+1
I saw his blog some time ago and was thinking exactly the same thing. I quit my job at 32 or 33 to start my consulting business, like you I set my own hours and worked at home for the most part. I was self employed, not retired!
...
(Emphasis mine.) I agree with you. Sorry, but I do not consider living off the work of one's spouse something which fits my definition of FI or retirement. A SAHD is no more retired than a SAHM if the spouse is working.
I don't think it's so important at all. I raised the fuss here because it gets lots of search activity and pays well because there's a lot of money in managing or telling other people how to manage their money.
Some of us are rubbed a little wrong by that, especially when their creds are questionable.
Of course if I were in his position I would not consider myself retired, I would be proud to be self-employed and managing finances to give me maximum time to be with my family and to do the things I wanted when I wanted to do them. That is indeed something to be proud of. On the other hand, many of us tried to accomplish this too, I was self employed in my early 30s and lived relatively frugally. Retired? that would have been laughable.
Retirement has various meanings, if you are an athlete you can retire from your sport after an injury at 30, you can retire from the military after 20 years, you can retire on a pension or you can retire after you have accumulated enough so you can live off your assets. So there are many meanings. But I agree with you, using the word as a marketing ploy is something else indeed.
Goodness people, don't we know by now that anything means whatever it's author intends it to mean, ie. if it gets the effect he is after, that is all that matters. I am a superhero, I am retired, I am a master of the universe. If I say so, it must be true, and if you see it differently and express that, you must be one of those new fangled haters. Itself a newfangled term that intends to shut up anyone who still has the outdated habit of using external, historically accepted definitions.
Naughty, naughty!
Ha
And Ha, I have read many of your posts and have no doubt that you are a superhero, but master of the universe may be a little bit of a stretch!
Words do have meanings, they cannot mean anything we want, but of course that is what marketing tries to do isn't it?
Can you retire right out of college? You can travel the world, picking up jobs from place to place and as long as you don't hurt anyone else it is of course fine. I have seen some use that word, it used to be called being a hobo. In my travels I have known people who do this, they use the retirement term only jokingly, not knowing what they will do in the future.
My mother was never employed after she was married. Was she ever retired? She would have laughed at you.
As with any complex human condition, there are areas of white, and black, but mostly grays, and that is what we have with this word and this lifestyle.
I just ask myself this. Would I consider myself retired in this situation? I am old fashioned I guess, but words do have meanings. On the other hand meanings do change. Maybe we are in the midst of that change with the word retirement now.
It is only important to get a little joy out of life for ourselves and give some joy to others, but I do think some honesty is important too.