10 years ago I took a step back and looked at where my life was going. Family life was great for which I was and remain incredibly fortunate. However when I looked at my career I saw an industry that was being hollowed out, was being outsourced to the lowest cost country and where all the stuff that was fun was slowly being weighed down by stuff I disliked. I was also 34 years of age and by that time had been working for 12 years across the globe yet when I looked at how that work had helped build our financial future I saw limited progress with the vast majority of the money I had earned having ‘disappeared’.
I was at a turning point, some might call it an early mid-life crisis, and clearly had to do something different. Stay the course and I was looking at having to work until the nice government would let me retire but the risk I ran was finding myself without a career before that period. So I started to think about retraining to do something different. I’d also heard of people retiring a little earlier (this was before the millions of personal finance blogs appeared on the scene) and so I spoke to some financial planners about how they might be able to help me bring retirement forward a little. One of my strengths is quantitative analytics which meant I was able to work my way through their sales pitch which led me to the conclusion that while that route would help me bring retirement forward I would also be helping to bring their retirement forward as well.
In tinkering with those spreadsheets I also discovered something quite amazing. If I could modestly increase my earnings, modestly decrease my spending, invest averagely and just not give my wealth accrued away to the financial services industry or tax man I could possibly bring my retirement forward a long way. I also thought I could do that myself and so in October 2007 I built a spreadsheet and a plan that would see me retire by age 50, a period of only 16 years. I thought it also meant I didn’t need to retrain and instead just had to get my head down and run the plan I had built.
I was at a turning point, some might call it an early mid-life crisis, and clearly had to do something different. Stay the course and I was looking at having to work until the nice government would let me retire but the risk I ran was finding myself without a career before that period. So I started to think about retraining to do something different. I’d also heard of people retiring a little earlier (this was before the millions of personal finance blogs appeared on the scene) and so I spoke to some financial planners about how they might be able to help me bring retirement forward a little. One of my strengths is quantitative analytics which meant I was able to work my way through their sales pitch which led me to the conclusion that while that route would help me bring retirement forward I would also be helping to bring their retirement forward as well.
In tinkering with those spreadsheets I also discovered something quite amazing. If I could modestly increase my earnings, modestly decrease my spending, invest averagely and just not give my wealth accrued away to the financial services industry or tax man I could possibly bring my retirement forward a long way. I also thought I could do that myself and so in October 2007 I built a spreadsheet and a plan that would see me retire by age 50, a period of only 16 years. I thought it also meant I didn’t need to retrain and instead just had to get my head down and run the plan I had built.