In February 2012, I decided to negotiate a severance to break free from corporate life. By mid-June 2012, I had received a severance check and the last of my three months of WARN Act pay. Ten years of fake retirement later, I want to share with you some of my biggest takeaways.

Overall, it’s been an incredible journey. However, I’m also melancholy I’ll never get back these past 10 years. The greater your appreciation of time, the less you will want to waste it.

For those of you thinking about permanently leaving your day job to go on a great adventure, this post is for you.

To feel rich consistently is even better than actually being rich. In fact, learning how to feel rich might be the biggest wealth hack of them all. Once you got that rich feeling, you don’t need to work as hard to achieve a net worth you think is required to be wealthy.

I define rich as earning a top one percent income of $500,000+ or having a top one percent net worth of over $11 million. You may disagree, but if you make more or have more than 99% of the population, you are rich.

However, you can be rich and still be miserable because your spouse left you. You can be rich and still feel terrible because your children despise you for neglecting them growing up.

Making $1 million a year is great, but due to tremendous job stress you hate your life. You may have a $20 million net worth and never feel rich because you sacrificed your health to amass a fortune. Then when you’re on your deathbed with millions, you wonder why you didn’t spend more time enjoying life instead.

Obviously, if you can consistently feel rich and actually be rich, then you’ve got the best of both worlds. But sometimes, we can’t have everything we want.

Are you trying to determine your level of financial satisfaction or dissatisfaction? After all, if you’re more satisfied financially, you should also be happier and less stressed. Good news! The FS Wealth Reality Ratio (FSWRR) will help you quantify your feelings and reveal the unhappiest cities in America!

The core attribute about the FS Wealth Reality Ratio is about managing expectations. After all, happiness equals reality minus expectations. The higher your expectations, the lower your happiness.

If you go to Harvard and end up doing the exact same work as a non-Harvard graduate does, you might feel a little disappointed. But if you go to Podunk U and end up getting paid the same as your Harvard co-worker, you are probably thrilled!

I didn’t go to Podunk U, but I did go to The College of William & Mary for only $2,800 a year in tuition from 1995 – 1999 ($22,000 for comparable private universities at the time). Therefore, any job I got that paid more than my $4/hour McDonald’s job in high school would be a blessing. And boy did it feel good not to have high expectations placed upon my shoulders.

After sharing how one man retired at age 41 with a household net worth of $4 million, I thought it would be good to share another story about early retirement from a completely different situation. This story comes from money trauma and how it is being conquered.

One of the complaints about the $4 million retirement post was that it was unrelatable. For some old-fashioned people, it was hard to imagine having two kids and a high-earning wife. While others thought only working for 14 years after law school was an unreasonably short amount of time to amass wealth.

In my opinion, working 60-hour weeks for 14 years burns you out sooner than working 40-hour weeks for 21 years. I’m also very pro-women who want kids and a well-paying career. More than half my classmates in college were women. And the managing director at my last job of 11 years was a woman who also had three children. She was a rockstar!

Whatever the reasons people aren’t able to relate to others, I love reading about how people achieve their personal monetary goals. There are always some useful nuggets of wisdom to absorb.

The following is a guest post by 38-year-old Stacy on how she overcame money trauma, left America, and retired to Taiwan with only about $600,000.

The following is a guest post from a long-time Financial Samurai reader named Joona. He shares his secret to retiring at age 41 with a $4 million net worth, a wife, and two kids ages three and six.

I really love hearing about early retirement case studies and how my writing has helped people reach their financial goals. After all, I’ve been writing about my own case study of achieving financial independence since 2009. It’s been a fun journey full of twists and turns.

Previously, I had written about how retiring early with $5 million is extremely difficult for families in expensive coastal cities. Therefore, reading this case study on retiring early with $1 million less is particularly insightful. Take it away Joona!

If you want to build above-average wealth, you need to be dynamic in thought and in action. The world is ever-changing, which is why you should stay flexible.

Those who remain rigid will suffer the consequences: less money, fewer friends, less meaning, and lower levels of happiness. If you don’t believe me, identify the unhappiest person you know. Chances are high they are set in their ways.

Being able to see the other side of an argument is a beautiful thing! It is absurd not to acknowledge another person’s point of view. Maybe if more of us did, there would be no more wars. That would be nice.

In finance, everything is yin yang. A negative is often counterbalanced by a positive. In this current environment with high inflation and rising interest rates, your dynamic safe withdrawal rate in retirement can now increase.

Let me explain why.