Stuck in second gear

[BenjaminF]

Question for the community because I am wondering if anyone else is struggling with the same problem.

Short summary, my salary has never been very high but I worked hard towards FI and have been (really) lucky in the stock market so I have a couple of annual salaries in cash/stocks. The problem is that I got so sick of wage slavery/cubicle life that I decided to drastically reduce my work time and am now working part time. You could call it semi-retirement but now I find myself stuck in this position. With the reduced income, I can no longer save money. At the same time my stash isn't anywhere near being large enough to call myself FI.

So the question is basically: how do you motivate yourself to keep working towards full retirement when you have so much money that you can afford semi-retirement?

Ideally, I would use the time on my hands to find something I really love that can make additional money, but I am having a hard time finding something that is fun and profitable at the same time.

[SustainableHappiness]

I struggle with a similar problem when I am occasionally feeling anxious about not being as "successful" as I could be. i.e. More FI than I am in this case.

Why bother motivating yourself if your happy with semi-RE? My family has dropped in semi-RE, cover the expenses mode with ~10-15 years saved up (we've concurrently moved into a higher spending position than we ever have, which seems dumb, but our daily life is better for it). We're content with our lifestyle and DW and I know that that 10-15 years of savings could be stretched to infinity when our kid(s) (one for now) move on to their own independent lives.

If you don't like your part-time job, can you find a different one that you enjoy more? I.e. if you aren't happy with your semi-RE state then that seems like a different question altogether.

What do you feel full retirement will provide that semi-retirement does not?

[FBeyer]

First of all: Is it really a problem?
Who judges you for your choices? Who suffers due to your choices? What are the actual, not implied, ramifications of living like you do currently?

[Lucky C]

Fun and profitable is a tough combination unless you put in more effort than your competition (10,000 hours of practice after which it may not be fun any more), or you were one of the first to do something new and innovate, or you have the right connections in the job/industry that you think is fun.

For example, a lot of young people now have dreams of doing eSports or being a Youtube star as a career. Well you have to be an early adopter of a new game or platform and put in 60+ hours per week to beat out the competition, and then with a little luck you might get something close to a 6-figure salary. While I have had fun both playing video games and producing videos in the past, anything beyond a 10-20 hour per week hobby would no longer be fun and would turn into hard work. It would be very frustrating to have zero success for several years while hoping to finally break through and make a living sometime around year 5 to 10, so I never tried that route.

I can however make good money doing things that are not "fun" but that I don't mind doing, which most other people have no interest in doing. There are many engineering positions available, for example. More demand than can be filled right now. If you graduated with a 3.x GPA and have a good attitude, you can easily find a job close to six figures even with zero hours of real-world experience. This is because there is no competition. Because engineering isn't "fun", it's "hard". But I say that working your butt off for many years with zero success in the entertainment industry or some other "fun" job, against a million competitors, is a lot harder than studying a few years and competing with maybe only one other applicant for an engineering position.

I'm not saying you should go get some new advanced degree, just that you should keep in mind what you are willing and able to do vs. what others are unwilling and unable to do, to avoid competition (since too much competition can kill what little fun there is).

[prognastat]

Fun and profitable is a tough combination unless you put in more effort than your competition (10,000 hours of practice after which it may not be fun any more)

Yeah this is often the downside of making a hobby/something you enjoy your job. It's rare for it to be as much fun when you "have" to do it and your income depends on it. Also when something becomes a job often less interesting/fun things become aspects of it too. Still probably beats doing something you don't enjoy as your job since the other less enjoyable aspects are present there too, but you are taking a risk that you may no longer want to do what you enjoyed after doing it long enough as a job.

[classical_Liberal]

...

[Jean]

. If you graduated with a 3.x GPA and have a good attitude, you can easily find a job close to six figures even with zero hours of real-world experience. ,

Then how Bad is my attitude?

[Lucky C]

Sorry if I didn't make it clear that I was talking specifically about in-demand engineering fields. And to further qualify, if you are willing to move to where the jobs are and work in an industry where the jobs are. For example it is relatively easy to get a high paying defense industry engineering job, however that may be the polar opposite of "fun" work for many people.

[IlliniDave]

You just have to decide if full FI is worth the price (the price being increasing your work hours enough to resume saving). Nothing wrong with working part time basically forever if that's your comfort zone. To borrow from Nietzsche: “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.” In my case the why (complete FI) is worth a lot, so much that I'll work any hour of overtime they'll pay me and be grateful for the opportunity. Fun has nothing to do with why I go to work--the profitable part is the essential transaction.

[SavingWithBabies]

I get the sense your stash isn't quite big enough to be where you want it in 10-20 years for FI. If it was, I think you would be doing coast FI or Barista FI in that you accumulate enough savings that you can let grow untouched and have switched to a lower stress/pay job that doesn't allow you to continue saving at the old rate (if at all) but does cover your cost of living.

If I'm right about your situation, the problem you face is that at some point you have to go back to a higher earning job if you want to achieve FI. I haven't been in your shoes but I've definitely considered doing what you're doing now or at least taking a break from working for 6-12 months. I've got enough saved that if I could live without touching it for 15 years, I'd get to where I want to be. But I'd be 55 at that point and I'd rather stop sooner [*]. But I also understand "getting off the bus" can be similar to stopping.

It's like you have these options:

1) Continue on the path your on. For me, this would be stressful (if indeed don't have enough to eventually be FI by just letting investments grow). However I do get it would be stressful in long term sense and not day to day as much. For me, I would worry that my tech skills would grow stale in some way that it would be hard to get back in at a top earning job.

2) Find a high paying job and save as much as possible to get your lump sum up to the point that it needs to be so you can hit your retirement goal and then go back to the low stress job.

3) Find a high paying job and ... and stay at it until you hit you FI number and then retire.

4) Some other option I haven't focused on. Just including this for completeness.

The choice is tricky because it's all about your options and what you want. How old are you? How much do you have invested right now? When do you want to retire? What is the latest age you'd consider pushing it back to? With that information, you can sit down and calculate in reverse what your options are.

It doesn't help you find something you love that is also fun/interesting however if you have a fairly good handle on the rough needs to get to where you want to go, you might be able to make better choices that get you there.

* The issue with this though is it might not be true. If I found something I enjoyed more, I'd probably be happy to go to a lower paying role where I still worked for 15 years but enjoyed it. I want more time flexibility and control over my work and so far I haven't found what I'm looking for so I'm trying to make it myself by becoming self-employed. I know going in odds are low this will work out but I want to try it as the first option.