I’ll confess that my approach to financial independence has hitherto been overwhelmingly lazy, driven by the pursuit of maximizing my leisure time along the way as well as once I cross that finish line. After setting up a reasonable budget and maximizing my savings rate, I’ve just been on financial autopilot for several years. The savings get invested, my portfolio grows, and I’ll be able to retire early in another decade if all goes according to plan. Some people refer to it as “the boring middle” and while your personal life doesn’t have to (and shouldn’t) be that way, it’s felt pretty apt at times in terms of grinding away at my career.
I posted six months ago about how monthly work travel was causing dissatisfaction with my job. It took me longer than expected but I did find a new job, one which so far seems more engaging and with more opportunities for long-term development. This new gig is actively encouraging the use of work time for developing relevant technical skills which I think is important for engineers as we tend to love the process of learning. This will be my 5th job in seven years and I didn’t even last a full year at the previous job, but I absolutely don’t feel bad about hopping around to find something more sustainable.
I have a few coworkers around the same age as myself who are really into real estate investing. Each of them have a couple investment properties already, with three to five year plans to exit the workforce and sustain themselves off of their real estate portfolio while they continue to grow it. Part of me thinks their plans are the irrational exuberance of first-time millennial real estate investors after experiencing the unsustainable real estate market gains since March 2020. On the other hand I admire their aggressive approach towards planning an exit from the traditional workforce.
I’ve always tended towards being risk averse. I would for example choose a guaranteed 10 year FIRE plan over one with a 50/50 chance of taking either five or 15 years. Obviously the nature of investments, risk, and volatility being what they are nobody can predict such timelines with any certainty. But as a general rule I will try to avoid being in the left tail of a distribution (i.e. a statistical loser) whenever possible. That’s just my personal preference.
My shifting thoughts on spending my free time wisely
When I was younger, the thought of spending all of my free time playing video games sounded amazing. I considered it one of my main hobbies as a teenager through my mid-20’s. Now at 29, I’ve slowly tapered off my playing of video games over the past few years due to naturally losing interest in them. Everything feels like a stale and rehashed version of something I’ve already played, and accomplishing things in the virtual world is no longer fulfilling.
Recently I’ve found a lot more satisfaction investing my free time towards ventures that build a particular skill I want to have or creates a tangible product that benefits myself and others. The title of a blog post by Darius Foroux that I read a while back says it best: “The Purpose of Life Is Not Happiness, It’s Usefulness“.
Entrepreneurship for the risk averse
First of all I would like to state that despite its rising popularity, I find the term “side hustle” to be stupid and juvenile. Maybe I’m just not in touch with the popular culture any longer, but “entrepreneurship,” “my business,” or even “experimental venture” sound a heck of a lot cooler to me.
These thoughts on reconsidering the lazy path to FIRE are coalescing into a potential approach to accelerating FIRE that I’m thinking of as a type of entrepreneurship for the risk averse. Personally, I don’t think I’d risk tens of thousands of dollars on building a side business. But what if we could attempt a potentially profitable venture for little or no financial investment?
For example, this blog costs me just a few dollars per month to host. I’m also about 75% of the way towards a first draft of my first book, which will cost me no money out of my own pocket if I self-publish digitally and use a print-on-demand service for physical copies. I enjoy writing in these mediums, and it could potentially make me money, but more importantly if it doesn’t I’ve lost nothing financially while still gaining the inherent satisfaction and enjoyment of the process.
As they say, you can’t win if you don’t play. And I feel that oftentimes the risk averse types like myself choose not to play to avoid left-tailed outcomes, rather than carefully selecting a playing field where left-tailed outcomes don’t carry a tangible risk.
What type of things are you doing in your spare time for free or low cost that you enjoy doing, find challenging, and that could potentially lead to a FIRE-accelerating payoff?