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My latest MoneySense Retired Money column looks at the so-called FIRE movement: (an acronym for Financial Independence/Retire Early), as well as a new book by a FIRE blogger titled Work Optional. You can find the full column by clicking on the highlighted headline here: How “Work Optional” can fit into your Retirement Plan.
You’ll see that regular Hub blogger Doug Dahmer — founder of the Retirement Navigator planning software — has been using the phrase Work Optional for at least five years, even though the new book of that name was just published in January 2019. It’s a useful phrase that describes the kind of thing Mike Dark and I refer to as Victory Lap Retirement in our jointly authored book of the same name.
There are many ways to describe this phase, but generally it refers to a period after full-time employment. FIRE proponents often declare that they “retired” in their 30s or 40s but of course most of them do not spend the next half century doing absolutely nothing. They really create encore careers based on self-employment, and often build businesses based on book-publishing, blogging and public speaking, wherein they reveal “how they did it.”
Victory Lap and Findependence
To some extent this very website does a similar thing, focused as it is on Financial Independence, or my contraction of it, Findependence.
And of course my other website is FindependenceDay.com, devoted to making available my financial novel, Findependence Day, in both US and Canadian editions.
Certainly the phrase Work Optional nicely summarizes the appeal of the FIRE movement, or Findependence, or Semi-Retirement, or the Victory Lap, or whatever you want to call it. Ironically, as I relate in the MoneySense column, I actually finished that article by working a few hours on Family Day in February: a day when most people choose NOT to work. So did my wife, who technically had the day off from her now-three-day-a-week corporate job. But we both decided to opt to work a bit that day, which is the whole point of the exercise. As Dahmer says, using a phrase from my own book Findependence Day, now we’re working because we want to, not because we have to (financially speaking).
I often have to explain to people that Findependence and Retirement are not synonymous. True, you need to be financially independent (aka “findependent”) if you really want to be retired, but — as in my case and soon my wife’s — it’s quite possible to be findependent but NOT retired. That’s really the whole point of the Victory Lap, or Victory Lap Retirement. In fact, the book makes repeated mentions of the concept of Financial Independence/Findependence, as reflected in the subtitle: Work While You Play, Play While You Work: The Joy of Financial Independence … at Any Age.
