semiERE: exploring semi-retirement

[AxelHeyst]

I agree with “this is where Jacob needs to be in a hire-me mode” but not “this is where one needs to be in a hire-me mode.” I suspect you might (?) have a blind spot wrt how a qualitatively differently WoG works wrt social dynamics.

I think to work it requires a certain temperament (one might say a WoG constructed in a certain kind of way) and an amenable circumstance wrt other people, available kinds of work, and competition for that work. You don’t have the first (not a criticism, just an observation) and I don’t know if you’ve got the second.

I’ve never been in a hire me mode but when I’m in QH I can semiERE >1COL without even trying, all I have to do is stop saying “no” to the people asking me to do paid interesting work for them.

And enough other people around the forum live the semiERE WoGstyle that it seems odd to me to say “in theory semiERE has to work like so” when we have observational data that for many people it works a different way. Maybe I’m projecting my own experiences on how many other similar dynamics there have been though.

[jacob]

@AH - Well, I'm wary of the "I can do it and [therefore] so can you"-statements. To give an example, in the sf bay area, there's a fat stream of bicycles that just need a bit of simple TLC after which they can be flipped for a profit. It would be possible to develop that into a side-business and make $500/month w/o too much effort. Whereas in Chicago, that stream is almost completely dry because it's subject to a lot of competition.

This is why I assert that one definitely has to arrange one's WOG (including place of living and people of association) around semiERE. Money-streams are not something that spontaneously emerge in any given environment. Put it another way, suppose I moved to QH and became your neighbor, do you think I would be automatically flooded with offers to do paid interesting work for your neighbors as well? Or do you think it's more likely that you're capitalizing on existing relations-capital + your engineering background?

Whereas making, say $7000/year, from one's newly discovered love and practice of baking or woodworking for that matter requires ... a bit more.

It may be that I'm not paying enough attention to the journals, but I can only think of J+G and 7wb5 as explicitly pursuing some kind of semiERE. That's not enough for me to conclude anything in general. Who are the many others?

[7Wannabe5]

I'm wary of the "I can do it and [therefore] so can you"-statements. To give an example, in the sf bay area, there's a fat stream of bicycles that just need a bit of simple TLC after which they can be flipped for a profit. It would be possible to develop that into a side-business and make $500/month w/o too much effort. Whereas in Chicago, that stream is almost completely dry because it's subject to a lot of competition.

Yes, this is true in the specifics, but less so in terms of the general concept of taking advantage of the discard market. One of the reasons why "Discards: Your Way to Wealth" is one of the 5 books I keep in my possession even in extreme minimalist mode is that it offers a very good generalization of the discards market to the extent that it would be almost impossible to find yourself in a situation where you couldn't at least make some money working the discards market. I mean, it would be practically akin to communicating, "There is no need for decomposers in this eco-system."

Whereas making, say $7000/year, from one's newly discovered love and practice of baking or woodworking for that matter requires ... a bit more.

I think this is because even if the quality of your product is much higher, you are directly competing with something (bread, a table) WalMart could provide in general terms. OTOH, the easiest sort of casual income or barter exchange to pick up would be for something many humans absolutely need to keep their lifestyle/household/project-scape/business going which they can't easily pick up at WalMart in some form. For example, child, elder, or pet care are both favors that may be asked of you and casual work for pay that may often be offered to you if humans in your social circle observe that you are not currently employed. And other service to household tasks such as "tutor math" or "fix solar panels" or "build deck" will also circle around, because although not so much in demand, there are fewer humans skilled to provide.

[jacob]

Yes, this is true in the specifics, but less so in terms of the general concept of taking advantage of the discard market. One of the reasons why "Discards: Your Way to Wealth" is one of the 5 books I keep in my possession even in extreme minimalist mode is that it offers a very good generalization of the discards market to the extent that it would be almost impossible to find yourself in a situation where you couldn't at least make some money working the discards market. I mean, it would be practically akin to communicating, "There is no need for decomposers in this eco-system."

Case in point of how location, location, location matters. Compare someone like @Ego living in a stream that is so affluent that unopened boxes from amazon can be picked up next to the trash at the apartment complex and their contents eBayed in predictable way... to someone living where I live where scavenging literally requires a business license because so many trucks are trawling the garbage cans in the back alleys ... to someone attempting to make similar amounts of money by going to yard sales in rural bum fuck eqypt.

I certainly agree that "some money" can be made everywhere. However, for semiERE, the amount and regularity makes a difference!

[AxelHeyst]

@AH - Well, I'm wary of the "I can do it and [therefore] so can you"-statements.

I am pushing back on your "I can't do it and therefore neither can you" statement.

