But I will reinforce what IDave is talking about. Your age absolutely matters. And I think the difference between someone like myself or Dave and the younger members is that although obviously the less-aged among us can process that mentally, we can actually feel it as concrete reality. We've crested the hill and are on the downward slope I like to joke. But maybe that is part of the exercise too?
Mrs. Ego and I have an ongoing discussion about the many ways our childlessness has allowed us to continue to be somewhat childlike. Having children represent milestone moments in life. Do they anchor the parent to particular roles at particular times? Does it become difficult to maintain the mindset of a twenty-eight-year-old when you are the parent of a twenty-eight-year-old?
I don't think of us as being on a downward slope at all. In two years I could be doing something completely different. While I cannot run as fast as I once did, I feel like I am still learning and still growing.
We constantly wonder how much of this is caused by a mindset we purposely adopted and how much is the result of our lifecycle programming being out of whack.
I completely +1 the idea that age matters greatly to this question. And I'm younger and have a smaller stash so I'd feel a NW zero less. So the best I can do is imagine what it'd be like to be 60, have less energy than I do now, and be faced with 'starting over', with the point that I don't know what it's like fully acknowledged.
In my imagination of this older-me scenario, my age would be extra motivation to let go of the goal of traditionally retiring unless by that point I had a relatively chill access to very high earning potential. I imagine that my tolerance for trudging anywhere, for any reason, would be something like six months tops. I imagine that my strategy would be something like "what's the funnest, most interesting, rewarding, etc thing I can do to get my material needs met until SS kicks in in a few years, and how can I build a great lifestyle off SS income"?
But ^^ isn't a criticism of anyone else's answer, it's just a way to reflect my curiosity. Insofar as we all are exposed to a smorgasbord of risks, I'm getting a lot of value out of reading and thinking about everyone else's perspective on this.
In particular, what risks aren't worth the effort to protect against? I mean, if I game through a scenario where I lose X, and all of my gamed responses are actually not that bad after all and in some cases sound interesting, then is it worth it to spend Y effort mitigating against it? (A well run scenario game will run the event at a spread of ages...)
Thought about it for a while. I run variations of this scenario in my head every now and again, also @Ego's one where my ROI is -10% annual.
Alongside some earlier comments, my day to day life would not change much, other than the initial few months but I will spare details about logistics. DW and I like what we are doing now so we would want to continue to pursue this, I have a sense we would use the situation as an opportunity to move countries earlier than we think about now. Some other changes could follow possibly.
This exercise as I see it brought to its logical conclusion is
'what would you do if you were to die tomorrow'.
Then backtracking from this drawing on @Quadalupe's comment by giving more allowance for resources such as time, wisdom, knowledge, skills, access, social etc. we can eventually find ourselves in the OP scenario.
In response to whatever is suddenly absent, naturally people are going to employ various tactics that are perhaps interesting but rather idiosyncratically i.e. from the point of view of their life, seen through the lens of their journal and such.
I think a big takeaway from exercises such as this one is creating a possibility for every person introspectively to reflect on the principles that govern their life and if these are the principles that they want.
Last edited by guitarplayer on Wed Jul 05, 2023 2:24 am, edited 1 time in total.
I don't want to give the impression that I've sat down in the rocker and started yelling at the neighborhood kids, haha.
But the reality is that at 55 I am closer to death than my birth. I've crested the hill as far as longevity and that is going to affect decisions in my life (especially time management) as well as influence starting over in the workforce. And I would venture that it would be a psychological hurdle to have to start from zero again for a multitude of reasons, not the least of which would be one's ego. It is a huge difference between armchair quarterbacking this fictional experiment and serving someone French fries at the burger joint because you need that $8/hour.
Having raised children that are now adults on their own, it is actually easier when they are young to bring out your inner child. They just want to have fun and who doesn't want to build a fort or jump on a trampoline? Now they will choose their friends over you around 13 or so but until then they can make you feel much younger and playful. Age 13 to 18 or so isn't much fun as a parent but then they grow up and mature and want to do some fun stuff again and have really interesting discussions, albeit more limited. Childless couples have more options and money as a rule, not a monopoly on any sort of freedom.
Along your last point I also don't feel my age as far as curiosity or growing as a person. It's a mindset in my opinion as we all know people our age that look and think terribly or even dead at this point.
Seems to me there's basically two paths. One can pursue a path of FI (as many of us were or had, which optionally could include retirement per se) or not (some of use weren't). Both of those paths are paths of a thousand faces. There's a subset of us for whom time is a weakened and depleted ally, if not an outright foe. It closes doors. If you don't believe me, redo this exercise on your 60th birthday.
The inception of "traditional retirement" grew out of the recognition that people do get too old to work:paying job, homesteading, multifaceted hustler, Dumpster diver, whatever. Not everyone but enough that it motivated societies to put social safety nets in place--family, government administered. Further people do get old enough they can't even maintain a household through their own physical effort. Again, not all, but enough that it's imprudent to dismiss the possibility, doubly so if your not tight with your family. Triply so if your single.
