Never Retire - A Review Of The Most Important Points As We Prepare To Pass A Milestone
Any second now, the Never Retire newsletter will pass 100 paid subscribers.
To commemorate the occasion, subscribers #101 through #105 who sign up for an annual or founding membership will not pay another dime after their initial payment. Subscribe and pay whatever you like today (starting at $40) and you automatically become a lifetime member.
Special shoutout to of and of . They recommend the Never Retire newsletter in their publications. Without their support, this growth simply would not have happened.
With this in mind, it’s time to show new subscribers where we’ve been and review the most salient newsletter points for those of us who have been around awhile.
These are newsletter posts that, if you only had, say, half an hour to spare, you should read to get a strong sense of what we cover and where we’re headed with it.
Finding the floor
No or a low housing payment
Pots of money
It’s simple.
You pay $4,000 a month for housing.
You need to keep your demanding six-figure job for as long as possible. Or you probably feel like you can’t take a break. Because, each month, you’re in a race against the clock to meet that non-negotiable obligation.
Drop your housing cost to $2,000 and you probably cut both the time required and stress experienced in half.
Drop it to zero. Now we’re talking.
It doesn’t seem logical to make the primary personal financial strategy on the road to old age one where you take on a relatively massive 30-year loan—and the attendant lifestyle that often goes along with it—at the same time as trying to save $1 million or more in the span of roughly 40 years.
Doesn’t seem logical might be a nice way to put it.
Clearly—based on many of the outcomes we’re observing—there’s tons of risk and uncertainty inherent in devoting your prime years to working to pay off a mortgage and save $1 million so you can quit work altogether at around 65 years of age.
It’s an ironic twist—the more cash security you have, the more you’re willing and able to spend freely, albeit within reason.
Cash security—which I define as having a cash cushion (surplus) most months and over time—might be the most important intangible in personal finance.
When you take on debt—any type of debt—you not only commit to pay somebody a certain amount of money each month, but you agree to pay it back with interest.
A basic definition worth simply stating.
If you start from a Landrover and two Teslas in your driveway (actually one in the driveway, one parked on the street), you start from a super high baseline.
This makes it difficult to work less now so you can work less longer and still do what needs to be done to move on to core elements #2 and #3. (Not that this household with two Teslas needs or wants to manage their money and financial future this way).
In a nutshell, you want to start from the least stressful work and expense situation possible and wiggle your way down from there.
When I refer to Never Retiring, I often get a response along the lines of that sounds absolutely dreadful.
It’s instructive to consider why large swaths of the population react negatively to the notion of Never Retire.
It’s even more helpful to explain why—and I can only speak for myself—it’s actually a super positive thing. This idea that you’ll Never Retire.
If you kick and scream into relative old knowing you’ll Never Retire, it’s not the same.
However, if after acknowledging and accepting it as your reality, you embrace and recognize it as superior to traditional retirement, you have made a choice.
A choice others often will not understand. A lifestyle others often will not understand.
Everything from the low cost of living to calling yourself semi-retired. It just doesn’t make sense.
All that matters is that it makes sense to you. That if it’s calling you, you go for it.
To this day, I really don’t think my parents understand what I’m doing with my life—professionally or otherwise. So they hang onto conceptions of what they expected and work them into their perception of what I’m actually doing.
This is actually what—in part—makes them good parents.
We don’t get it, but we’ll support it even if we don’t fully understand it. Even if it’s not what we wanted or—when you were a little guy—expected.
Bottom line—I gave them no choice.
To close. A picture I took during the recent two-day run of rain in Los Angeles.
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