This is why I assert that one definitely has to arrange one's WOG (including place of living and people of association) around semiERE. Money-streams are not something that spontaneously emerge in any given environment.

Yes, this is what I am arguing is the case.

Put it another way, suppose I moved to QH and became your neighbor, do you think I would be automatically flooded with offers to do paid interesting work for your neighbors as well? Or do you think it's more likely that you're capitalizing on existing relations-capital + your engineering background?

Yes, I was capitalizing on existing social and technical capital. I agree that people need to be careful and not assume that they can just skill up in a couple areas and then bam incidental income will flow like magic. In other words: you can't just develop technical capital and expect a semiERE WoG fueled by serendipity to emerge. You must also develop certain specific kinds of social capital at minimum, AND be in a location amenable to this kind of WoG.

tl;dr I agree with making it clear that a serendipity-powered semiERE WoG is not a trivial thing to construct ex nihilo. I don't agree with asserting that it is *necessary* to hustle/be in "hire-me" mode to make semiERE work. I assert it is possible to achieve a state where the work comes to you as a result of your WoG's construction and your daily behavior, and you can accept/reject whichever work you feel like.

I do wonder about the advisability of targeting such a WoG starting from scratch. Would I advise myself to seriously consider such a thing if I were talking to my about-to-graduate-High School self? Almost certainly not. Was it a great WoG to kind of patch together from 2021-2024? Definitely, I'd redo that phase.

It may be that I'm not paying enough attention to the journals, but I can only think of J+G and 7wb5 as explicitly pursuing some kind of semiERE. That's not enough for me to conclude anything in general. Who are the many others?

Maybe I'm wrong. semiERE roll call? Who identifies as semiERE round here? And would you characterize it in the manner in which we've been discussing, where you've achieved a state of somewhat incidental income as a result of your capital stacks, and don't really have to be on the hustle?

[7Wannabe5]

@jacob:

Well, the general rule of thumb is that in an affluent realm the discards are tangible goods and in an impoverished realm the main discard is labor, This rule of thumb also applies to phases in the business cycle. So, you also have to be flexible in terms of the role you are willing or able to play. For example, transporting unemployed youth from the impoverished neighborhood nearest to you to the affluent neighborhood nearest to you where they might be employed. As an extension of this it made sense for me to freelance as a math tutor in the impoverished realm where I recently lived, because those in charge of the organizations/programs funding tutoring for impoverished kids had already recognized this as a "waste" of future labor to which I could "value add."

Also, an active discard operator will explore the opportunities presented by the artificial boundaries constructed by any business in their locale. For example, maybe your neighborhood supermarket regularly experiences the problem of broken shopping carts which it is not in the business of fixing. Either the broken carts or the opportunity to fix them can then become a boon for the savvy, adaptable operator on the discard market.

Finally, it is unlikely to be able to turn $600/month just from the most obviously still valuable contents of the nearest 6 dumpsters, but it is entirely possible to come up with a collection of maybe 3 to 6 unique discard streams that could provide such an income. And the entire generalized discard market can also just be one of the several forms of income in your even more generalized semi-ERE lifestyle system.

ETA: Really the process of both the discard market and casual semi-ERE employment opportunities could be approached in the same way a permaculture project is approached in terms of mapping flows. Just determine the bounds of the social system or neighborhood in which you are willing to pick up cash flow, and make a map of the already occurring economic and material flows through this realm inclusive of labor and information.

[daylen]

I've been in the "semi-ERE" camp for a while, I suppose. I easily make what I need working half-time. Any side gigs or projects that make money act as savings accelerants.

[Western Red Cedar]

And would you characterize it in the manner in which we've been discussing, where you've achieved a state of somewhat incidental income as a result of your capital stacks, and don't really have to be on the hustle?

In some of the early conversations here regarding SemiERE, we established a rough concept centered around the idea of a less direct path to FI. The circuitous route could include ongoing PT work after leaving a career, stints of full time employment with regular breaks, or a hodgepodge of unconventional approaches to reducing costs and/or producing income.

The idea of SemiERE, at least as I understand it, basically represents an alternative to the grind it out and save 25-33X annual expenses template for financial independence.

It may be that I'm not paying enough attention to the journals, but I can only think of J+G and 7wb5 as explicitly pursuing some kind of semiERE. That's not enough for me to conclude anything in general. Who are the many others?

I think a lot of it depends on how you define SemiERE. If you apply the broader definition I mention above, there are a lot of examples who opted for this route, including myself, and have referenced SemiERE at some point in their journals or on the forum.

[MidsizeLebowski]

An interesting survey of those pursuing semiERE would be which income streams they’ve realized and under what circumstances they were developed.

