Part-time for life?

[FrugalPatat]

Anyone consider or do part-time work for life instead of striving for early retirement?

[SustainableHappiness]

Doing it, have been since last October. It's been great so far. Only "problem" is, I have striving/productivity built into me (protestant work ethic and all that jazz), so for example, I'm upping my hours again already this fall for a part-time project as a result of opps I think will be cool and pay-off (the pay-off is still important when you're not fully FI I think). However, I suspect as we produce more chilluns (currently at 1 baby), my desire to paid-work will be dampened further and further down to about 12-15 hours per week.

But, one thing to think about, each $1000 you make, takes $25000 off your required capital at a 4% withdrawal rate. So if between let's say you and a partner you making $15k each, $30k total (after tax of course), all of a sudden BOOM you need $750K less...Or if you only need $750K you actually need nothing.

Of course, we're doing it starting at about 13 years saved up first, so the wiggle room for F-ups is large.

Oh, high paying part-time work also helps (duh.)

[BMF1102]

I have thinking about this a lot lately. I've been leaning towards a few more years spent working part time/seasonally as opposed to going balls to the wall for the next couple. I will still be striving for FI for the peace of mind and the freedom it allows, I believe I will be happier coasting to it though.

[Jin+Guice]

I am really into this idea and am planning on posting some extended thoughts on the topic in my journal, eventually. I think this is a worthwhile and under-discussed way of finding FIRE freedom.

A good book for this is the semi-retirement classic "Work Less, Live More" by Robert Clyatt. Nothing here you can't figure out if you know the FIRE basics, but it's still inspiring to read the story of someone who did it. An interesting bonus, Clyatt FIREd and failed but didn't give up.

I have been following the part-time to FIRE plan exclusively for a year and a half. I'm still saving towards FIRE but at the rate I'm going it'll take 10-15 instead of 5-7 years.

Paid work is such a huge part of our society that completely cutting it out could be somewhat socially isolating. I'm about 50/50 on the extrovert/introvert scale so I enjoy the social interaction up to a point. It also allows me to do a high paid job that I dislike and stay sane.

Peak earning years can be taken advantage of as well as the multitude of tax/ handout advantages that come from earning some money and saving most of it.

One thing I'd like to move towards is working for skills as opposed to money. I could begin doing this now and cover my expenses but I'd like to accumulate more before I do this. Which brings up another important point, this isn't an either/ or tradeoff. It's still possible to work part time an accumulate a stack of billz, the stack just grows slower.

I could go on and on about this, the revelation that I could FIRE on part-time work was almost as revolutionary as discovering FIRE .

The last thing I'll mention, for now, is the tremendous power of being part-time and having fuck you money. A few years of living expenses banked and not having to show up everyday and you're ready to make power moves for breakfast, but usually you'll be satisfied simply having your cake and eating it too.

[7Wannabe5]

Pretty much what I have been doing for the last 32 years, give or take, with a few serious fails. My worst fail resulted in two 3 year bouts of full-time-employment-by-other with a 1 year break in between during the years I was half-supporting two children. Of course, due to my age and gender, I've been able to pass off some of my semi-retired-slacker tendencies as business-as-usual Mom/Wife/Daughter duties. However, my first round of by choice semi-retirement through frugality was when I was only 21 and living dirt-cheap in a student co-op although not actually enrolled as a student. My stated intention is total FI by Harvest 2022, but since I have quite negative desire to work full-time-for-other continuously for even just the next 4 years, it may take a loaves and fishes level miracle for that to occur

I would note that Jacob very clearly outlines intermittent/minimal employment as an option in the book, although this kind of gets lost in the excitement of the SWR calculations in later chapter. On some other thread, I once asked him for "safe" rule for intermittent option, and I believe he invoked the Rule of 3. Based on some recent extreme sh*t hitting the fan on my best-laid plans, I would agree that Rule of 3 is both necessary and likely sufficient when it comes to covering extreme-frugal level expenses with intermittent/minimal income plan. So, for instance, you could be reasonably safe with plan such as:

1) Earn 8% off of capital through active investment = 100% expenses @5 hours/week X 52 weeks
2) Pick seasonal crops in California after the wall is constructed and before the robots are in place = 100% expenses @60 hours/week X 10 weeks
3) Tutor Chinese kids in English via the internet= 100% expenses @20 hours/week X 20 weeks

Of course, if you actually engaged in all 3 of these activities successfully at this level in any given year, your savings rate would remain high enough to achieve total SWR FI in fairly short order. However, you would still be working-for-money 1260 hours/year = average of 24 hours per week X 52 weeks year, and it could be argued that the collection of frugal practices necessary to maintain very low expenses might comprise another part-time job. So, it really depends on what sort of flow and flexibility you value.

OTOH, you would still be safe under Rule of 3, if you only worked enough at one or all 3 options to cover your current expenses, IFAOI you also cover maintenance and transition costs. IOW, you have to keep an eye on your intermittent job markets or income opportunities just like you keep an eye on the investment markets and the changing landscape of inflation related to your expenses, and how all of this relates to your druthers and time/energy cycles, and also watch out for hidden dependencies that would undermine your Rule of 3 coverage.

For example, when you do your scheduled monthly check of opportunities on Indeed, you notice that the average pay rate for Chinese tutors has gone down by $5/hr, and you monthly scan of Craigslist reveals that the sort of rental situation that would provide you with the level of internet access you need to provide this service have gone up by approximately $80/month with little flexibility. So, you decide that the mix of pleasure and purpose you derive from this option is no longer worth the locked-in-overhead and greater commitment of hours, therefore in order to maintain Rule of 3 and maximize ideal lifestyle, you must do some work to come up with a new third option. My point being that it is necessary to allocate/schedule some alert brain time to manage your currently passive, but planned-in-as-option, skill-trade portfolio, just like you do for your "passive" investment portfolio, if you choose the intermittent/minimal ERE path.

The beauty of the Rule of 3, as I hinted at with 8% return on actively managed investment as (1), is that you can throw in quite a bit of risk or unlikelihood and still have reasonably safe coverage. Far better than the average maxed out at 40 hrs/week uber-specialist anyways . HOWEVER, the lesson I should have learned from my multiple fails is that you have to account for how far in $-wise you are likely going to have to go in order to sturdily construct or prop-up the shortest or shakiest leg on your stool. You can't leave anything hanging out in the vague.

Anyways, it is likely that I am just making a note to myself here, since hardly anybody on this forum (don't know what I am even doing hanging out with such a bunch of robust fortress builders) likes living on the chaotic margin as much as I do.

[unemployable]

Anyone consider or do part-time work for life instead of striving for early retirement?

Yes, as I've essentially given up on looking for full-time work and tend to have more free time than I know what to do with.

But, one thing to think about, each $1000 you make, takes $25000 off your required capital at a 4% withdrawal rate.

Only if you make that $1000 every year. Otherwise it's just the same as being $1000 richer. An extra $3.33/month or about 11¢/day in perpetuity at a 4% withdrawal rate, the real return on that extra grand notwithstanding.

[OTCW]

I worked full time for 18 years, then part time by choice for 3.5 years, and am now back to full time. I'm glad I did the part time, but I actually enjoy my work, so I'm also glad to be back to full time.

[BMF1102]

7w5 - Rule of 3? I tried searching the forum for Jacobs mention of it with out much luck. Is it simply to have 3 options that could cover expenses for a year in short order?

[7Wannabe5]

@BMF1102:

Sorry, I should have written "something like unto the Rule of 3", IOW some safe mix of redundancy and diversification. I can't find the thread either. Too damn many posts on the topic of intermittent fasting to slog through. NOTHING in my above post should be regarded as having been granted Jacob Stamp of Approval. Especially, the bit about hacking earned income through active trading. I should have used more specific example such as buying and flipping vacant inner city lots, so as not to confuse.

