Is ER really a growing trend among Gen X ?

[bondi688]

Over the Hill, Already: 50 May Be the New 70 - Yahoo! Finance

"Almost without fail, people in the 45-55 age range get to a place where they go through a professional midlife crisis," said Sharon Hulce, president and CEO of Employment Resource Group, a search firm. "They say 'I've made money and done well and is this all there is?'

There could be many more execs joining Ma in his 'retirement.' A survey of executives in June of last year by search firm ExecuNet stated that many executives were just waiting for the economy to get better so they could retire. They cited stress as one of the main reasons for wanting to leave.

"More and more, professionals are feeling burnt out and discouraged, and are in turn leaving the workforce because they can't find any level of alignment between work and life," says Allison O'Kelly, founder and CEO of staffing firm Mom Corps.

"High level professionals are finding that their careers are too demanding and as a result they are choosing family and personal life over career to find relief," O'Kelly said."

The comment section accompanying this Yahoo article is interesting as well.

[obgyn65]

Thank you for sharing. I am turning 48 this year, and happy to see that I am not the only one feeling a midlife crisis, certainly a factor in my desire to FIRE. However, I have been fortunate to be able to discuss these matters with others on this website.

Quote:

Originally Posted by bondi688 "Almost without fail, people in the 45-55 age range get to a place where they go through a professional midlife crisis," said Sharon Hulce, president and CEO of Employment Resource Group, a search firm. "They say 'I've made money and done well and is this all there is?' The comment section accompanying this Yahoo article is interesting as well.

[donheff]

A lot of us ERed members here went through this. Unfortunately for most people, discovering you want to ER in your mid to late 40s is problematic unless you were already LBYMing and/or are making a lot of money. In my early 40s DW and I kicked our savings way, way up but that was accompanied by big upticks in earnings and we still relied on my pension for a solid base. Without the high earnings and pension we would have needed to cut our life style to the bone to ER in our mid 50s.

[Jay_Gatsby]

I believe the disillusion in the article is certainly achieving an increasing degree of recognition among Generation X as we see our parents (who sacrificed substantially for us) developing lifestyle-predictive diseases (e.g., cancer). We don't want to end up like them nor put our children through that kind of pain/burden.

Yet this disillusion is not compelling Generation Xers to retire early. Rather, it's compelling us to become financially independent or at least more financially secure. Decisions large and small are being scrutinized. Home brew coffee instead of Starbucks. Coupons, sales and other ways to get a discount are being utilized more and more. For cars, Hondas, Hyundais, Toyotas, etc... instead of BMWs, Acuras and Lexuses.

Donheff makes a good point, namely, discovering you want to ER in your late-40s is nice, but it would have been better to have made such discovery in your early-20s and planned for it.

[LoneAspen]

I'll be turning 46 later this month, and am (hopefully) counting down two more years until I can at least semi retire. I have the checklist printed out and everything, ticking off each week as it goes by.

I've been doing IT/computer work all my life and hate it. There is nothing about my job, or actually my career, that I find rewarding nor satisfying. In fact, I look back on my almost 30 years in the IT field and consider it pretty much pointless in the grand scheme of things. I tried to escape IT and the rat race by moving back to Colorado in 2005 and got my real estate license. Had a blast, but then the market tanked and I lost everything I had, so had to come back to IT.

I feel blessed to be at a startup that (fingers crossed) should IPO later this year, and I'm hoping will be acquired about a year after that, which will line up with my four year vesting schedule. Regardless, in early 2015, I'm out. If I've made anything close to a life-changing amount, I'm selling everything I have for whatever it's worth, cashing out, and leaving the 9-to-5, cube, office-building, IT ratrace.

So yeah...I guess people could say I'm definitely having a mid-life crisis

My parents were older and have both passed away, I'm not close to my sisters, and I've never been married nor had kids, so it's just me (my preference actually - I've always been extremely independent). I don't know if it's a generational thing or not, but I do find myself looking back disappointed that all the years I spent in IT were meaningless in the grand scheme of things. I just have no sense of satisfaction that anything I did was lasting, meaningful, or helped anybody. At least with real estate, I felt like I was helping people get on with their lives, moving from one home to another. Not so in IT, where you just work on a software or hardware project that's obsolete in a couple years and tossed aside.

If I'm able to escape in a couple years, I'm sure my friends will be shocked I chose to (semi) retire relatively young, but I can't wait, and I'm sure I'll have no desire to return to the 9-to-5 working world. I want to find something a lot more satisfying in Life 2.0, and it has nothing to do with sitting in offices, in a cube, or behind a computer all day long.