A typical month income wise for me might look like 15-20 hrs/week personal training (a continuation of skill as discussed) yielding 2.5x expenses.

1-2 weekend stints doing erosion control ( an emergent income stream in semiERE tied to social capital and skill developed for personal rather than compensation motives) yielding 1-1.5x expenses

Eggs and overflow vegetables to local food co-op yielding .2x expenses

Unrealized revenue streams in my own semiERE include construction labor, trail maintenance contracts, part time work at local nursery, and pet sitting. These were declined for various reasons, primarily being too heterotelic or having outright contradictory second order effects. I think the relevant point is that none (or very few) of these skills would have crossed hireability had FT employment remained modus operandi. Building check dams wasn’t in my lexicon when working 50 hr weeks in gyms and physical therapy offices.

Note that all of these occurred in a rural setting. As Jacob mentions - location matters - to my understanding it matters not in that some locations are absent of semiERE congruent opportunities, but rather that location determines which types of opportunities may present themselves. The social element of this is certainly not to be overlooked, one who is inclined to solitude would likely find semiERE options thin as solo-crafting, reading, etc. does not lead to meeting those with “problems to be solved”.

WRC, JnG, 7wb5, Animal, AH all fall under the umbrella of semiERE if we expand the definition to WRC’s forementioned non-linear path to FI.

[daylen]

Being in a growing college town of just under 100k population, numerous businesses cater towards part-time or half-time hours. I've worked about 15-25 gigs/jobs depending on how you count (e.g. paper grading, math tutoring human/ai, food service, pet sitting, seasonal farm work, office cleaning). My current half-time office cleaning gig has minimal social interaction allowing me to think or listen to audiobooks while mostly walking around. Long gig on the side being simulation/game development in a very theory-heavy slow crawl into the unknown.

[Western Red Cedar]

A few others that fit under the broader SemiERE umbrella:

2birds1stone, trailblazer, mooretrees, jiimmy, bicycle7, berrytwo, mathiverse, OutOfTheBlue, black_son_of_gray, ego, stasher, classical_liberal, dustbowl, halfmoon, RFS, Salathor(?), Laura Ingalls, etc...

Apologies if I mischaracterized anybody's journey above. I'm sure there are others I missed.

[Western Red Cedar]

I'll add this quote from @berrytwo's journal that offers a glimpse into the amorphous nature of the SemiERE path:

I have been reflecting a lot looking at the semi-ERE thread. Am I already Semi-ERE’d? I wonder if the state of one’s mind can go through a shift from whip to carrot through a continuum. Something like completely controlled by money to semi-ERE to the total lack of whip with FI (if your mind allows).

I feel like I have a lot more autonomy than I ever have in regards to money and it is especially because of my system. I think that once I internalized that I have a high paying part time job at least I did, now it is full time for a couple months, I started to really feel a shift of internal safety. I totally can try to run a coaching business and it is okay if I make no money at it for a year. Or I could travel for a month or go to grad school if I want. I think this relates to the Maslow conversations that I see on the forum. It would take a huge huge shift for me to be financially screwed. My decisions can almost always be in alignment and intentional. Although money is still a factor.

I think my whip is also just mindset. My whip can be worrying about disappointing people or people finding my work cringe. My 2w4 energy is moving towards accepting my authentic desires and moving past fears.

I think those who have advocated for SemiERE in the past emphasized the fact that we are financially resilient and have immense optionality once one establishes a baseline of financial security. That number will likely depend on ones personal circumstances and appetite for risk. Nonetheless, freedom is ours to claim well before we hit the 25-33x COL milestone.

For some, the traditional path to FI makes sense. Some might have better balance with PT work. Others might thrive with longer breaks between FT employment. Some might opt for a pivot to a high-paid, part-time consulting gig in their field rather than trying something completely different like baking bread or making furniture. I think this is probably a better strategy. Others might opt to downshift and stay with their employer at reduced hours for much longer. Once the try it, they may find their relationship with work is completely different and they don't necessarily feel a desire to leave.

I've personally never enjoyed the PT approach, because much of my cognitive energy is still tied up with work. I'd rather be completely on, or completely off. Much of my "freedom to" vision has relied on longer periods of time with limited commitments. Perhaps if I found the right kind of PT gig though, my thoughts might change.

[jacob]

A few others that fit under the broader SemiERE umbrella:

Okay, I'm getting confused now, definition wise. Is there anyone who doesn't fit then? Some of those on the list are FI already.

My definition of semiERE: not FI, WL6+ and making money but is not attempting to increase NW, that is, they're not making any more money than they're spending. Otherwise, it would just be ERE but not FI yet.