[Jin+Guice]

I believe the book says something like work 5 years of your life or 5 hours per week. There are a lot of ideas I've had about FIRE that, upon rereading, are actually in the ERE book. Many of them are mentioned in just 1 sentence.

Part-time to FIRE is much easier to swallow if you discover FIRE with no savings and/ or without a full-time STEM job and decide you want freedom now.

[classical_Liberal]

...

[Jin+Guice]

From the thread linked above:

One other model I consider is the suggestion that a human equilibrium ideal might be 2 days of work for money, 1 day of work for community service, 2 days of creative work, and 2 days of relaxation each week. Once you are down to Jacob level expenses, 2 days of work at any minimum wage endeavor will be more than adequate, and wouldn't even preclude large blocks of time devoted to travel or other projects, since it could be 104 days of work in one clump each year, or 2 years of work every 7 years, or 2 hours of work/day. One reason I sometimes suggest that people are going into overkill zone with SWR is that they very well may discover that 7 days of relaxation is not ideal, and that even work that is meant to be community service or creative will eventually generate either money or other practical resource flows towards further reduction of expenses and/or higher quality of life.

So, if your current modus operandi is 5 days at salaryman position and 1 hour working on investment portfolio, you could temporarily bump yourself up to adding a part-time job at the cool old hardware store, volunteering at the humane society, and finally getting started on your painting. Otherwise, it's like you are training yourself to be a diligent persistent worker with the goal of becoming the exact opposite, rather than gradually developing the practices in alignment with the lifestyle you truly desire.

An elegant summary of the arguments for part-time work extreme.

[7Wannabe5]

@classical_Liberal:

Better than the one I was thinking of. Interesting to note that I am back to the same self-talk square as prior to my crash and burn with only maybe 1 extra layer of asbestos and a re-conditioned parachute added to the mix. We can learn, but we do not change.

Another obvious thing to consider would be that with lower expense budget, you have more flexibility/ease/variety in finding adequate income sources, but with higher expense budget, you have more flexibility/ease/variety in meeting budget constraints. For instance, easier to find your next new $800/month housing than your next new $300 month housing. So, if your housemate has a major mental health event, and then somebody at city hall tells you that you can't live in your camper on your vacant lot AND one of your part-time income sources is location dependent, then you might find yourself down to crashing with one of your BFs or buying a stealth-van or living in the trailer park featured in an Eminem film. So, I would highly recommend at least one part-time/intermittent income source that is not location dependent.

[classical_Liberal]

...

[Jin+Guice]

After quickly reading through the thread I feel that social capital is under represented in the metric developed. This is another topic that is briefly addressed in the ERE book but warrants a much broader discussion, IMO. I have reduced expenditures to 0 using social capital alone for a short period of time. My pillars of ERE would be social capital, diversified job income, diversified investment income and skills. There is much more discussion of the last 2 than the first 2. Any of these can be so strong that none of the others is needed, but having all 4 is the most robust and most enjoyable, IMO.

@classical_Liberal: The "spend reduce" term is a nice way of measuring social capital and skills, which are hard to measure. I would multiply x2 for a personal metric, since it captures 2 independent measures and I think this is roughly twice as important, unless you're also trying to avoid weighting.

@7w5: Could you not mitigate these risks with an emergency fund strategy? I once "solved" a similar roommate/ location-dependent work problem by becoming homeless/ living at work. Interesting that this was easier than living on your own abandoned lot. Maybe it's the no car stealth van equivalent.

[classical_Liberal]

...

[Jin+Guice]

@classical_Liberal:
Diviserified Job Income: Money obtained from work.
Diversified Investment Income: Money obtained from investment of financial capital.
Social Capital wrt to an ERE metric: Money saved from help obtained from other people.
Skills wrt to an ERE metric: Money saved from work you do yourself.

The line between job and investment income could be blurry but I think this crowd knows it when they see it. I suppose we could use IRS classification if that won't work.

