Thank you to everyone. To be honest, most of the arguments made are ones that I thought about, but somewhat needed to have confirmed.
Let me clarify a few things though. We currently have young kids (9 & 11), but they'll be teenagers if/when we pre-retire at 40, and young adults if/when we retire at 45. So being involved in what they do and use them for social networking will become difficult.
Also on the age difference, many of you said I'd benefits from being around older people. I don't disagree and most friends we have are about 10 years older than us because:
- we hang around with them because they have kids of similar age. The difference is we had our kids in our early 20s, and they had theirs in their 30s; and
- we hang around people we work with, and both my wife and I have been fortunate to progress quickly through our careers. So our colleagues are in their 40s.
So we look at our average friends who are 45, what we perceive about their financial situation, how they spend and save their money, and we know that they'll still be in the rat race when they are 50 or 55.
crazy connie said:
Once you have time M-F you may find there are many more FIRE folks than you thought! Even if they are not from your current social circle.
Nords said:
ER tends to distinguish your real friends from your co-workers & family. Your real friends are the ones who still want to hang out with you even when everyone's busy with work & family.
I think that's the key here. I don't doubt that we'll be able to make friends. I just have a feeling that our social circle will gradually change. I know we'll continue to have Saturday get-togethers with our friends. I know we'll find lots of hobbies to keep us busy during the week, we'll just have to find new friends to share these hobbies with.
It sounds silly, but early-retirement or pre-retirement bring some fears out of me which are not even financial in nature. Your posts were extremely useful. In any case, I know that the option is always to go back to work at doing something else that pays less but that we enjoy if boredom sets in.
Rich_in_Tampa said:
You might be a perfect fit for ESRBob's recipe: semiretirement rather than cold-turkey full time FIRE. That's my plan.
That's exactly what I mean by part-time work at 40. We're in a situation where we feel (based on very conservative ROI of 6.5% or 7%) retire at 45 with a SWR. We're also thinking that if we stop saving at 40, we can use up our dividends from taxable accounts and work part-time while the nest-egg grows slowly to a full-retirement next egg at 55. So worst case, we're thinking of slowing down, working part-time and/or doing something we like between 40 and 55 to pay the bills. For the wife, it's relatively easy as she freelances in accounting and she'd just scale back to 10-15 hours per week.
As per myself, I'd want out of my industry and into something totally new. I'm a handy and versatile person not liking the senior management life I'm in right now. You have no idea how exciting the prospect of even just working as a Walmart greeter sounds to me. What keeps me going is the thought of being relatively FI in 5 years, or FIRE'd in 10 years. I just don't think it's worth waiting 10 years. I just need to prepare my pre-retirement career over the next 5 years.
frugalguy said:
Having calculated my allowable expenses to die broke
(hopefully slightly better), world travel isn't often in the cards, but can still manage a couple of good vacations most years.
Same thing here. When I say FIRE at 45, I mean at my current expense level. I figure that what I save from work expenses will pay for the new hobbies. I can see 1 or 2 international trips per year in affordable areas, but no trip around the world. I know there are cheap ways to travel, and we'll likely have more time to figure this out when we're FIREd.
mountaintosea said:
It was only then that I saw that the rest of the world values personal time, travel, and experience rather than accumulation of stuff! Then I started saving in earnest but that was in my early 40s. You are way ahead of where I was. The mindset in the States is to work work work so you can buy buy buy. :
I've seen that too. It's very obvious when you travel to the Caribbean's. Some of us laugh and talk about the "mañana culture". I look at them and think, what a worry-less way to live ;-)