The original definition of semi-retirement was someone who didn't save enough money to fully stop working but did save enough to significantly reduce hours.

I'm not trying to pull a "no true scotsman"-here, but I think there's a difference between becoming FI and then later making some more money for fun in contrast not becoming FI and have to make money to pay the bills. Not necessarily in goal lines but in terms of how one's entire WOG has to be structured towards income streams or whether that's optional.

Add: In that sense, I also don't see taking a sabbatical before going back to full time work as semi-retirement. I certainly agree that peace-of-mind increases as savings increase. This is also the case for people with emergency funds of 6-12 months. The difference in mentality lies in "what does the future hold?" To repeat myself: with semi-ERE, it does require keeping one foot in the "earned income" camp [forever!], whereas with FI-ERE, this is no longer required.

[Western Red Cedar]

My definition of semiERE: not FI, WL6+ and making money but is not attempting to increase NW, that is, they're not making any more money than they're spending. Otherwise, it would just be ERE but not FI yet.

I'm happy to elaborate, but curious where you got this definition from? Why WL6+?

[jacob]

I'm happy to elaborate, but curious where you got this definition from? Why WL6+?

WL6+ because otherwise it's not ERE. WL1-5 is standard frugal/consumer: earn-spend-save.

semi-retirement from https://earlyretirementextreme.com/freq ... -questions

Q: How can you be retired if you still make money? (Definitions of retirement, financial independence, and semi-retirement)
A: People used to work in one vocation until they grew old, worn down and nonproductive. Then they would be retired, “put out to pasture” so to speak and get a pension. ERE shares some of these qualities but not all of them. Different generations have different definitions of what retirement means to them. The confusing part is that we use the same words to describe different things because ERE is still so uncommon that no common words exist. First, the concept of working only one career is outdated. Second, not many will be lucky enough to receive a pension anymore. The point of ERE is to reach financial independence (FI). FI means having enough investments to pay all your expenses for the rest of your life WITHOUT needing to work. If you think of this as saving enough money to start your own trust fund, stipend, or a big annuity for yourself, you got it. (Many people who pursue ERE manage their own funds). Being freed from having to work to pay the bills, many EREs [plan to] retire from professional life in the sense of no longer working in that career. (For example, I was a physicist, but I no longer do any physics, I don’t even think about it). This usually means taking up some other activity that is more meaningful to them but which could be hard to make a living from such as raising children, saving the world, rock climbing, making art, open source programming, writing, etc. It doesn’t mean doing nothing. In that regard, some people say that I still work because I have this website. If you want to call that work, fine. Whatever rocks your boat. I call it a hobby and so does the IRS (I pay income taxes on my writing, but I don’t take any deductions)(*). I have no idea how much “work” I put into it. Sometimes 0 minutes per day, sometimes 50 minutes (if there’s a particularly interesting forum discussion), some days none at all. But then every few months I spend a week hammering out a longer article for some magazine on a pro bono basis. Work work work ;-P

PS: To add to the confusion, “semi-retirement” is sometimes used to describe a person who derives some income from investments but not enough and thus needs a job, typically part-time, to make ends meet.

The original concept/definition of semi-retirement goes back to Bob Clyatt https://www.amazon.com/Work-Less-Live-M ... 1413307051 (2007)

[Jin+Guice]

The definition might be the problem. I see semi-ERE as someone who is pursuing FI on a slower path, taking breaks from full-time work in some manner.

The endpoints are: work 5 hours a week for 40 years or 40 hours a week for 5 years. Semi-ERE is between those two.

The assumed savings rate in that scenario is also very high... like just under 90%. So people with "only" a 60-75% savings rate who work less than 40 hours a week end up taking a substantially longer time and have a longer work/ save period, but have more freedom in that period, which is why I think it's a different thing.

[jacob]

The endpoints are: work 5 hours a week for 40 years or 40 hours a week for 5 years. Semi-ERE is between those two.

Semi-ERE is pretty much the first one. ERE makes it possible to spend much less and thus makes it possible to work only 5 hours per week for 40 years compared to the non-ERE consumer who needs to work 40 hours per week for 40 years for the same quality of living.

This would be semi-ERE: https://earlyretirementextreme.com/my-4 ... -week.html

While not exactly equivalent to the zero hour work week of financial independence, four hours do come pretty close, and so it could be the choice of those who do not want to hold full time career over 5 years to become financially independent.

