Mental adjustments and our FIRE plans
May 20, 2019
I’ve always pushed myself professionally to be the superstar, to deliver beyond expectations, to perform at my highest possible point to justify the raises and promotions I’d then advocate for.
It was important and right for the growing my career stage of life but I deliberately slowed that pace down a bit in the last few years as I focus on my family. That tendency to operate at a fever pitch has stuck with me, though, and the decision to pursue our path to financial independence turned it back on to an unhealthy degree.
There’s a strong correlation between my job hitting the level of Unbearable Stress, my impatience with work, and desire for FIRE growing into an unmanageable monster. After half a year of every possible thing going wrong at my job, and all sorts of nonsense at PiC’s work for the past year, my brain latched onto FIRE as The Way Out. I had always been on this path subconsciously because of my health, why not crunch the numbers and make it a reality?
I planned and planned and fretted. That fretting even helped me understand an anxiety that’s been bubbling under the surface, and that was good.
What was not good? Crunching the numbers revealed how much time we still have left before we can take off into the sunset (a lot considering my nerves around the idea of age 50-55) and that was its own problem. I didn’t like discovering that we need to plan for at least 15 or more years of income-producing work, not a bit. I didn’t like the idea of having to figure out how to either hold on to my current job for a “really long time” or finding a better way to produce the same or more income. I didn’t like that this was the best case scenario because I plan for worst case scenarios, I never formulate plans that bank on everything breaking our way. That is not how life works.
All of these pointed to two big problems.
First, I was trying to resolve a short term (I hope!) problem with a long term solution. It’s no wonder that produced more worrying than it solved. While it was a distraction, and in some ways a good one because I focused deeply on streamlining our financial efficiencies, it became counterproductive.
Second, knowing that we have such a long timeline on this particular phase of our life plans isn’t a good thing. I don’t do well with huge goals that stretch over a decade. It makes me squirmy and crabby and I forget to live in the present. I do my best work when I have a hazy undefined (huge) goal that is only glimpsed by peripheral vision and setting a FIRE date that’s so far in the future and trying to break that down only brought the difficulties into stark contrast, it didn’t make it feel more possible.
This might be why I never made up a 360 box chart for paying off our mortgage – it felt like it’d just be depressing to see how far we still have to go at this stage in our paydown process. But maybe it’s time to adjust my mindset.
I have no intention of giving up the goal of building up assets to create our financial freedom! There was nothing wrong with that goal in the first place but the pursuit shouldn’t become all-consuming and ultimately negative which is where my stress and instincts took it. I neither love nor hate work, it’s the thing I do because we have to produce income and I’m excellent at my job, but when it, like any other thing, turns bad of course I looked for an escape.
It’s taken a few months to wind down my stress levels and related anxieties about needing to do absolutely everything right in this next decade-plus that feels critical to build our path to financial freedom. Not surprisingly, this reduction of anxiety is directly correlated to all the work I’ve put into changing things at work. Now that things are slowly getting back on track, it’s the perfect time to get in the right headspace for tackling this in a much healthier way.
Perhaps I can learn to embrace the process and the journey. No guarantees, this is rather foreign to me, but I can try.
I’ll take the mortgage, my second source of serious anxiety aside from growing our investments, for a start.
I’m printing up that chart. We will fill it in monthly. We’ll have a mini celebration, on the order of a Hershey kiss or the healthy equivalent of that for me, each time we pay down $5000 in principal. If that helps channel the frustration with having an overwhelming daunting mortgage into joy over slow and steady progress, we’ll do the same for the progress in building up our investments. One block at a time, one month at a time.
The fun thing this decision revealed is that my life insurance term and our mortgage are slated to end the same year! I can’t remember lining those up before but it’s good to confirm that the term on my policy won’t run out before we’re slated to finish paying off the mortgage. (That’s assuming we’re going to stay here for 30 years. I assumed we would but here’s allowing for the possibility that we won’t.)
I know this is annoying coming from me but how do you eat an elephant? You take one bite at a time. No sense in killing yourself to reach a goal only to be exhausted and mad at the end
Why annoying coming from you? If I were to be annoyed by the thought, I’d imagine it’d be annoying from anyone 😀
I’m not annoyed except at myself for having so much trouble shaking the impatience.
There was a phase in my life when I tracked more closely and did elaborate calculations about where my current savings and expected additions would put me if I continued along the same path for different time periods. The calculations even included different growth rates, ranging from worst-case scenarios, most likely scenarios, and into unlikely but nice to think about scenarios.
And I stopped, not for some grand reason, but because I hit the point at which my life was just too busy and too messy to take the time.
I have never been someone who wanted to plan for FIRE. I want FI and know that as a general statement, I’m in good shape for that. But RE…I’m not in your position with a known serious health problem. And I see the benefits of my job beyond money. I like the people I work with. I like the work I do. I like the balance that work brings to my life and the sense of purpose it gives me. I like the person I get to be at work. That person is different from Mommy, different from wife. Work-me is her own person, and she does not have toddlers gleefully wiping their noses on her pants.(Which is not to say that I would scrap being wife-and-Mommy, just that it is really, really nice to have time to focus on being an adult among adults, too.)
So, yeah. I guess for me, I’m not even really thinking that much about the journey anymore. I’m still saving and doing things that will–hopefully–get us to a comfortable, distant retirement. The journey hasn’t been abandoned. But the current landscape is such that I’m not so strongly focused on the destination. I don’t need to get there sooner than it comes, and I might as well enjoy where I am now.
What a lovely perspective.
Honestly I think that being too busy to obsess will play some role in my letting go, as well. Deep breaths help, but they won’t do the trick alone.
