Living on $650-$700 a month... this must be a typo, correct ?
You need to go read Jacob's blog. I recommend that you subscribe to it (small daily doses instead of a huge data dump) and consider buying his book. Especially if you're going to follow through on your "Joe Dominguez" plan (
Real-Life Retiree Investment Returns) of retiring on an asset allocation of 100% fixed income.
I can see that I'm going to have to write a blog post about "old school frugal"...
It's my strong impression that regular readers were fine with it. Some of them even guessed at it coming(*)---I had been [mostly] autopiloting the blog for over a year and apparently it showed that I was getting bored/frustrated with the blogging process.
I agree it's easy to tell that your
active regular readers are fine with it. It's harder to tell how
all your readers feel about it. The vast majority of blog readers never comment.
I only have 18 months into the blog, hence the choice of another 18 months for the exit strategy. But whether it's blogging or books or discussion boards, I cannot imagine a time when I'll stop writing. In fact guest posting (or posting to discussion boards) seems to be the ultimate way to write without the constraints of deadlines or other business choices. This whole process of taking an idea from a discussion to a published book and a blog has been very educational and quite a bit of fun. The next idea will be at least that fun, and I'll already have much of the education.
But before I'd go into autopilot, I'd be blogging about the temptation to go into autopilot. And that would probably lead to a way to avoid going into autopilot/boredom/frustration.
I think anyone on E-R will understand your choices because they know you.
I think one of the key points I've picked up is to share/discuss the options leading to those choices before the choices are actually made. By the time everyone's been through the discussion, then they think they know you.
However a large part of my curiosity on this subject comes from a lack of understanding, not so much a lack of agreement.
For example, I've had several attractive job offers over the last decade. Each has taken me through the emotional arc that accompanies that sort of offer, followed by realizing that (for various reasons) it's not a good idea. My spouse has been [-]calling me out[/-] a valuable sounding board in perceiving the traps behind the bait. By now I've been through the "got a job offer" process enough times that I cannot conceive of an offer that would inspire me to go back to work "for the Man" and "for a salary". Even if I am the Man and I'm keeping all the earnings.
I also can't imagine giving up that degree of control over my life. I joke about the perfect job being one where work is suspended when the surf is up, but the guy running the surf shop (and trying to hire staff) knows it's no joke. You've chosen to take the quant job for its access to tech and techniques... arguably you couldn't reproduce that on your own in a Bay Area RV. But I'm pretty confident that you could have replicated many of the problem's more interesting aspects without having to uproot yourself to take a job with a bunch of other societally-imposed obligations. It's the difference between a more cautious exploration of the water depth & temperature before diving right in.
It can all make perfect sense to you in the context of who you are and what information you've been given. But most people are still unlike you and didn't have the same info. So when you announce that you're leaving behind a dream lifestyle in a dream area of the country for... a job?!? Well, you've given yourself a huge communications challenge. I can understand why people question whether you had ulterior motives.
But, hey, this is my perspective after 10 years. Perhaps you're embarked on a similar voyage of discovery. Maybe you'll do better at it than I did.
I keep telling my daughter that she may find the fabled career that she really loves-- and until that happens, it's better to be financially independent. I suspect she senses my skepticism that such a career really exists, and I fear at times that I've poisoned her youthful optimism with my cold-hearted harping on self reliance.
Of course, seeing as I've developed an estimated handful of dectractors over the years, those guys immediately pounced on it. I think it comes down to politics again... if you have anyone who disagrees strongly with you and you say or do something that can be taken out of context and turned around to be used against you [mod edit], it will happen. It simply will happen. The observation that it's done so frequently in politics suggests at 1) It's very effective; and 2) There's practically no defense against it.
That's one side of the issue. The other side is that there are just as many politicians who manage the message. They start communicating early on, they attempt to manage the media (or at least make it easy for the media to use their message), they start a dialogue, they keep communicating throughout. I agree that it's difficult, but I think that there is a defense. I just wish I knew more about it and could get better at it.
So if you know of a couple of blogs or active forum posters elsewhere who have written posts or comments about "How Nords stuff just doesn't make any sense to me", you're in trouble. If they're writing about "How Nords stuff doesn't apply to regular people", you're in bigger trouble because these authors considers themselves champions of a cause against you, for the people.
I see this as at least two blog posts. Perhaps a multi-part series!
(*): Of course the way it was done, the surprise, did have something to do with reality-constraints: this was a lucky opportunity that fell into my lap (actually through one of my long-term readers); not a case of me sending out job applications for a sustained period, so the only other option was to either not say anything or wait a few months and serve it gently.
Well, I'm still not sure of the right way to handle the situation. Another blogger waited nearly three years to tell people he'd sold his blog, and that had its issues as well. Since then he's made other life decisions (which may be right for his personal situation) that have jeopardized his credibility even further. In both cases it's because he felt that there were things he couldn't discuss on the blog-- and then he had trouble catching up with explanations. And again in both situation there were reasons for people to question his ulterior motives, or at least accuse him of protesting too much.
I guess one way to answer the detractors would be to fully disclose the salary/benefits, what you're doing with them, and why. But again I don't disclose my finances to that degree of detail-- only to the extent of noting that anything requiring a 1099-MISC or Schedule SE is donated to charity.
Now that I've muddled my way through a few hundred words, I guess it comes down to two contrasting impressions:
1. Being a tireless advocate of a lifestyle that you've fully embraced, including its very real potential penalties for failure, versus,
2. Choosing to abandon that lifestyle for anything else.
If you've been doing the first then it's very difficult to maintain credibility as you transition to the second.
Another contrast would be the Kaderlis and the Terhorsts. The Ks are still galloping the globe and writing more than ever. The Ts have adopted a new lifestyle and deliberately faded into obscurity. IMO, both have done so without controversy.
Maybe readers just want to see the bloggers reach their goals and then write "... and they lived happily ever after!"
Early-Retirement.org readers excepted, of course.
Those readers would want to know how much money was left in their estate when they died after the "ever after", and whether their withdrawal scheme was 100% survivable or just an artifact of their time period of history and their sequence of investment returns...