[scrabbler1]

Although I was born in 1963 (and technically at the tail end of the Baby Boomer age range), I have always considered myself a Gen-Xer because I have always heard the term "Baby Boomer" defined in a way in which I do not fit into (and my brother, born in 1968, definitely fits into the Gen-X definition). The definition I heard was being born to parents (at least the father, usually) who served in WWII and returned home to start families. My dad was a few years too young to have served in WWII.

My burnout from work was due more to the commute than to the work itself. For the first 12 years of my career (1985-1997), I enjoyed the work enough to overcome the awful commute. But when I hit a wall in 1997, the enjoyment of work could not overcome the awful commute any more. I managed to get a second wind and was okay until 2001 when my company moved from lower Manhattan to Jersey CIty, New Jersey (before the 9/11 attacks), making an already barely tolerable commute even worse.

I was able to reduce the commute by working part-time, mostly telecommuting, for a few years, to lessen the burnout from the commute. But the telecommute gig ended and I had to commute 3 days a week to NJ, something I knew even then (back in 2003) would be my eventual undoing. In 2007 I switched to 2 days a week after the burnout caught up with me. But I knew even then, as my ER plans were beginning to take shape, that I had less than 2 years left in me, as each trip became an increasingly annoying chore and I was enjoying my work less and less. I had also regained my personal life, resuming some old hobbies and starting some volunteer work. That was huge.

When the last pieces of my ER puzzle fell into place in 2008, I left for good and never looked back. If I were still working and today were a workday, I'd be heading out right now for the beginning of my lousy trip on the trains to the office. Guess which I prefer doing, that or writing this post about not doing it any more?

[bondi688]

LoneAspen

I really do not think that you should feel your work in IT was meaningless, or you should feel so disappointed that you had not helped anyone, or be so down on yourself. What the world had enjoyed in term of information dispersing, work efficiency, safety, entertainment in the last 40 years or so was because of the revolution in information technology. And what enabled you to vent your frustration and shared you feeling with us is through availability of a web site like this, another gift from the digital age. While you may not remember them as such, you had done more things for more people than you realized or gave yourself credits for. All of us, at work or at home, had benefited from help by people in IT. We all had time when we were desperately calling for help from the IT Department.

If anything, your work (job) may enable you to begin Life 2.0 soon. You also may cherish the freedom even more, looking back at where you came from and what you personally dealt with to get there. Good luck with your plan and don't be so hard on yourself.

[Lazarus]

Everyone at megacorp not in IT hates it. Is like plumbing, they are not glad you unstopped the toilet. They are mad at you that the toilet is stopped up!

[MDJO]

I meet a lot of people 45 - 55 looking for meaning in their w**k and their lives. It is clearly something that affects many people as they realize they have less time left than what has already passed. It's natural and healthy to stop and take stock.

LoneAspen, I hope you find peace and happiness in the next phase of your journey. Enjoy the trip. Sometimes you have to make yourself enjoy it.

[brewer12345]

I asked some of my buddies what they belive they have actually produced in the course of their career and the answer (from a Gen Xer) that resonated with everyone was: landfill.

This it by Fred Reed really hit me as well:

"The problem is that we don’t have anything worthwhile to do.
Used to be, almost everybody worked on farms, because they wanted to eat. Being males, the males killed each other, neighboring tribes, and all reachable nationalities, but they generally did not murder their own children—though anyone who has been a parent can understand the temptation. People were too busy making stuff that mattered—food, clothes, roofs.
Then farming got automated, so people started making other things that were sensible. Refrigerators. Penicillin. Actual glass for windows. Electricity.
As time went by, nearly everything people really had any use for got made, mostly by automation. This meant two things. First, consumerism became essential to keep the economy going. Nobody much needed designer water, or Farrumcoochie boots, or SUVs, or McMansions with enough space for a large colony of Barbary apes. Which typically they contained. These things were kinda fun, like Corvettes and iPads and whoopee cushions, but hardly vital. Mostly nobody would have thought of buying them if not beaten about the head and shoulders with advertising campaigns subtle as a sock full of hog kidneys.
The second part of the bog of consumerism was that all of this deplorable nonsense was rolling off automated assembly lines. Consequently, people didn’t have anything to do that needed doing or that wouldn’t have been better not done. Yet they still wanted to eat. Two solutions offered: The Democratic, which was to give everybody everything he wanted as an entitlement, and the Republican, which was to have people work their lives away in meaningless jobs that allowed them to buy the unnecessary things advertising told them they wanted. This required the creation of huge numbers of meaningless jobs. Of course, it was politically wiser not to describe them just this way.
An obvious and expandable source of unwork was the government. Conservatives always say that they don’t like big government, but their choice is to pay federal drones to occupy offices pointlessly or else to fire them and put them on obvious welfare. Being decayed Calvinists, conservatives choose the former."

