• LargeHardonCollider@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Do you mind sharing a bit about how you were able to take a long break? I’m really interested in doing something like this before I turn 30; I’ve been working since 21

    • jbrains
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      1 year ago

      I don’t mind. I got very lucky. Your results will vary.

      For the book length version, read Your Money or Your Life. Alternatively, You Need A Budget would also suffice.

      I should also point out that when I took a long break, I still worked for money, but I got to choose what I did and I went periods of months doing almost nothing. I don’t want to oversell what retirement meant to me.

      The ingredients were these:

      • high-pay/low-time jobs (software development consultant and trainer)
      • geographical flexibility: no fixed office, but instead I traveled to visit clients and conferences
      • downsized living expenses: left Toronto and moved to the middle of nowhere, which was riskier when high-speed internet was just becoming available
      • wife had compatible ideas and goals regarding money, so almost no big arguments about what to do
      • few family ties to keep us in one place: we noticed that after we moved away, when we visited family, the visits meant much more than weekly Sunday dinner
      • found high-leverage income streams (closer to “passive”) that fit our temperament and provided background profits to pay for essential living expenses

      I got lucky along the way, finding a business partner with whom I worked for about five years and who found us a very lucrative contract that put the whole plan on fast-forward. Even so, I found him by attending conferences, talking to people, organizing my own, and mostly being open to whatever came my way. When we are consumed with day-to-day survival, it’s easy not to take those kinds of risks.

      I don’t know how well this overall strategy works in today’s economic conditions. Some of the principles, I think, still apply, but I genuinely don’t know how lucky I really got to go as far as I did by age 35. (We left Toronto when I was 33 and that alone sped up the results a lot.)

      Read the books, if you haven’t already. Good luck.

      • jbrains
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        1 year ago

        The key moment happened when we asked ourselves a key question: what are three things we absolutely want and are willing to be flexible about everything else? We spent about a month agreeing on that list. Once we had that, we had a clear plan for how to give ourselves the best chance at earlier retirement episodes more often.