In my experience moving something from the unpaid to the paid realm is categorically different. If your friends sometimes pay you, it is building social capital when you're not paid and diversified job-income when you are paid. Social capital only "counts" towards the metric when your friend does you a favor and saves you money. Thus it's imperfect for measuring social capital, but wrt ERE I think the metric captures the social capital effects nicely.

My initial reason for weighting was incorrect, the reduce spend term adequately captures the monetary value of both social capital and skills without doubling. I would still personally consider the spend reduce category twice as important but this is arbitrary, personal and not good for cross comparisons. Perhaps subtracting the "head tax" from personal expenditures and consumer expenditures would be in order for this term, otherwise it can never reach 1.

At any rate we are hijacking the thread and I'm nitpicking, I think we basically agree.


While typing this I got called into my part-time job and am now cursing myself for not being totally free...Womp womp.

[FrugalPatat]

And what do you part-timers actually do with all this extra free time?

[SustainableHappiness]

@unemployable Truth. An assumption is that by the time we've reached the age where we actually want to stop working entirely (and stop making the $1000) we'll have a ridiculous amount of capital anyways since we've got decades of compounding on 13 years worth of savings + any additional savings made. Still doesn't make my math correct, but it sure helps the decision.

BTW, loving the discussion and stools (pun intended) in this thread, particularly the "7 days of relaxation may not be ideal" idea. Having had 4 months of no employment recently, I've found it more enjoyable to have a bit of catered content (i.e. employment) in a week. However, I think it'd be different if everyone around me was off too...because then we could hang out. 2 weeks in a retirement community in Florida was great! There was always SOMEONE to play pickleball or swim or walk with if the desire struck.

@FrugalPatat spend it with as a family unit. DW and I were just talking about how we could be more efficient as a unit if we split up and conquered different tasks at once (e.g. 1 person does groceries, the other works on X), but it is better to do things together and with our baby. For example I can take 1 hour doing the dishes because Baby SH is "helping out" and it's no big deal. We can go to the park as a unit for a couple hours sometimes, bring a picnic and leave the dishes undone until bedtime, because we have time to waste/spend together.

We also sold our TV to a friend around the time I went off, so there is no incentive to watch X,Y,Z (not that babies allow it anyways)...unfortunately after about 6 months of not watching a single movie or show (not true, we tried to watch a movie once and it took us 3 naps to do it, which made it shit), we can now contribute zero if those types of conversation come up at dinner parties. It also got old explaining the whole no TV thing after about 2 months (and it comes off as pretentious to some people), so we just watch other people talk more often now.

[BMF1102]

@7w5 - Understood, nothing was taken as Jacobs "word".

@C_L - Yes this is also a big part of what I've been thinking alot about lately. I read through the thread you linked a couple times and through this one a few times to let the ideas sink in a little better. The rule of 3/stool I believe will better align with my short and long term goals as opposed to the singular SWR and you're all set.

@FrugalPatat - I have only worked 10 days since the end of June. With my free time my brother and I built a lean-to off the side of our Grandpas garage, I have sanded, stained and installed a couple more cabinets and finishing trim pieces/plywood in my kitchen. As well as repaint a bedroom and trim out a couple windows. I am also racking up miles on my mountain bike (and learning to maintain it) I discovered a recently finished trail locally that is a blast and really igniting my fire for the sport. Took my brother and nephews to a favorite backwoods camping spot of mine fishing, among a number of other things.

I have savings of 4-6 years depending on how my spending goes. This cushion (and having low overhead) has allowed me to be extremely choosy about which jobs I take. I work jobs that will supply me with roughly 1.5-4x monthly expenses per *week worked. I have been currently leaning towards continuing on this way and using my off seasons to check some items of the bucket list while I'm still relatively young(33) single and healthy instead of buckling down and racking up a large stash first. Keep an eye out for journal entries discussing my situation more soon.


*Week=12hours/day 7days/week, often out of state/town.