Hey folks! I’m CJ, a 25-year-old living in the western US! Ever since I learned about FIRE in the summer of 2018, I’ve started looking at money differently. Up to that point I wasn’t frugal by nature, and I wasn’t really raised to be. Suddenly I saw a path that would allow me to live life on my terms, and I started doing what I could to make that dream a reality. I’ll definitely write more about all of these things soon, but that includes finishing college a year and a half early, doing grad school online while working full time, some strategic job hopping for raises, staying put for a while to capitalize on the chaos at one job, and then, most recently, working two full time jobs remotely to more than double my income. It’s been an interesting handful of years!
I’ve done all that with the goal of making my dream of retiring early a reality… a lot faster than I even expected. When I started this journey I remember thinking maybe, just maybe, I could have a million by 36, a live off of $40,000 a year following the 4% safe withdrawal rate. Then I started thinking I could do it by 32. And then I was sure I could do it by 30. Then it seemed like maybe I could do it by 27? And then recently I’ve started questioning if I even need a million at all!
Now I’m thinking maybe I can retire at 25, if I want to. Which gives me until the day before I turn 26 mind you, and I will definitely be using all of that time thank you very much! Why retire so soon? Well, let me first say, when I say retire, like many folks in the FIRE community, it doesn’t mean I’ll never work again. It just means having enough to cover a certain standard of living in perpetuity, meaning I wouldn’t HAVE to work again if I didn’t want to. I intend to find more meaningful ways to use my time than my current work, and some of those might end up making money. And if the market takes a turn for the worse, maybe I’ll end up working again too. But that’s okay!
What I really want to avoid is the all too common “one more year” syndrome which plagues early retirees. Folks who are on this path have been diligent enough to save a large percentage of their income, have done all the projections know what they can feasibly spend, but then they somehow doubt that everything is going to work out. And “working out” can mean a lot of things. For those of us “retiring” really young, we likely won’t have tons of issues getting back into the work force if things go awry in our plan. They do say the first 15 years of market returns in your retirement is really what determines how well things are going to work out longer term. If you’re unlucky enough to retire at an all time high, depending on how bad the pullback is, you might end up needing to find a way to cut back on spending or bring in some extra income.
Anyways that all to say, I don’t find much meaning in my work, and I feel like there’s a lot to do, see and experience in this world, and I don’t want to miss it if I don’t have to. One of the biggest things that drove me down this path was the idea of being able to raise kids without having to sacrifice that time with them by having to work the standard corporate job. Though I’m still a ways off from having kids yet, still feel a bit like one myself! I was fortunate enough to be raised by my mom who stayed at home, but I do feel like I missed a lot of time with my dad that I could’ve gotten when I was younger. And there’s no guarantee that you’re going to get that time with them when you’re older either. My dad passed away in his early 50s. Thankfully not for any hereditary reasons, so I’ll hopefully live a long, long time. But we just don’t know how long we have. So why spend it doing something you don’t enjoy any longer than you have to?
Hence the name of this blog: Quarter Life Escape. This is where I’m going to blog about my progress, my thoughts and how I got to where I am today as I do what I can to reach escape velocity and start living my life completely on my terms. And while some of the stuff I’ve done might seem a little crazy and difficult to replicate, the investments themselves have been dead simple: no crypto, no individual stocks, just all in the S&P 500. And there’s been no windfalls to help me out either. I didn’t start my own business either. And I’ve got nothing to sell you. My story does have plenty of luck, privilege and the even the occasional hard work when I really, really had to. But I’ll get to all that in some later posts.
If you’re tired of the rat race, you want to do things different, you want to focus on experiences over possessions, you’re in the right place. Let’s get after it!