Fred On Everything

[ERhoosier]

Don't agree with the author. IMHO Gen X ER behaviour is varied & reflects the generation's financial polarity. I know many who have LATM (lived ABOVE their means) and are realizing they can likely never retire. Often try to justify their regular expensive purchases by stating perpetual w#rk is their intent (!?!). Others have been wiped out by years of bad economy in their areas & are trying hard to get their financial house back in order. Still others were always LBYMers or (like OP's article) enjoyed windfall (e.g. big stock options, selling very successful business, etc.)

[HighRoller]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Lazarus Everyone at megacorp not in IT hates it. Is like plumbing, they are not glad you unstopped the toilet. They are mad at you that the toilet is stopped up!

+1

[ziggy29]

Quote:

Originally Posted by bondi688 "Almost without fail, people in the 45-55 age range get to a place where they go through a professional midlife crisis," said Sharon Hulce, president and CEO of Employment Resource Group, a search firm. "They say 'I've made money and done well and is this all there is?'

Been there, done that. I don't think I've quite "made my money" enough yet to pull the trigger at 47, but it may happen soon. It's not just the money saved up, it's also the income stream coming in.

Some of you know my wife has recently entered ministry (she's 44). There's a big schism at our current home congregation where she serves and it's an ugly thing. Her contract ends on January 31 and she has declined to seek another one (and will not accept if one is offered). We have a good lead on a different congregation between San Antonio and Victoria, and we may know as early as next week if we are packing up and moving soon. Right now I'd put the odds of it happening at 90%, maybe even a little higher.

If that happens and it looks like this will be a good long-term fit, if we can sell this house and live in church-provided housing there, my "FIRE clock" just moved a LOT closer to midnight. And then, "what do I want to do will be the rest of my life" is really something I can strongly consider and not just wistfully talk about as a pipe dream way down the road.

[imoldernu]

Quote:

Originally Posted by brewer12345 I asked some of my buddies what they belive they have actually produced in the course of their career and the answer (from a Gen Xer) that resonated with everyone was: landfill. This it by Fred Reed really hit me as well: Fred On Everything

Am thinking that GenX may be the last to ER, based on supply exceeding demand.

[ziggy29]

Quote:

Originally Posted by imoldernu Am thinking that GenX may be the last to ER, based on supply exceeding demand.

I think it will be really hard for the Xers who started late in terms of retirement saving and planning. Wage growth isn't enough, it's harder than it's been in a long time to throw large percentages of stagnant or falling real wages into the IRAs and 401Ks, and when you start later you need to put in a much higher percentage, often 20% of gross pay or more.

I was lucky enough to start putting away at least 12% of my income *every year* into retirement savings since I was 23, and now it's closer to 30%. Had I not done that, especially after my first Megacorp eliminated retiree health insurance and froze pensions for younger workers, there's no way I could think about getting out by 60, let alone 50.

[Jay_Gatsby]

Quote:

Originally Posted by ERhoosier Don't agree with the author. IMHO Gen X ER behaviour is varied & reflects the generation's financial polarity. I know many who have LATM (lived ABOVE their means) and are realizing they can likely never retire. Often try to justify their regular expensive purchases by stating perpetual w#rk is their intent (!?!). Others have been wiped out by years of bad economy in their areas & are trying hard to get their financial house back in order. Still others were always LBYMers or (like OP's article) enjoyed windfall (e.g. big stock options, selling very successful business, etc.)

Would tend to agree with this. Gen X has a fair number of financial strata. Many Gen Xers started working in the go-go mid-to-late-1990s. Some hit the proverbial lottery (and timed things well by getting out), while others never did and/or were wiped out when the dot-coms went dot-bomb. It took a good 5+ years for them to recover, only to be wiped out again by the Great Recession of 2008. Save for the few lucky ones, it's been mostly two steps forward, one step back, with some suffering one step forward, two steps back. In a nutshell, many Gen Xers have very little to show for 10+ years of working and are approaching their 40s with minimal life savings. They've delayed marriages, house purchases, car purchases, vacations, etc... until they're more financially-secure. Further complicating matters is a lack of upward career mobility because many older folks aren't retiring due to similarly anemic retirement savings.