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By Bob Lai, Tawcan
Special to the Financial Independence Hub
When I created this blog over seven years ago, the sole purpose was to chronicle our journey for financial independence and joyful life. I wanted to share my knowledge with like-minded people. I could have just focused on writing articles about money and personal finance.
But I didn’t.
Right from the start, I put a strong emphasis on the joyful life aspect, because I realized that having all the money in the world does not automatically make one happy. Happiness needs to come from within and finding this internal happiness is a daily practice. I realized, that writing about money gets old quickly; I wanted to write about more than just the money.
Being the sole income earner of the family (for now), early retirement was never really a goal I had in mind. My focus has always been on financial independence. I want to reach financial independence so Mrs. T and I can have more options in life and have the freedom to work because we want to, rather than working because we have to.
Perhaps the reason that early retirement isn’t on my radar is because I enjoy what I do at work. Having been with the same company for 15 years, over a third of my life, I feel fortunate that I am still working at the same company where I started my engineering career.
To me, early retirement has always been just one of the nice things that we would have in life one day. It does not mean I must retire early in my 30s or 40s to make myself happy. Or that I must hit a specific FI number or hit a specific FI date.
Perhaps I am unique compared to most people, as I grew up in a family where multiple family members either retired in their early 40s or became financially independent but continued to work. Money has never been a taboo subject in my family, which has had a very positive impact on my life.
Another unique thing about our family is that we technically are financially independent, but we choose to prolong our financial independence journey. We wanted more flexibility, so we set the goal to create a dividend portfolio that had enough dividend income to cover our annual expenses. We set a goal of becoming “financially independent” by 2025 or earlier, but we aren’t too worried about whether we hit the goal by 2025 or not.
One of the distinctive benefits of having a dad who retired early and a stay-at-home mom is that my parents were always there when I needed them. Unlike many of my school friends, both my dad and mom could attend many of my school functions, like sports games, band concerts, and field trips.
Now I am a dad of two young kids, I am even more appreciative of what my parents could do for me and my brother when we were growing up. Always available and present at my kids’ important life and school events is something I want to achieve. I am practicing it right now as best as I can with a full-time job.
One year, we flew to Toronto and drove around Eastern Canada and the Eastern United States. Another year we drove from Vancouver to Alaska and back. Another time we drove from Vancouver to New Orleans and back. Then once to Prince Edward Island to drive around the Maritimes and Maine. Throughout high school, we also drove to Banff and Alberta multiple times.
My extensive travels growing up is the exact reason why I want travelling to be part of my family’s life in the future. I want Baby T1.0 and Baby T2.0 to learn invaluable lessons that can only be learned from travelling and seeing the world with their own eyes. There are so many things that you simply cannot learn from reading books or sitting in a classroom. You must see them and experience them yourself.
We have been very fortunate to have travelled quite a bit with both kids already. We went to Denmark multiple times, we visited Japan and Taiwan, and various parts of Canada and the US.
We plan to travel around the world for a year and live abroad for an extended period of time in the near future. We can live off dividends via geo-arbitrage already but building up our portfolio will provide even more possibilities.
FIRE the end
Although I am involved in the FIRE community, shamefully I didn’t know the acronym until a few years after I started this blog. For a while, I was confused whenever people used this acronym.
For a while, FIRE was the only acronym, then folks started coming up with different acronyms to categorize FIRE. There’s lean FIRE, fat FIRE, barista FIRE, and the list goes on.
FIRE has been getting more and more mainstream coverage lately. Almost every other day I would come across articles on so-on retired at age 38, or someone who retired at age 27 to travel around the world, or someone who retired after saving extremely aggressively for 5 years, or someone who retired by saving up one million dollars in less 5 years.
To me, FIRE is flawed in these articles.
They don’t provide the general public with what FIRE really means.
Almost all of these articles only focus on the early retirement aspect and provide a false image of relaxed and luxurious life in retirement – travelling around the world, leaving the 9-5 rat race, saying FU to the employers, and sipping piña colada on the beach. Early retirement is all fun and games. There are no drawbacks and no negatives to early retirement.
Many of these articles also fail to acknowledge that many of these early retirees are not really “retired” in the traditional sense. In fact, many of these early retirees are still earning money through side hustles or even part-time jobs.
These articles are click baits. They are there to get the average Joes and Janes to click on them, read, and feel more miserable about their lives.Because most of them cannot fathom the idea of financial independence or early retirement. A small minority even gets so fed up with the idea of early retirement, they become trolls and leave very negative comments on these articles.
The fundamental problem with FIRE
The root of the problem is that too many people hate their jobs.
They despise what they do at work, they don’t like their bosses, they don’t like their co-workers. Through media, these people have been told that owning expensive things will make them happy. Purchasing things will solve all of their problems.
Therefore, they continue to clock in and clock out every day despite hating their jobs. Due to how they feel about their jobs, they are constantly looking forward to the weekend or their next vacation, because that’s when they can be completely free from their jobs. And so, the Monday blues sets in whenever they are back to work from weekends or their vacations.
To them, FIRE is an escape. The happy ending. The escape route. The finish line.
They tell themselves that they will only be happy once they are retired. Before they get there, they will never be happy. They constantly remind themselves how miserable their life is and how wonderful their life will be once they are free from their 9-5 job. So, they constantly look forward to that retirement day so they can give their employers the middle finger and tell their coworkers to get lost.
This video is a perfect example of this endless vicious cycle of going nowhere and believing that buying things will lead to happiness.
Connecting life problems to not having money, financial independence, or retire early is simply incorrect and fallacious.
If there are marital problems, FIRE certainly won’t solve them. Over the last few years, we have seen some prominent figures in the FIRE community ending their marriages… Continue Reading…
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