Personal Finance (Not Investing) • This is why I'm glad I started investing at 23

I'd like to keep working and hope I will. But my tolerance for the day to day:

-policy changes
-work process changes
-org and reporting structure
-new director initiatives driven solely because of their desire to "make an impact"
-sycophancy (is that a word?)

I'll bet that your tolerance for those things is HIGHER than it otherwise would be, in that you know that you can walk away if you want to. It may be more irritating intellectually, but at the gut-emotional level, I assume it's less stressful because you know you don't HAVE to deal with 20+ more years of it, unless the job is otherwise fulfilling.

I have a slide in my financial lectures which states that "Retirement is not the day you stop working, it's the day you COULD stop working, if you wanted to". Saving for retirement should not be thought of as denying oneself current pleasures, but rather helping to "buy", earlier than otherwise, freedom from the NEED to have a job.

Stumbled on this 2017 thread this morning.

"I have a slide in my financial lectures which states that "Retirement is not the day you stop working, it's the day you COULD stop working, if you wanted to". Saving for retirement should not be thought of as denying oneself current pleasures, but rather helping to "buy", earlier than otherwise, freedom from the NEED to have a job."

That is awesome.

Funny that you resurrected this post of mine on the same day I added an update to that net worth progression post. For fun, here’s a snip from my reply to that thread earlier today that picks up from when I made this post in 2017:

2016: 2000k
2019: 3200k
2020: 3860k
2021: 4300k
2022: 3780k
2023: 4477k
2024: 4760k

I’m guessing we were around 2.5 million. I say that because I probably got to thinking about that milestone number and that prompted me to post what I did.

I’m still with the same company. The things that I disliked then are even more problematic now. I’m still here for two reasons:

-would like to coast through another 4 years or so to cover all of college
- a pie in the sky project that first crossed my desk around the time I posted this consumed 6 years of my working career, but is now in final design and inching towards production. It should be online in another three…I very much want to see that as a crowning achievement to my career.

Statistics: Posted by smitcat — Wed Jul 03, 2024 8:19 am — Replies 61 — Views 10406