I think it’s great that you find personal and professional value in your work! For as much time as we spend in our jobs, it’s wonderful when someone can appreciate the role they’re playing in their work and find pleasure in it. It would be a shame if you couldn’t.
I’ve been running and re-running and re-re-running numbers but nothing budges: Until my house is paid off (in 8-10 years) I’ve got to keep working. And I don’t know what I would truly do with myself if not working, though I’m very happy to deal with that when I get there. (Of course if we lose the ability to affordably self-insure, it’ll be a non-issue anyway.) BUT I totally hear you – I have been rather stuck on RE lately.
Grace’s comment makes me wistful: I think that my issue is that my job is NOT deeply satisfying. I’m good at it, but I don’t feel it’s serving any larger purpose – I am an effective and busy and pleasant cog. So since I have to be a worker bee for about another decade, I think my focus needs to be figuring out how to get meaning from my job (and, likely, find a job that more closely serves my values).
Aside from commiserating, I do have one suggestion: if you print out any kind of mortgage payoff form, color in from the top as you do your regular payments, and color in from the bottom to signify rolling the payoff closer to the present. Does that make sense? I have my mortgage amortization printed out, and approximately every 2 months I pay enough extra that I move the payoff date 1 month closer to the present date. So I check off the last payment each time that happens so I can really SEE that I am making progress!
That’s where we are buuuut more like 20 years on the house part – no way out of putting in this time. And even with the mortgage paid off in 20, it wouldn’t change our FI date / needs since I also intend to cash flow a good portion of JB’s college costs and those would come into play right around the time that we finished up the mortgage.
I hope that, if you do go looking, you find a better place to be a cog so you’ll have some satisfaction over this period of time.
I love that idea, thanks for suggesting the backfilling on the payoff form! I colored them in and it was a bit satisfying.
Oh my gosh, do I ever relate!!
My house down payment fund grows ever so slowly at $500/month. It is nice now that I’m in the 90% completed range (for my initial goal of $50K), but when I started it about 7-8 years ago, it was…awful to look at and think about. It just felt useless.
It still feels useless sometimes, given the fact that the fund (and my salary) needs to be about 3x what it actually is in order to buy a house in Auckland, but…baby steps.
Congrats on being ready to adopt a new mindset! That is sometimes the hardest part, letting go of the stubborn, rigid ideas of How Things Should Be. I know that is for me.
It’s hard to focus when they’re “just” baby steps, but they will absolutely get us places if we keep going.
The mindset change is 100% really tough for me and that’s what I’m going to focus on for a while.
Yes, exactly this. I cannot do calculations towards goals that are too far out and require too many assumptions. I have a vision, and I know what steps I need to take this year. That is enough for me. I also get more FIRE focused when I’m not feeling my job, but a day of looking at the numbers usually convinces me that it isn’t a solution yet.
I like the way you put it – a long term solution to a short term problem doesn’t make sense.
Are you planning to FIRE locally? Our FIRE options get much better if we are willing to move, but we don’t seriously talk about that path. Our general plan is to stay here, and T isn’t so focused on the RE part. We’re in a position where I could quit if T wants to keep working. But I don’t feel ready financially for that, and it would be financially painful (but possible) to swing that and preschool at the same time, when the time for preschool comes. We’d probably save nothing for that year or two.
I really want to put down roots here but it’s been tough building community for ourselves from scratch, and it IS cost prohibitive. Still, I don’t really want to move. I love our lives here and I like being close by to the friends we’re close to!
Do you have reasonable preschool options? We are still paying through the nose for a preschool program in the daycare because the hours are so much better for us so our bills will be easier after next Fall. Would/could you ever consider going part time instead of quitting entirely or is that not worth exploring with your job?
Reasonable pre-school: FT preschool is equivalent to daycare (or more if we pay for the fanciest preschool in town with aftercare). I should look into this more… There may be more/better options than the 3 I have in my mind. It feels early, but probably isn’t.
PT for me could be a possibility at some point in the future, but nothing I’m counting on being able to arrange. It certainly isn’t typical for people in my job to be PT, but that doesn’t mean it would be impossible. My plans are pretty hazy. I’d probably be happiest working part time, honestly.
I do best when I focus on the medium term goals. Trying to hit a particular target for the month just doesn’t excite me much. Trying to make detailed retirement plans sends me either into boredom over how slow our progress is or analysis paralysis over everything that could possibly go wrong. But spending a few years aggressively saving for a car? Oh yeah baby, I am ON IT!
That makes TOTAL sense.
Right now I try to focus on short term goals but also doing long term goals in the background. This includes constantly contributing to my retirement accounts and checking on my life insurance a couple times per year.
This is an interesting journey for us right now, achieving FI is not the primary focus for us now but might be once we get our housing situation sorted out. Ideally it would great to already buy a home and have a clearer picture on what our FI journey would be but maybe this is the path that is going lead us to it. We are already saving so much by having low expenses and investing some of it in the market while the rest is for our future home.
Yes, long term goals absolutely belong in the background for us, too!
Crossing my fingers that you’re going to find a house this year.
This post really speaks to me, friend. There’s something about the long charge to financial independence that makes feel restless. Now that we’re close I should feel relief and relaxation. Instead, things that might delay the goal by a few years, like a second child, really cause some serious anxiety. I feel weird even saying that out loud because retiring even in three or five or 10 years would be amazing. But instead of feeling gratitude and gaining perspective, I get some bad emotions instead.
Done by Forty recently posted…Tariffs are Just Regressive Taxes
It’s interesting that I’m at what I consider the beginning of our journey being 10-15 years out (or possibly more because that’s the best case scenario!) and you’re nearing the end, but we’re both feeling the same feelings. WHY.