Whisper 9999 started this thread by asking what motivated us through the long years of preparation for early retirement – years of saving, years of deferred gratification, years of seeing peers with more stuff and lifestyle.
I think its a great question, and it has taken me several days of pondering to figure out my answer, so its a bit late.
My answer is slightly different than others, in that I did not ‘save my way’ to ER, but rather chose to ‘earn my way’ to ER. Terhorsts gave me the vision and roadmap, but Joe Dominguez' YMOYL-style privation was never our path. We bought what we needed and just sought to earn more, through taking more risk, working harder and smarter, starting companies, investing carefully in risky asset classes.
But the motivation was always around ‘Freedom’. I held vivid images for 15 years of escaping prison, escaping the humiliation of bosses and employers, and once I was the boss in my own firms, vivid images of ‘graduation’ to a new level where I would have all the time in the world to be with my kids, to not take business trips, to take exercise classes, to hang out with friends or have lunch with my wife. I though a lot about the old style indentured servitude by which some of our ancestors came to this country and worked for years to pay off their passage debt and were finally free, though in that case just free to work for themselves without a debt, not Financially Independent free.
Once I had a firm image of freedom from the indignities of having to make a monthly sales quota or a quarterly revenue projection or leave my family on a Sunday afternoon to make it to Dallas for a Monday morning meeting, then spending just what we needed was pretty easy to manage. (Be warned, however, that ‘the basics’ for us may be different than the norm as we spend about 4x the average for this board on our annual expenses.)
It took 15 years but we made it.
We haven't dropped out lifestyle spending much, though we do spend less than our peers through savvy tricks to keep a similar or frankly better lifestyle. (we also have more time to do more fun things together that don't necessarily cost much). However, in the interests of full disclosure, we do rely on a bit of part-time work income to close the gap between a 4% SWR and our annual spending, and afford things like our property taxes (while the kids are in school - 8 more years), our 37 ft bluewater cruising sailboat and this summer's 3 weeks in France (with a week renting a self-hire barge and putting through Burgundy) It's a tradeoff that works for us.
ESRBob