Add: In terms of definitions, I think it would be a mistake (as in not useful) to simply decide by one's speed to eventual FI. The actual speed is strictly set by the average savings rate. If the definition was determined by the time it took to FI, then anyone earning a very high salary would never be semi-ERE + anyone making a low salary (say minimum wage) would all be semi-ERE. Ditto, someone with a high level of spending (it could be argued that they're not really ERE or at least not trying very hard) will always be semi-ERE ... and vice versa. Unless I just created a strawman or completely misunderstood the point, I don't think this is the way to go. This is all defined by the working years vs savings rate diagrams... which are not split into semi-ERE or full-ERE domains.

[Western Red Cedar]

@Jacob - I think the definition you provided for SemiERE above is so narrow that nobody on the boards would qualify. Maybe there are no true scotsman in this case?

Perhaps the definition I laid out is so broad it starts to lose meaning because so many could lay their flag in the SemiERE camp. Some of this is just semantics though. It gets back to the notion of the internet retirement police: https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2013/02 ... nt-police/

The point in keeping the definition or concept of SemiERE broad was to encourage people that were/are grinding it out to consider other alternatives beyond the traditional path laid out in the early FI space. To show them that the path in LivingaFI isn't the only option, or even a good one: https://livingafi.com. At the time, the dialogue here favored the "render unto caeser" and spend your time in the salt mines mentality. The culture has changed quite a bit over the last five years.

There were some detailed discussions about all of this with 2b1s, classical_liberal, and J&G as major advocates for SemiERE. I can't find them at the moment, but they probably date back to 2018-2019. I am fairly certain they grew out of this discussion on the MMM boards, as that discussion is what brought me to the ERE forums. 2b1s and CL expanded on the discussion over here as it fits in with ERE philosophy: https://forum.mrmoneymustache.com/post- ... tirements/

I have noticed that when others are talking about SemiERE, they are usually applying their own concept. Occasionally I'll ask about the serial mini-retirements or multi-year breaks in those discussions, and they'll respond that those fit two. Perhaps we can finally get some clarity on the great SemiERE debate that has lasted almost a decade

[jacob]

@WRC - Well, the original concepts have indeed gotten quite diluted over the years. For example, there are now people who want to be FIRE except without the RE part .. and some also without being quite FI to boot. Turns out all they ever wanted was to have a lot of money in the bank, so they make up all kinds of FIRE-variants instead of just dropping the FIRE lens in the first place.

I don't think my definition is narrow though. I'll agree that it's rather rare/niche though. This is why I could only think of J+G and 7wb5 as in that category: Someone who walking and talking ERE concepts while at the same time deliberately has chosen against saving up 25x. AH also used to belong there before he changed his mind to go full FI.

semi-ERE under my definition (and Clyatt's) would be going part-time before hitting FI and generally never planning to become FI (or postponing it by decades). That's the semi-part, because some work is still required. The ERE-part is using systems-thinking to drive expenses so low that very few hours of work are required. Whether that's 4-10 hours per week or 2-4 months per year or 2-4 years per decade is immaterial in that regard.

For example, the serial mini-retirement thing is basically how a 20something YOLOist carries on their life anyway. Calling it a mini-retirement is just putting a fancy term on common practice. They work a few months to save money for a plane ticket. Then they fly off to volunteer somewhere and when they run out of travel money, they work a few months again. I would not call that semi-retirement or semi-ERE or even semi-employed.

Then there's the poor waitress/walmart stocker/gas station attendant who works three part time jobs and struggles to make ends meet on their $1500/month budget (under the poverty line). I would not call that semi-ERE either. They might be picking up jobs and trading favors in many places but there's no deliberate system in place (hence the struggle). It is not the low spending that makes one ERE.

And finally, there's a rather large group who don't really want to learn ERE-level resource management, so they decide that a 30-50% savings rate is good enough for their above median-salaries. That's the typical MMM candidate right there. Maybe they also imbibe a little bit of Tim Ferris and use their savings to take a year off at a convenient time before inevitably heading back to fulltime work again just to increase the "safety level" of their "stash". Also not semi-ERE, nor semi-retirement. Rather, these are essentially "Mustachians" and on the MMM-track.

In summary: In order for a categorical description to mean anything, it can't include [almost] everybody. Conversely, it also can't exclude everybody but one (one entry is not a category). Having words like semi-, full-, ... and ERE and not-ERE, and FI and not-FI, ... makes it possible to chop up the data space and hopefully have some insights.

[AxelHeyst]

Jacob is convincing me that we've been using the term wrong all along. I'm a sucker for precision and hardassery.

But what do we call, at least colloquially, people with sub-FTE pre-FI yet non-zeroSR WoGs? ("WoG" here indicating legit WL6+ praxis.) It is different enough in vibe to merit it's own term (having spend a few years in such a phase myself).