classical_Liberal's Semi-ERE

[classical_Liberal]

,,,

[classical_Liberal]

...

[black_son_of_gray]

Well I for one have faith in your abilities. Happy New Year!

[Scott 2]

Curious if you've looked at opportunities outside of treating patients? I would think there are companies producing products or services that benefit greatly from a nurse's expertise. Insurance tech, medical devices, publishers, etc.

[mooretrees]

Excellent post! I really appreciate your openness and try to learn from your experiences. How do you account for the drop in expenses, 15% is fairly significant. I recall you noticing you weren't spending as much money after you stopped working. Was the drop over the whole year or primarily in the last part where you were not working?

Also, I assume you are working on the entertainment money and hoping that will be the area that drops to get you to your desired lower spending amount? No suggestions but I am always curious to see what people figure out that fits their own life.

Personally, we're about where you were in 2013 with money. So here's hoping I can get us to semi-retirement in less than seven years!

Have a great New Years NOT WORKING!!!!!

[wolf]

Congrats to the huge increase in net worth! And I admire your skills to hack housing costs! Although I don't post many times on your journal, I follow it with great interest. Honestly, if I see that you posted something, I read it always.

Have a great New Year and celebrate (a little bit) your success of this year

[fingeek]

That's what will end up happening. Inertia always wins the day for me, unless there's some other great idea/opportunity. Which so far there isn't, but I've put in virtually zero effort finding anything. I've been in decompression mode, learning to not do anything the world deems as productive . The only question is when, and the practical side of my mind wants to line up my next stint with the GF's next stint. So, probably end of January I'll go back for three months and see how it all shakes out.

Merry Christmas to all who celebrate it!

Hah, yeah sounds familiar - This year for me, decompression turned into more lethargy/apathy namely because I didn't have [the energy/inclination to find] much else meaningful and structured to be getting on with. Perhaps I should have bathed in decompression mode for a little longer, but it didn't feel amazing after a few months.

Update 12/29/2019
Here goes the financial update for 2019.[snip]

Great to see the overall update/review - Do you plan to do a non-financial one too?

[Jean]

Wow, you're in a really great position. Congratulations. Where do you plan to go out if the us? Happy New year.

[Frugalchicos]

Congratas for your 2019 achievements and Happy NY! - I think we are both in similar spots. Sometimes doing nothing is the best. I think we just need some time to decide/get know in which direction we want to go.
Good luck!

[classical_Liberal]

...

[Jin+Guice]

So, like.... $850/ month? Just gonna try to sneak that one by us, eh? You told me you weren't going to be able to make it on under 18k a year! If my weary mathematics are correct you're FI at a 3% SWR at $850/ month. It also sounds like you've got plans to get that number even lower. I stopped tracking before I joined this forum, but I'm pretty sure I'm still around $1,000/ month. Congrats on getting your expenses down in retirement. I agree with @BSOG, I have confidence in you too.

Yeah, I'm trying to look at this from a systems approach. I've recently realized that I need to place some boundaries on my thinking, otherwise trying to place your life in a systems model becomes overwhelming and frustrating.

I've said this before, but retiring at 35 and living on $7,000/ year are like the least impressive things Jacob has done. The motherfucker woke up one day and wanted to race boats around San Francisco so he was like "oh I'll just figure out how to get on the crew, (k)nots and shit, nbd." Trying to put your life in a system is so frustrating!

[classical_Liberal]

...

[classical_Liberal]

...

[fingeek]

The money definitely becomes more and more backseat as you realise that it's just a mechanism, not a destination. Pretty painful to get to FI and realise you have nothing to RE to!

I equally am a "C" whereas I thought I'd be a "B". I struggled with the lack of structure and loss of belongingness/socialising. I'm fairly happy back in work for now (albeit full time). We'll see over the coming months how that all pans out.

Glad to see you making positive decisions to move forward. I hope the burnout is gone at this point. Will be watching to see how part-FIRE works out for you, perhaps as a model for me to copy . Another person close to me has gone part time from a job they disliked, and gained distance and perspective so that they can tolerate (and I think enjoy!) it.

[ertyu]

As someone uber-focused on reaching That Number so The Big Suck can finally stop, this discussion is very interesting to me. I think we are born self-directed, with a natural curiosity, and a natural drive to socialize and connect with people. We are also born with an innate motivation to pursue what we find meaningful and rewarding.

And then school trains all of this out of us in order to "professionalize" us.

At school, you show up on another's schedule, you learn to pursue the tasks that are set for you by an authority greater than you rather than the tasks you'd like to pursue yourself, and you're thrown for hours on end with a bunch of other kids you didn't choose to be around. Yes, in this experience you somehow bonded, but also, you learned how to navigate the social circumstances you were thrown into rather than to actively create social circumstances of your own.

