If you spend any time in the Financial Independence Retire Early (FIRE) community, you’ll hear a ton of acronyms and categories: Lean FI, Coast FI, Barista FI, Fat FI, and more. In case you’re not fluent in FI-ese yet:
- Lean FI – Reaching financial independence with a minimalist lifestyle and relatively low expenses.
- Coast FI – Saving enough early on so that, without adding more to investments, compounding alone will carry you to full retirement age. You can “coast” by working only to cover current expenses.
- Barista FI – Hitting a point where you can cover most expenses from investments but still choose to work part-time (often in lower-stress or more enjoyable jobs) for extra income and benefits.
- Fat FI – Achieving financial independence with plenty of cushion—enough to maintain (or even upgrade) your lifestyle without worrying about expenses.
A lot of FI talk focuses on hitting a specific number and then leaving work entirely. But there’s a catch: studies show a high failure rate for people who go from full-time careers to nothing overnight. It’s like slamming on the brakes at highway speed—it’s jarring, and it doesn’t always end well. High powered, type A personalities can only sit on the beach or play golf for so long.
Personally, I think the ideal career trajectory looks more like a bell curve: ramping up in intensity to a peak, then gradually declining as you learn how to relax and explore what retirement can be. So, even though I left my last W2 job at 50, for me, the RE stands for “recreational employment” rather than “retire early.”
My career path ended up looking pretty close to that:
- I spent years working multiple jobs, including high-stress school administration roles where 80-hour weeks weren’t uncommon. During a lot of this time I was working other jobs on the side to sock away more money in investment accounts or going to school to give me more career options.
- Eventually, I moved back into the classroom, but at the University level instead of in K-12. Thai was still busy, but far less stressful (Committee work was tedious, but not difficult). A lot more flexibility in my schedule offered me the chance to explore additional side hustles and types of travel.
- Next I left the University and shifted to full-time consulting. I was traveling almost weekly to visit schools and work with teachers and administrators around the country. Lots of fun, plenty of opportunities for travel (and travel rewards), but time consuming and tough on the family.
- Over the last few years, as I’ve approached FI, I’ve tried to scale back my consulting work—aiming for just two weeks a month and combining it with more fun travel that Katie and/or the boys can join in on.
I’ll admit I’m still vulnerable to “one more year syndrome” or the lure of an interesting contract in a fun location. But looking ahead, I want to shrink my workload even more—maybe one consulting gig a month, and eventually none at all, so I can focus on overseas exploration and our slow travel.
The lesson? Financial Independence, and retirement in general, shouldn’t be a cliff you jump off. It should be a slope you walk down—at whatever pace feels right to you.
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I think there’s another group, the No FI. These are the people who plan never to retire (at least, not voluntarily), plugging away at full-time jobs. I break those into two groups. One includes the people who don’t think they can risk coming up short later. They’re afraid of what a health emergency might require or maybe they’re responsible for people who are vulnerable. Or, maybe they just look at inflation and think that whatever fixed income they can get now, it won’t spend nearly as well ten years from now. The other subgroup is people whose identities are totally wrapped up in what they do. Maybe they don’t have any financial need to work but they wouldn’t know what to do with themselves if they retired. I don’t know if it deserves a separate category but I’ve discovered other retirees who fear not being “relevant” any more.
I don’t think that way. In fact, I read recently that one way to measure how “cool” someone is involves looking at how little they care what others think. Reflecting on my youth I can see truth in that because those people kind of had their noses in the air or whatever, hardly paying attention to the little people. The irony is that as we age, we start seeing through a lot of those facades and we don’t care any more about having the fanciest car or the nicest clothes. As we age, ironically, we get “cooler.” That’s why they call it the “geezer’s paradox.”
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