You know you're committed to early retirement when...

[Lisa99]

Did you have a defining moment when you KNEW that you would retire as soon as possible?

Today I had a truly horrendous day at work. On the way home I stopped at the store to pick up stuff for dinner and thought...hmmm I think I'll buy some flowers to cheer myself up.

Then my FIRE voice kicked in and said, "what a waste of money!".

So instead I came home and bought $5,000 worth of Vanguard Small Cap Index Fund.

As of today, I think I can truly say this board's lessons have sunk in!

 

[Surewhitey]

For me, it was when we moved back to Los Angeles. Leaving at 6 a.m. and returning home at 6 p.m. 5 days a week.
Earned a paycheck and had to spend it to live frugally.

Living in Mexico for 8 months gave us the bug to return in April. When you find yourself w*rking / commuting 60 hrs a week for not much benefit makes you cut your spending in half and live off your savings earned interest / divy's and not w*rk.

Spearfishing is really cool too! Like hunting and fishing wrapped into one...

 

[chasesfish]

I was 22 or 23, had been working my rear end off at a company for two years, but the boss a second level up was a complete jerk. He was called out on something he did blatantly wrong, and responded by threatening me with my job. I really needed this at the time, my wife was in the middle of vet school and the job market in that area were just awful. I remember how small I felt at that time and said never, ever again.

A few months before my wife ended vet school, I transferred within the company to Atlanta where there are always employment opportunities in my industry, and I have always been cordial with management at my competitors. Both my wife and I work and we live so that either us of could loose our job and nothing would be disrupted. That 50% savings rate has really started building a nice portfolio. I've also been lucky enough to work for some phenomenal people in that same company and am still with the same organization

 

[Chelhxi]

Within a few months of my first real job after college. That's when I started thinking about it.
It became obvious I would actually be able to retire early when I got married and I was able to start saving a significant portion of my paycheque.

 

[Major Tom]

There was no defining moment for me, but I have always had a "hope for the best and prepare for the worst" mentality.

When the company that I loved working for closed down and laid me off, I was really glad that I had been preparing for the worst.

 

[KM]

Both my wife and I work and we live so that either us of could loose our job and nothing would be disrupted.

This.

I dont know when I started to think about or realize I could retire early - but I do remember from the time we were married DH and I lived the same way. My parents never lost their jobs, but I remember as a kid in the 70s they had many friends that did. I never wanted to be one of the 40-somethings that lost my job and lost my house. So we always LBOM to ensure we could support ourselves if one of us had to go to work at McDonalds.

Then we woke up one day and realized we didnt have to work much longer. It was a great feeling.

 

[travelover]

For me it was working 30 consecutive 18 hours days at a location 200 miles from home.

 

[comicbookgujy]

After 3 months in my first real job, my department was laid off due to a merger. Saw a lot of people in their 40's and 50's crying.

I didn't want to find myself ever in that situation so I always try to save 25% to 50% of my paycheck

 

[EvrClrx311]

$5,000... thats a lot of flowers you turned down. Good choice.

 

[NanoSour]

For me it was more about reaching FI rather than ER. I have long been obsessed with having enough money not to have to work. Probably since I was 18 and joined the Military. To that end I stuck out a 20 year career and now have a second career that is going pretty well.

I always thought the decision to ER would be easy, but not so in my case. Much harder than I ever thought.

 

[GolfingDuo]

For me it was more about reaching FI rather than ER. I have long been obsessed with having enough money not to have to work. Probably since I was 18 and joined the Military. To that end I stuck out a 20 year career and now have a second career that is going pretty well.

I always thought the decision to ER would be easy, but not so in my case. Much harder than I ever thought.

Awesome job thanks for your service and keep up the great work.

 

[Fean]

$5,000... thats a lot of flowers you turned down. Good choice.

My first thought when I read the OP was to suggest that the key to her ER was to get into flower sales That sounds a lot less stressful to me than my current j*b

On a more serious note, I got serious about ER in 2009 near the bottom of the market when my entire division was shut down and outsourced to a group in India. Ouch.