Most people who manage to ER-E are usually high-earning, thus they are also often the best professionalized. Stopping work in that case, after the inevitable "decompression," does result in a lack of structure, lack of drive, lack of socialization, etc. (I fully expect this to happen to me). Going back to work part-time is one way to resolve this. Another way is to realize that "professionalization" goes much deeper than overspecializing, trading your time for money, and meeting all your needs via cash outlays. You need to apply conscious effort towards discovering what it's like to be self-directed, curious, and intrinsically motivated. Also, you need to apply conscious effort towards seeking out particular kinds of people and bonding with them. (or at least this is what I expect it would be like for me).

Imo the way to get there is to take the loneliness, boredom, etc. until you feel interested in the world again. Converting one's super-ego into an "inner employer" that sets tasks and projects where a regular employer would have set them instead is imo counter-productive. Yes, many people go that way: learn to "side-hustle" to supplement income, work for themselves, manage themselves, etc. And I know this is fulfilling to many. Might bring a sense of achievement, accomplishment, etc. too. But imo it would not constitute being truly alive unless it emerges out of one's inner sense of drive as opposed to out of, "well, uh, what should I do, oh well looks like this might be a good potential idea." Ultimately the goal of ERE, to me at least, is to be alive and fulfilled, and before one can do that one needs to consciously suss out one's professionalization programming so one can let it go.

[7Wannabe5]

Well, I am a Choice A who has never been successfully “professionalized” (attempted to self-educate myself at age 14 without permission)who is currently interviewing for full-time professional jobs. So, I am fretting about whether or not I can still fake it in order to fulfill my own long term objectives. Like I am whitewashing a bumper sticker affixed to my forehead which would read “I would rather be doing any or all of the projects on my personal list, but I need to be able to pay the rent on private space where nobody will bother me in order to do that, so here I am pretending like I am going to be committed to doing this career for 40 hours/ week until I get a big enough roll or grubstake.”

So, from my ENTP perspective, which is NOT your ENTJ perspective!, all you are lacking is the equivalent of land/laboratory/personal office/ maker-space/ warehouse/ barn etc. A different example would be that I have no clue why IlliniDave is not at his woodland property building a sauna or a fish smoker from scratch right now. If you guys just need somebody to generate a VERY long list of fun projects, I would be happy to assist

[classical_Liberal]

...

[horsewoman]

If you tackle this problem in a systems thinking way you probably need to work 2 or 3 contracts with longer breaks between them to get some data.
Some of the assumptions you made before going off FT did not come to pass and you've had some surprises in how it turned out. So I think it would be smart to take stock of how you feel after your upcoming contract. Maybe the decompressing time is way shorter because you go into the contract rested and with the knowledge that there is no need to immediately look for a new one. Perhaps you feel mentally stimulated by work again after your rest period. There might be some interesting developments you can't imagine right now, who knows?

That's what systems thinking is for me in a practical way. Establish some parameters, try them out, evaluate, tweak, repeat. What do you have to lose? If work sucks you still have squirreled away some money for traveling. And you actually know it still sucks even with breaks, so you can move on to another career/set-up without regrets. If it does not suck as much as you have feared, you have a sweet semi-ER gig going.

I know no better way of creating urgency than a job, apart from looking for a job that allows for more regular but less intense hours. Maybe 1 or 2 night shifts a week in a nearby hospital? According to my friend (who does this) night shifts are not overly popular amongst her colleagues, so she can more or less choose when she wants to come in, night shifts always being available.

[Jin+Guice]

I've been following your semi-retirement pretty closely and it seems like this part of the year work thing might be right for you? You've mentioned a lack of internal motivation and it seems like having to work in a few months catalyzes you. If this works out for you, the only risk you run is not progressing further in non-monetary ERE skills because you'll have too much money.

What remains to be seen is how the 3 month contract treats you and if you want to spend 1/4 of each year working or not.

@ertyu: A very wise post. I definately struggle with the "inner-manager." It's hard to get out of the mindset once they get you. I do think, as @c_L points out, that paid employment does satisfy several human needs which is why it's such an appealing trap. One does need to figure out a way to replace whatever one is getting from paid employment though, which is not always obvious.

[CS]

Anyway, all of this is to say that if someone has a better idea about how to create an urgency with my free time I have begun to lack, I'm all ears (or eyes as the case may be). I'm going back to work because of inertia of a pre made plan, and because having cash flow alleviates any money concerns that are still on the back of my mind. Not because I think it's the best long term solution, it's just an easy solution for now. OTOH maybe @ertyu is correct, just being content not doing things is fine? IDK, though, I don't think it'll last. Maybe that would be the point of self motivation, when the contentment starts to wane, and I just haven't given it enough time?

Why do you need to create urgency? It is so early days, man.

Keep those options on the back burner and when you do get bored, then go do some of them. When you get lonely, go do some of them.

From what I see, the culture of "I must create within two weeks or I won't get paid" is coming out into your daily life. Why wouldn't it - you've lived with it for twenty to thirty years. It's in your cells.

Breathe.