ERE Motivation:

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Slevin
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Joined: Tue Sep 01, 2015 7:44 pm
Location: Sonoma County

Re: ERE Motivation:

Post by Slevin »

I don’t think I have ever wanted to have a job one day in my life. Just never appealed to me. Don’t know why it would appeal to anyone, honestly. And I say that as a massive masochist.

Studied physics in college because I wanted to know how the world worked (see? Masochist), then when I was graduating and had locked down a first job because ???? (It was just what you do), I tried to figure out how the hell to be an actual adult. A quick search on savings percentages lead me to wondering how people were only saving 20% when I was used to spending 400-500 per month tops, which then eventually lead to the FI rabbit hole. With the physics brain, I think I just latched on to ERE explanations and writing style moreso than MMM or another. Got a whole explanation space, not just tips and tricks. So I ended up here. In the end, I just want the money to just go and pursue whatever is grabbing my interest instead of sticking to the rigid structure of the job and the 40 hour work week. Study movement, grow food, build fun low tech stuff with pulleys and passive solar and appropriate technology. I dunno, be a human and do interesting human things.

IlliniDave
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Joined: Wed Apr 02, 2014 7:46 pm

Re: ERE Motivation:

Post by IlliniDave »

I wrote a lot about this a number of years ago in my journal.

TL/DR: I wanted an escape from too many years of money-driven stress to a simpler more tranquil life.

I can only talk about ER because by the time I got headed in that direction it was way too late for "early". Happened fairly quickly though, took about 9.5 years once I set my sights on it to retire, maybe could have done it at 7.5 or so.

Happens I married someone who was cataclysmically bad with money. So when that situation ran its course I was in my mid-40s, full-time single parent, facing the early days of the 2008-2009 financial crisis, and not far from being broke. Prior to that were many years of being under constant stress trying to plug financial the gaps and keep the family solvent. For someone with my temperament, it was a miserable time. But once I was on my own using generic "good" financial stewardship (pay down debt, spend less than you make, save/invest 10-15%) I was at least able to get the ship steered towards the right direction.

Then it was 2011 and at work when we all took time time off for the year-end holidays, it looked like there was a very real probability we'd all be laid off in mid-January 2012. I used to listen to NPR news during my commute back then, and they were still chronicling the stories of some midlife professional folks who lost there jobs in 2008/9 who were still un- or "under"-employed. So my yuletide cheer was doused in cold contemplation of how I might navigate a situation where I'd be out of professional employment for a significant time. I made some calculations based on some assumptions and the answer was that it would be a distressingly short time before I went belly up financially. Memories of years and years of skirting financial disaster came flooding back. I then started playing with the assumptions, eventually putting together a simple parametric analysis. Through that I arrived at a length of time that if I was extremely efficient with my income, and managed to stay employed throughout, I could bridge (very austerely) to retirement age with just part-time minimum wage work. So I pledged to myself to get financially "lean and mean" going forward--no matter the outcome, I'd be at least somewhat better off for doing so. At that point stewing about it wouldn't do any good so I just set it aside and hoped for the best. As it turned out, the threat of lay off never came to fruition. Realizing I may have simply dodged the first bullet of many, I stuck with my plan to keep some sort of emergency exit viable.

Then about 4 months later I had an epiphany. I'd been carrying around this in-case-of-emergency plan, even started refining it (my initial assumptions were a little naive and optimistic) and tracking progress. Sitting at my desk one morning I asked myself out of the blue: what if I make my backup plan the plan. That idea resonated with me so deeply it changed my entire outlook (sounds melodramatic, but the statement is accurate). Thus ER entered the picture for me. Two years later someone on bogleheads pointed me to this site and the last tumbler fell into place. Even though the math seemed to work out my plan was outside the norm over there, which gave me pause. Here I found a few people making it work with numbers on the order of what I was considering (and many doing so with considerably lower numbers). That gave me the confidence to just roll up my sleeves and grind it out. The rest is history.

While minimizing and ultimately eliminating reliance on full-time employment was a big deal, the greater benefits came from the efforts along the way to streamline my life and eliminate much of the clutter (literal and figurative) that was working against simple contentedness.

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grundomatic
Posts: 413
Joined: Thu Apr 29, 2021 9:04 am

Re: ERE Motivation:

Post by grundomatic »

All I have ever wanted to do was to be able to do whatever I wanted to do. I used to think owning my own business would get me there, now I'm counting on ERE. It just occured to me that ERE is like owning the "business" of your life.

WFJ
Posts: 416
Joined: Sat Apr 24, 2021 11:32 am

Re: ERE Motivation:

Post by WFJ »

Freedom to use time as I preferred, freedom to pursue a wide variety of opportunities in a variety of fields in a variety of locations. Below are quotes that come to mind as my main motivation.

All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.
The first wealth is health
In skating over thin ice our safety is in our speed.
A man in debt is so far a slave
Money often costs too much

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Jean
Posts: 1890
Joined: Fri Dec 13, 2013 8:49 am
Location: Switzterland

Re: ERE Motivation:

Post by Jean »

working was making me suicidal, and my before suicide todo list was way to long. so ere was much less effort.

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unemployable
Posts: 1007
Joined: Mon Jan 08, 2018 11:36 am
Location: Homeless

Re: ERE Motivation:

Post by unemployable »

Jean wrote:
Wed Sep 28, 2022 11:27 pm
suicidal
I tell people I wouldn't kill myself unless I were to run out of money. Which almost happened when I was 23. But now I'm on a 2% withdrawal rate, so...

lightfruit55
Posts: 102
Joined: Mon Feb 20, 2017 10:47 pm

Re: ERE Motivation:

Post by lightfruit55 »

Fortunately or unfortunately, in my first job, I had a sociopathic manager. As such, the initial motivation was to get out of that situation ASAP and to never be in such a situation again. I literally googled for a way out in the first/second(?) week, found ERE, and quit that job within 2 months. Why ERE and not MMM (or the likes)? That was circa 2013, and if I recall correctly, MMM was not really a thing then? The first compelling read was Lacking Ambition and that was my way in to the ERE rabbit hole. ERE clicked for me immediately - it was really the lifestyle/systems design aspect of it and the aversion to "doctrine-thinking" (e.g. "4% rule", "market always goes up in the long run", etc) that really ticked for me. I'm a natural optimiser, pessimist and sceptic all in one - MMM style does not appeal to me. I also like the old school no-frills blogging style of the ERE website.

Till this day, I still remember very clearly the concept (in the context of saving money on clothes, though I'm likely to misrepresent the example) - and I can't remember where I read it (in the book or ERE blog) - that it's better to lose weight to be of the size where it's easy to look good in most clothes and to find second-hand clothes, than to know how to source or optimise for style. That way of thinking blew my mind.

mathiverse
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Joined: Fri Feb 01, 2019 8:40 pm

Re: ERE Motivation:

Post by mathiverse »

lightfruit55 wrote:
Thu Sep 29, 2022 12:41 am
Till this day, I still remember very clearly the concept (in the context of saving money on clothes, though I'm likely to misrepresent the example) - and I can't remember where I read it (in the book or ERE blog) - that it's better to lose weight to be of the size where it's easy to look good in most clothes and to find second-hand clothes, than to know how to source or optimise for style. That way of thinking blew my mind.
That statement really had an impression on me too!

Here is one place where it's mentioned that I saved in my bookmarks: https://earlyretirementextreme.com/who-is-extreme.html

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