch money. How are we going to get the lights turned back on and have money for gas to get us to school, the grocery store, dad to work, etc… why do other families not seem to struggle with this so much?” Seriously, if anyone is familiar with the show Malcom in the Middle, or Shameless, those shows were more in line with my childhood, but more like Shameless and less funny than Malcom in the Middle. We couldn’t win for losing.

For those reasons and others, I’ve been working since before I was legally able and was the “best” in my family in regards to money sense. If you’ve read any of my Bad Decisions posts, you’ll think, “Holy hell, if Mr SSC is the best in his family, that is a pretty bad situation!” Anyway, I hate the feeling of being broke. I went through that for another stretch in college when working full time and doing school full-time. I broke my collarbone, and was laid up for about 8 weeks with no work, which meant 8 weeks with no income, you know, I think this was what kicked off my student loan becoming my emergency fund money and more problem. I burned through my meager savings pretty quickly during then, but fortunately had a super awesome landlord that let me repay back rent, with no penalty, over the next few months. Still, except for that time and growing up, I usually had a decent savings fund, paid bills on time, sometimes even early, and tried not to overspend my income. Yes, the wheels came off that in grad school, but I was within sight of a great paying job then, so it’s okay, right? According to my family, sure!

Back to the point of this post. Even thinking back to those times makes my skin literally crawl, and makes me feel frantic and I go into hoarder mode. The stress levels peak (I’m seriously stressed just writing this post and being so deep in thought about those times, ugh…) and I just want to get a second job as a buffer to ease the worry about money, lol. It’s ridiculous. On the one hand, I’ve done my best to avoid turning out like that in my current life. I told myself in 7th grade, I’d never live like that and I’m not settling for that to be the lifestyle I strive to achieve. Rather, I promised myself I’d do better and find a way that I wouldn’t have to worry about money 24/7/365. So far I’ve done pretty good on that promise. I’ve had my own missteps, but not really lifestyle failures, just bad, bad decisions here and there…

That gets me long-windedly to the point again. I have this constant fear of ending up like that again, which if you’ve read any of my “light-bulb” posts realize, I am NOT down for the Ramen, trailer lifestyle just to not have to go in to the office, not that there’s anything wrong with that. Maybe this sheds more light on why, but this was my main criticism with FIRE in the beginning. Now that it’s something we’re both on board with and focusing on, I still have this nagging voice in the back of my head telling me, “You’re not saving enough… This will never work… You’ll quit your job and be dumpster diving in no time, stressing about how to pay utilities, find food for the kids, etc…” I know it’s silly because the numbers work out, the calculators and simulators show we’ll be fine, and that’s with all these extra “cushions” built into the yearly budgets. Growing up how I did, I KNOW we can live on WAY less than we have planned, if need be. I have no problem doing that. I just get freaked out thinking about giving up a really good paycheck.

In the end, I know if our FIRE fails, there will be lots of other people, companies, economies in more dire straits than us, because something really big went really wrong at a higher level than just our financial planning. I also know I’m strong enough to survive anything life has thrown at me so far. And I know that more likely than not, it will all just work out fine, but that doesn’t help to quiet that little voice in the back of my head telling me otherwise.

What types of fears do you have over FIRE, planning of it, and the success of it coming true and holding up for years and years? Let me know, because I’d like to know I’m not the only one out there with these types of fears.