AxelHeyst wrote: ↑Thu Jan 19, 2023 11:43 am
A common (but not universal) story is people accumulate to some FI number, and then then quit, and then they wind up making income anyway. So, they oversaved.
But, accumulate to FI math makes sense, and conceptually its easy to grasp. So it's a robust way of achieving FI and money security.
However, if one is capable of navigating a bit more uncertainty, and is willing to commit to getting one's skills up faster, then there exists another path. The path of FI as secondary order yield, a side effect of a well put together WoG.
This path looks like skill up on postconsumer praxis and get CoL down very low, and save up some FU stash, something like 5-10 years at minimum, up to 20 years. At this point, if you're FTE, quit, probably. This is the first milestone: five to ten years of runway with a VLCOL means you never have to FTE again.
Do watchu gotta do to heal thyself and recover from whatever it was you had to do when you were FTE.
Then: commit to to the learning journey of building a WL7 level WoG. Build a web of skills with homeotelic loosely coupled goals and be working on closing loops and making everything in your life make sense and work together, and maintain yourself in a stance of being open to serendipity etc...
...and the idea is to spin up multiple sources of secondary-yield, i.e. incidental, income, that covers and then exceeds your CoL. To be generating in excess of expenses as a side effect of living a life the way you want to live.
This is exceptionally difficult to paint a picture of, I think, because everyone's WoG will be very unique structurally if not topologically, and so there aren't any simple directions to give, unlike with fire, where you can just say "Once your CoL is n% of stash you can quit, although you should do your own homework on withdrawal strategies etc, don't be an idiot".
But this FI-as-side-effect approach sounds more like loosey goosey handwavey stuff. "Figure out VLCOL, then get an FU stash, then do your best to speedrun the ERE curriculum to WL7 and then you'll have figured out multiple sources of incidental income. Whether or not you are FI according to FIRE math is only academically relevant."
The thing is, you have to do it fast. Maybe it just seems fast. It's not that most people take a long time, I think it's that most people run up to WL5 very quickly rapidly and then
stop there. It's not that it intrinsically takes a long time to get to WL7, it's that most people simply aren't even trying to get past WL5 optimizer stage, because why?
It occurs to me that the carrot of FIRE is very distracting. The problem is that it is at WL5 ish. So if it really is the carrot of FI that attracts you to ERE, well, you get the reward at WL5. And then for most people there is no other visible carrot. The reasons for going on to WL6 or 7 or whateverthehell 8+ is are... opaque, fuzzy, even repellent to some. So you get the carrot at WL5, and then you're good, and you're basically done.
Which is fine, of course, but I think the fact that so many people are content with WL5 and stop there gives the impression that making it to WL7 is a) very difficult, b) takes a really long time and c) basically no one does it.
c) might be true, but I think a and b aren't *necessarily* true. I think it's just a matter of staying on the path and maintaining momentum, and soon enough you'll get there, if that's what you want.
The easiest way to stay on the path I think
is to decentralize FI as a goal, to avoid getting stuck in the FI-at-WL5 trap. Instead of putting FI as the goal at the end of the FTE phase after which one's real life begins, put FI as a likely effect somewhere down the road *as a result of having lived your real life for several years already.*
This takes away this huge milestone of apparent freedom that, honestly, has a lot of baggage associated with it for many people, this word 'retired', and is truly difficult to navigate.
By ending one's relationship with traditional FTE with only a FU stash (let's define this as 5-20xCoL, enough for breathing room but not enough to consider yourself FI-forever), this sends a signal to yourself that while yes, you've just made a big change in your life and everything is different now, you're not completely independent, you don't have total freedom of action yet! There is still work to do.
Yes, take a nice long break, go travel overseas, do a thruhike, live in Baja for a winter, put it all out of your head for a bit, signal to yourself that you're entering a new phase of your life, but then, as my friend Arti would say, Keep F'ing Going. Keep developing your skills. Explore activities that you enjoy and are meaningful to you that might have some renumerable component.
If the FU stash gets lower than you like, explore different options for earning: seasonal work, part time work, freelance, side hustle, job-as-skills-learning-experience, etc. Be open to serendipity.
At first, you might be w*rking more than you'd like, or the type of thing you're doing for $ isn't exactly what you'd like. If it weren't for the money, you wouldn't do it. But compared to the FTE version of yourself, you've got abundant surplus time and life-energy, and you're constantly improving your skills, your WoG, etc. So with every year, your relationship with generating $ improves. You find multiple streams. You find yourself doing less of what you don't like, and more of what you do. Serendipity compounds. You work on your inner game to ensure to protect yourself against
zemblanity. Instead of working towards this big overnight flip of a switch (pulling the trigger on FTE because FI), a discrete change, you're constantly working on improving and tweaking and tuning, a much more gradual and certainly non-discrete process of development.
At some point, you notice that you aren't doing anything you don't like to do. Your stash isn't at n%SWR yet, but that's fine, you're content with how your WoG is set up. This is the second major milestone.
A few years later, you notice that your stash is below n%SWR, in fact it happened a few months ago and you didn't notice. Oh hey, neat, how about that. This is the third milestone, which is epilogue.
Your life doesn't change: it already did.
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Okay. Criticism? What's naive about this? Are there non-obvious ways this fails?