I was fortunate with two companies early in my career that put me on track to ER, but the layoff was a major wake-up call to me. I saw that I needed to actively manage my finances and career if I was going to stay on track for ER. I bought a copy of Quicken, tracked every penny we spent, and trimmed down our budget considerably. I also took our portfolio back from our #!#$!!! advisor and learned to manage it myself. Our returns are no longer substantially lower than the market due to 2% annual fees.

-Fean

 

[ksr]

I was very unhappy at my job and thought I needed a job change. I found a new job, and within a couple of months at the new place realized that I was just as unhappy. I was 32 at the time, and I definitely consider this a defining moment - I realized that I needed out of the whole corporate scene, that changing jobs just shifted my unhappiness from one job to another. That started me on the path to FI and I put together a plan for getting there.

 

[W2R]

Did you have a defining moment when you KNEW that you would retire as soon as possible?

After 23 years of marriage, my divorce at age 50 left me destitute, with a temporary soft money job and a towering debtload to pay, hounded by bill collectors and in a town where I was a newcomer and knew nobody. It was enough to rattle anyone's nerves a bit, I suppose.


Not having much fondness for playing the "victim" role, I decided to put all my effort into making a good life for myself that anyone would want. To me, a good life meant things like owning my own home and not having to wait until I was older than anyone else before retiring.

Hitting bottom is always a great defining moment. For those who prefer melodrama, here's a great film clip:

I'll never be hungry again - Gone with the wind scene - YouTube

 

[Meadbh]

W2R gets the prize for the most appropriate movie clip!



I think my defining moment was when I received an inheritance in 2005. It involved property, an investment trust and cash. The day the proceeds from the house sale were transferred to my account I realized that new possibilities were open to me.

 

[laurence]

Not a "retire" moment, but an FI moment: Watching my step-mom break down and cry because she had less than $20 in the ATM and couldn't withdraw it to buy dinner. I was ~8 years old. I didn't understand money but knew I never wanted it to be the constant worry it was for my parents. Now my only worry is my kids getting too spoiled. I sound positively curmudgeonly when I tell my kids, "You don't know how lucky you are!"

 

[UserRequested]

Had a really tough first few years when working. Went through a patch after voluntarily leaving a job I hated without having another lined up. Took me a while to find another . Used up all my savings. I was 30. Decided from then on then the only way to live and work is FI.
Take pride in the fact that I have never stayed in a job once I had enough of the BS. Longest I've lasted in one place was 5 years.

 

[David1961]

Not a real defining moment for me. Started thinking about ER shortly after I started working. At that time it was a dream, but slowly it became more feasible.

And congrats on buying the index fund. As you watch the $5,000 grow in the upcoming years, you can buy flowers to celebrate.

 

[steelyman]

I knew I would go in 2006. I had a terrible manager then who was later fired, and I just ignored him and worked with other academics in the US and Europe. But I did probably the same spreadsheet all of us do, put the pedal to the metal, and was free in 2011.

 

[scrabbler1]

Did you have a defining moment when you KNEW that you would retire as soon as possible?

There were several defining moments in my path to ER. But I can choose one of them which really accelerated my trip there.

Back in 2003, I was working from home most of the time as part of a part-time arrangement I ahd had since 2001. It was wokring well until the company bigwigs ended any open-ended telecommuting arrangements. I could still work part-time but I had to fulfill all of my hours at the New Jersey office, threby bringing back to me many of the horrors of the commute I had been able to avoid the previous 2 years.

Even though I continued working there for 5 more years, I knew at the time of this switch that it would be my eventual undoing, or retirement. I put up with thie 3-day-a-week trips to New Jersey until I was able to reduce it to 2 days a week in 2007. But in those 4 years I was ramping up my work on my ER budget spreadsheet, running the numbers nearly daily to see what my expenses would be and what kind of investment income I needed to generate from cashing in my rapidly growing company stock.

In 2007-2008, the pieces of my ER plan were rapidly falling into place so by the end of 2008 I could resign and ER.

