Are you confusing your good fortune due to your own skill rather than due to luck? I’m here to argue that above average wealth is mostly due to luck. Therefore, stop deluding yourself into thinking you’re so great!

As President Obama said in a July 13, 2012 campaign election speech, “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that.“

When I first heard Obama say this sentence, I was taken aback. From 2009-2012, I had been working on Financial Samurai for three years from about 5 am – 7 am and from 10 pm – 12 pm after working 12-hour days in finance.

If I wasn’t building Financial Samurai, who was?!

I had also recently left my finance job because I wanted to be free. All I really desired to do was write while traveling around the world, so that’s what I did.

Contrary to popular belief, the ideal retirement age isn’t as soon as possible. Retire too soon and you may feel empty for never living up to your true work potential. Retire too late and you might always be left wondering what could have been if you had changed course sooner.

For example, a 35-year-old couple making $400,000 might love their jobs. With two young kids under three, both parents might both want to work for 20 more years. This way, they can maximize their capital and support their kids through college. But will they regret retiring after both kids have left home? Maybe.

Then you might have a 30-year old couple making a combined $80,000. They don’t have kids and don’t want kids. Instead of needing a 4-bedroom, 3-bathroom home, they are happy living in a 1-bedroom condo for much less. All they want to do is travel and lead a simple life. In their mind, the ideal retirement age is 40.

To minimize regret and maximize happiness, I believe the ideal retirement age range is between 41-45. By this age range, most will have had ~20 years to save and invest. Most will also be healthy enough to explore the world and do the things they’ve always wanted.

As more people look to retire early (<60), more people are looking for shortcuts in order to reach early retirement quicker. Some hate their jobs so much they are willing to retire early and live in poverty!

One shortcut to retiring early is the concept of Coast FIRE. Coast FIRE is a type of financial independence where you have invested enough money so that by the time you hit traditional retirement age (>60), based on historical returns, your investments will have grown large enough to cover your retirement.

It’s understandable that in this day and age of instant gratification, some folks aren’t willing to grind it out for decades like previous generations. However, believing you are financially independent at age 30 because you’ve invested $100,000 is dangerous.

Yes, your $100,000 can grow to $1.75 million in 30 years at a 10% compound annual return. But your $100,000 portfolio might also be worth only $432,000 in 30 years if it compounds at only 5%. Then there’s weakened purchasing power thanks to inflation to consider.

If you decide to retire early on $100,000, your portfolio will generate about $4,200 a year in risk-free income today. Living off $4,200 a year in America is abject poverty.

If you decide to keep working after Coast FIRE, are you really financially independent? Most people would say there’s no difference between Coast FIRE and a regular working person who saves and invests for retirement. Perhaps the key with Coast FIRE is not stressing about exactly what job you’re doing.

Changing definitions of financial independence to give you a psychological boost can keep you motivated. However, just be careful about the lie you tell yourself. If you don’t have enough passive income to cover your living expenses, you are not financially independent yet.

There are some people who think that achieving financial independence before 60 is only for people with high incomes. I strongly disagree. You can still achieve financial independence sooner on a modest income.

A modest income is defined as +/- 25% of the median household income in America, which is roughly $75,000. In other words, a modest household income today ranges between $63,750 – $93,750.

A large part of achieving financial independence is having a strong money mindset. If you believe you deserve to be rich, you will likely put yourself in a position to get richer.

If you believe you don’t deserve more wealth despite people dumber and less talented than you making way more money, then less is what you’ll likely get.

The other part of achieving financial independence is having congruency between your beliefs and your actions. The more you believe, the more you need to take action. Otherwise, you might look back on your life, full of regret.

Anybody who has played competitive sports knows having a healthy mindset is more than half the battle to winning. And maybe that’s the problem? Not enough people are put in competitive positions to test their mettle.

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.

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.