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Early retirement / FIRE is becoming obsolete and that’s a good thing! No longer do you have to grind as hard and save as much to quit your job ASAP. Today, you can find many better ways to earn a living, no matter your education level or current occupation.

As one of the pioneers of the modern-day FIRE movement, I’ve witnessed many changes since 2009. In the good old days, the goal was to simply generate enough passive income to cover your living expenses. You could then retire early because you were financially independent.

Achieving the traditional definition of FIRE was hard. Therefore, new terms popped up to help FIRE pursuers feel better and more motivated about their progress.

Barista FIRE was created as a solution for those who still needed supplemental income and health insurance to be financially independent. Instead of working at Starbucks, I was thinking of working at Coldstone Creamery in Honolulu to help supplement retirement life.

Coast FIRE emerged for those who were still working day jobs but wanted to feel good about the amount of retirement savings they already had. But Coast FIRE and Slow FI are an illusion. It’s similar to everyone getting a trophy just for being.

Post-pandemic, however, I’ve come to realize early retirement / FIRE is now becoming obsolete. We no longer have to invent new definitions of financial independence. We no longer have to retire early either!

Let me explain why.

If you’re thinking about retiring early, let me share some of the surprising benefits of early retirement I never anticipated.

In a previous article, I highlighted the negatives of early retirement nobody likes talking about. It might have seemed like the negatives of early retirement outweighed the positives. Further, some readers commented I sounded depressed.

In actuality, I just wanted to provide some balanced perspective before you make one of the biggest decisions of your life. Jump with eyes wide open I say!

There are some surprising benefits of early retirement I never anticipated as well. Retiring early has ironically, been my “best career move.” Originally, I thought I would just live a frugal lifestyle off of roughly $80,000 a year in investment income in 2012.

My wife joined me three years later when she also turned 34 so we could both live free and frugal together. We thought we’d rent or buy a small two-bedroom, one-bathroom apartment near or on the beach in Hawaii and live out our remaining days.

Instead, our lives turned out a little differently. We started a family and unexpectedly grew our net worth and our passive income more than expected, luckily due to a bull market. Now we’re trying to figure out how to best spend our remaining years.

To balance things out, let me share some of the positives of early retirement I did not foresee.

Early retirement sounds great and it is great for the most part. But there are negatives of early retirement life that also needs to be discussed. I retired early in 2012, at the age of 34. Then I unretired a year later because early retirement felt unnatural.

Since leaving my day job in 2012, I’ve redefined what early retirement means to me. As a result, I now call myself a “fake retiree.”

Over the past 10+ years, I ended up actively doing a lot of things that provided meaning and purpose. And such things ended up making me money, hence my fake retirement.

The Desire To Really Retire Again

Today, however, I want to truly re-retire by 2023 because I’m so damn tired after the pandemic! I’ve been a stay-at-home father of two young children, 2.5 and 5.5. Fatherhood during a pandemic has been at least 50% harder than even the hardest years I had in banking.

Taxes are going up, reducing the return on our effort. With the economy also slowing, grinding harder if you don’t need to grind harder is a suboptimal choice. Finally, spending two years writing and six months marketing my new bestselling personal finance book has taken a lot out of me.

You won’t really know what early retirement life feels like until you actually walk away from a steady paycheck. It’s easy to pontificate what you should and shouldn’t do in retirement. Further, you can assume a high safe withdrawal rate when you are gainfully employed.

However, I promise you your expectations about retirement and the reality once you are in retirement will be different. Don’t be fooled by early retirees who only crow how amazing early retirement life is. Be wary instead. The Instagram life is not reality.

For all the positives of living an early retirement lifestyle, there are plenty of negatives as well. I know why we revert back to our baseline state of happiness, no matter how much freedom and money you have.

There is a dark side of early retirement I want to tell you about.

I originally wrote this post in 2011 when I was strongly considering retiring early from banking after 12 years. I was burned out and stopped caring about climbing the corporate ladder or making a lot of money. I felt similar to the way quiet quitters are feeling today.

I ultimately did retire a year later in 2012 and have stayed “retired” ever since. After 11 years of early retirement, or fake retirement as I fondly call it, I’ve updated this post with lot more perspective. The pandemic also gave me a gut-check regarding whether I’m spending time in a meaningful way each day.

Early retirement is generally great. You can do what you want when you want. But there is a dark side of early retirement that people need to be aware about. Let me share the negatives with you today.

The Dark Side Of Early Retirement

If you look carefully around the web, you’ll read scores of articles about the desire to retire early or how fabulous the early retirement lifestyle is. The FIRE movement (Financial Independence Retire Early) has grown rapidly since I first began writing about retiring early in 2009.