Of course now people see retirement as a birthright where it once was more of a fallback. Further, some of us go through a lot of effort to hasten it. I sort of chafe at the idea that retirement, especially the early variety, is a lazy, stagnant, entropy-driven decline. It's been largely the opposite for me. I'm less than 48 hours removed from having flipped a kayak in a tempestuous squall where I leveraged months of physical conditioning and years of research on what to do in such a situation to turn it into a funny story rather than having the state police out here diving for my remains. All that capacity facilitated by not having to worry about how to scrabble up a few bucks to see me through the week. And that's secondary to being able to live the life I want to live to begin with without being forced to monetize it, which gets icky after a certain point and would kill the joy for me.
But that's just me, my path being just one one of the thousand faces of ER. I get that it doesn't work for many. That we all have our own spin on the topic is a great evolutionary strategy. When I watch or read about past gory violence in places my ancestors came from, I often wonder whether I descended from those who were best at hacking people to bits with swords and axes, the cowards who ran away and hid, the sellouts who joined the side with the most good hackers, or I just lucked out that at junctures in the past children slipped in under the wire of one or both parents getting hacked to bits. Many ways to get there from here.
But for this exercise, as mentioned, my options would be few. I don't see any path back to retirement other than a token brief one necessitated by morbidity. So I'd have to shift gears and go back to working for money and plan to keep it up as long as possible. Basically those two are one in the same due to my age. If I had different values and ethics, I could mooch off my dad for as long as he lives, spin it as a symbiotic thing to assuage my conscience. And it would be--except for my annual time at the hideout I'm pretty much there 7 days a week keeping his house and household afloat. But me being old means he's even older and the situation likely won't endure long.
I don't want to give the impression that I've sat down in the rocker and started yelling at the neighborhood kids, haha.
But the reality is that at 55 I am closer to death than my birth. I've crested the hill as far as longevity and that is going to affect decisions in my life (especially time management) as well as influence starting over in the workforce. And I would venture that it would be a psychological hurdle to have to start from zero again for a multitude of reasons, not the least of which would be one's ego. It is a huge difference between armchair quarterbacking this fictional experiment and serving someone French fries at the burger joint because you need that $8/hour.
Snip
Along your last point I also don't feel my age as far as curiosity or growing as a person. It's a mindset in my opinion as we all know people our age that look and think terribly or even dead at this point.
I with pretty much everything you said ffj. I am the same age and really for the first time since age 5 my life is not revolved around the public school system’s schedule. I think child free and having kids are both fine life paths but you appreciate not having not having responsibility for dependent kiddos more when they fly the coop.
It still kinda boggles my mind that at the ripe age of 21 elder offspring has a job, health insurance, dwelling, transportation that he acquired on his own.
I know some of my present wanderlust in part because I was so nose to the grindstone in my late teens and 20’s. Moved to a new state at 22 and the three years I lived there proceeded to see very little of it because of my general poverty of time and dollars.
Barbara Sher in "It's Only Too Late If You Don't Start Now" recommends the exercise of estimating how many years, or just "good years", you think you have left, and then subtracting that from your current age, and contemplating how much you have done or how much has changed since you were that younger self. For instance, I am 58, I think I might have 25 more "good years", so I consider my journey since the age of 33, when I was married, my kids were 8 and 10, and I was working full-time with commute as the inventory manager of a very large bookstore while renovating my old house and garden. There was definitely a level on which I felt "older" or, more accurately, "consistently middle-aged, loaded with responsibility, and exhausted" during my prime working and child-rearing years. In the 15 years since I've been totally empty nest (since I divorced, the kids left home, and I unloaded the house pretty much simultaneously), I've found myself flipping back and forth between feeling 19 vs 69 much more frequently than feeling the center of gravity that was 39.
The funny thing is, "500 in a sock" is more than a lot of the homeless people I work with have, unless it's payday or perhaps the day after payday.
I would buy a bus pass for 40 bucks and go to one of the many local job help/temp agencies and get one of the jobs where I know I can get hired on the spot/within 48 hrs, in my area that's industrial cleaning and recycling/waste management jobs, or fast food/dishwashing etc.
Basically anything you NEED-NEED you can get for free if you know how and where to ask for it. I'd be at the foot of a church with this whole horrible story of how I was reset to 0 and I'd either have a place to crash or at least a tent by the end of the day. Even if that didn't pan out, with my leftover 460 and perhaps a little dumpster diving/"borrowing" a tarp, I could easily put together a sleeping setup and buy a jar of peanut butter.
If you make money in a stable regular way, and don't have some terrible vice, disability, or albatross, and with all the assumption and benefit of my young age, I think I could claw back to where I am now within 6 months, besides some of my savings. And this is ignoring all my friends and family and benefits of my job: in reality I know many people that would actively take me in, and when you work for a director of homelessness services, I kinda think they would pull out all the stops to get me into a place, LOL. Or at least a season-appropriate tent and bedroll.
I've only really been "out in the world" so to speak for maybe two years tops, and so long as I retained my memory of all I've experienced and learned, I think I could just reset and it wouldn't really change much besides my IRA balance, unless my legs were also broken and I was a felon or something.
Maybe in 3 or 5 years I'll try to remember to come back to this and see how my answer will have changed.