But I can trace this accelerated move toward ER to late 2003 when the telecommute gig ended. Lisa99, that was my turning point, or defining moment, when I knew I would ER as soon as I could. I found it deliciously ironic that it was 5 years to the DAY the telecommute ended that I ERed (10/31/2008 versus 10/31/2003, both Fridays).

 

[obgyn65]

No defining moment for me. My mentality has always been about delayed gratification. Big saver, and very conservative with money.

Did you have a defining moment when you KNEW that you would retire as soon as possible?

 

[chris2008]

Shortly after I had started post grad work I was sent to a business conference and found myself having dinner with some of the key persons.
They were very open and shared some of their ups and downs with me, the new kid.
I realized that most of them had been made redundant at some point of their career and had made big compromises to earn their pay checks. Broken families, cross country moves and all that stuff.
Talked with DH who has a safe but local job. Decided that if need arises we want to be able to say "enough" if my employment luck runs out.

Employment luck is still there 25 years later, but DH will ER at 61,5 for heath reasons in summer. I will join him at age 55 in the class of 2013 as we love spending time together.

As we both are LBYMers it did not require lots of effort.

 

[bo_knows]

The big defining moment for me was fairly recently. We've always been fairly good savers, and never bought anything extravagent, however about 3 years ago my wife got a big promotion at w*rk, 2 years ago I got a big pay bump by switching jobs, and 1 year ago we had our first child.

Somewhere in the middle of that, I found sites like here, MMM, and ERE. I threw some numbers into a spreadsheet and Firecalc with our new income level and thought "Hey, ER is conservatively possible!". When we had our child, and I started staying home on Friday's to care for him... I just had this feeling like "I want us to be able to spend a lot of time with our kids well before they're out of the house." With any luck, we'll be annoying semi-retired parents when they're in middle school

 

[EllisWyatt]

Defining moment came for me when I finished graduate school and had been at megacorp for about 6 months. When I had interviewed, I got the "we are loyal to our employees - we haven't had a lay-off since 1955" speech. Six months after I started working there, the first (of ultimately 13 ) round of layoffs hit. The most senior technical people (all around 50 to 54 y.o.) were the first to go, and were beyond shellshocked. Most were depending on retiring from the company with a comfortable pension, and only a few had accumulated much individual net worth outside of the promised penion - which suddenly they were not going to get. It was devestating to watch.

It was my light-bulb moment which drove home the fact that only you have your best interest at heart. I immediately doubled the amount I was putting into the 401K and started puttng every raise I got into savings/investments.

 

[rodi]

I had a few, distinct, defining moments.

First was when my dad died. My brother died 2 months prior to my dad at age 49. He died with negative net worth. From my dad I received a small inherited IRA. Mom and Dad's estate helped settle some outstanding bills my brother had. The inheritance was small in that it wasn't enough to quit my job outright... but big enough to boost the retirement pool of money to put me in reach of an age 55 retirement. But the market peaked the month he died (Oct. 2007) so that pool of money shrank rapidly over the next year. (Thank goodness it recovered).

Mortality wake-up-calls, a slight boost to my net worth... all planted the idea... but I was a long way from hitting the number.

My husbands employment was also effected by the recession - but after one firm closed the doors he managed to land a decent job. Despite a few gaps in his employment - we managed to continue our rapid mortgage pay-down... and have seen the mortgage go down significantly as we get closer to the payoff. In So.Cal - mortgages are super-sized - and even with only financing 1/2 the purchase price - we still had a super-sized mortgage compared to most of the country. Seeing the mortgage payoff date come into near term re-invigorated our ER dreams. (Target payoff is 1/2014!!!)

And the final catalyst was getting more involved in my kids school programs - being on the board of the non-profit that supplements their public school programs... having that struggle between being available to volunteer in their class, and keep my boss happy... I want to do more with/for my kids... especially as they're getting to middle school age.

Now I'm just waiting for the severance package. If that doesn't come the numbers will be well padded for every contingency in the next 2-4 years. Having the goal has made us really step up our savings, cut our budget, and reinvigorate the payoff of our last debt - the mortgage.