The reality is, there is a lot of downsides to retiring early nobody talks about. Take it from me, someone who left their corporate job for good in 2012 at the age of 34. I’m not 45 years old with a lot more perspective.

I agonized with the early retirement decision before I left. I also experienced some negative surprises that I did not anticipate until after I had already left Corporate America.

Leaving a stable job, especially during times of uncertainty is tough. As a result, many employees end up suffering from the “one more year syndrome” for far too long. If you decide to retire early and realize six months later you want to come back to work, there may not be a job to come back to!

Let me be clear. I love early retirement. I’m happier because I retired early. However, there are some things I would have done differently if I could rewind time.

Namely, I would have retired closer to 40 years old and had children while working, to take advantage of parental leave! But other than these two things, I have no regrets.

Let us explore several reasons why people want to retire early, why they exist, as well as understand why we should all think twice about pulling the ripcord too early.

If you don’t have your health, no amount of money is worth it. As someone who has been writing about early retirement and the FIRE movement since 2009, let me emphasize the health benefits of early retirement in this post.

There are many benefits of early retirement. Full control of your time is often the most cited benefit. However, the health benefits of early retirement are the most important positive of leaving the work force early. Our goal should be to retire while we are healthy!

Mance Rayder, The King Beyond The Wall once said, “The freedom to make my own mistakes is all I ever wanted.” After leaving Corporate America in 2012, his words have never rung more true.

If I wanted more money, I would have stayed in my investment banking job for the rest of my career. But I longed for the freedom to choose after my 13th year.

Being absolutely free is priceless. Unless you love what you do, it doesn’t matter how much money you have. If you’ve still got to take direction from someone else, you’ll always feel at least a little bit trapped.

But besides glorious freedom, there are also incredible health benefits I’ve noticed after leaving the permanent workforce. Let me share some with you.

Do you want to retire early with your spouse? If so, this post will discuss achieving the two spouse early retirement household versus only one spouse retiring early. We often call one spouse retiring early as being a stay at home parent.

For reference, I retired in 2012 at the age of 34. My wife then retired three years later at age 34 in 2015. We’ve been a two spouse early retirement household since. However, I do consider myself a fake retiree since I continue to write online and published a new personal finance book.

Retiring Early As A Couple Is Ideal

In my post about reflecting on five years of early retirement, I mentioned that having my wife join me two years later was an import shift that made the early retirement lifestyle much easier. 

This may sound strange since being able to do nothing all day would seem easy enough. But the reality is, early retirement isn’t very meaningful if you have nobody to spend it with. This post talks about becoming a two spouse early retirement household.

As an early retiree, it takes time to find your people. The vast majority of your friends will be at work all day, every day. Therefore, during the first six months you’re probably going to feel a little lost as I did. Only after about a year do you finally start feeling a little more comfortable with not working as you adjust to a new routine and make new friends out of necessity.

When my wife finally negotiated her severance package (she had the #1 coach by her side and got a juicy one!), I really started getting in a great groove. Now I always had someone to walk in the park with before grabbing some lunch. Instead of exploring Europe solo, I could now explore Asia with her for a month at a time. As an extrovert, life became much better when she was always around.

Being frugal is a good habit to adopt if you want to build more wealth. However, it is very hard to frugal your way to early retirement. Instead, it’s much better to try and earn more income since the upside is limitless. You can only save so much!

Surprisingly, I didn’t receive much pushback from my post, The Amount Of Money Needed To Retire Early And Live In Abject Poverty.

Almost everyone got the gist, which was to help you question whether the pursuit of early retirement is counterproductive if you have to live like a pauper. Instead, perhaps finding a job you actually enjoy doing would be a better use of your time.

Yes, a couple of readers jabbed at me using the words “coastal elite” as a pejorative term to say how out of touch I am that 200% of FPL is a near poverty wage. But come on, this isn’t politics. It wasn’t I who set the rules. If you find the FPL levels insulting, call your power-hungry Congressman or woman!

The government says that if you earn up to 400% of FPL, then you are considered poor enough to get healthcare subsidies versus paying extra to subsidize others. In general, it’s better to give than to receive. If we all become takers then our country is screwed.

I also acknowledge in the post that earning 300% to 400% of FPL seems totally fine in non-coastal cities.

In this post, I want to highlight some disconnects perhaps some of you who are thinking of living off 200% of FPL or less aren’t recognizing. Let me set the stage with one reader’s budget.

My main goal is for all of you to focus on generating as much wealth as possible through income and investments. After the pandemic scare, it’s more important than ever to look for investment opportunities.

Relying on just your day job, when millions lost their jobs, is not the smart way to go.