My FI campaign isn’t just about grinding to some end goal. There are victories on the way that are worth more than meeting a simple FI number.
Here’s some cool stuff I’ve noticed on my campaign so far.
Before we start – maybe some context
Early retirement seems to be getting a slating at the moment. the Telegraph newspaper seems against it and all the FIRE communities in the UK seem to be going through a pessimism phase. In fact, here’s a snippet I took from a simple Google search of recent FIRE articles by the famous right-wing broadsheet:
Then we have the pessimism on the various FIRE web communities themselves…
Is FIRE even achievable?
Can I ever reach FIRE?
I earn £X,000 per year – if FIRE a realistic goal?
Paraphrased from various online FIRE communities.
It seems to me that people think of the financial independence campaign as some kind of grind to success.
Look, I’m a person who likes a side hustle. I’ve tried a lot of stuff! But – and it’s a big but – I do these things because I enjoy it. There’s a reason I graded my various side hustles the way I did. Endless grinding is no way to build a life, there’s already enough of that in your average corporate job and on raw numbers you’d be best off flagellating yourself into big white collar oblivion than trying to squeeze an extra £50 trading things on Facebook.
Well, unless you’re gifted or stumble upon something awesome. In that case, double down on a good thing. However, for Johnny Average, it’s probably easier to grind away earning ones and zeroes for The Man than it is to turn a t-shirt printing empire into a six-figure income.
If we can accept that the financial independence campaign isn’t about mindless grind, then we should expect that there will be progress and benefits to be had other than the end goal.
This post is about the things I’ve gained by setting off on my financial independence campaign. If you’re just starting your own, maybe you’ll see these things too!
The campaign means growth
If you want to live a life like no other, you have to do things no other person does. Seems logical.
Financial independence is a bit like this. If you want to start on the financial independence campaign, you’re going to need to do things that other people aren’t willing to do.
More importantly, you’re going to have thoughts that other people don’t have.
Working out what’s valuable
I’m not a religious guy. If you’re expecting a quasi-spiritual experience from this site, we may be talking on different wavelengths.
However, it shouldn’t be news to anyone that most religions, cults, political organisations and so on require their followers to assess their core beliefs… and all of these things are struggling to survive in the modern world.
Unless religion plays a big part in your life – which, for many if not most people in the UK, it doesn’t – you may not have had time to reflect on what’s actually important to you. However, when you start to seriously work on allocating your income to a high rate of investment, you start questioning where your money should go.
Which means you start seriously evaluating where you want your money to go – and what’s important to you.
I realised quite early on that the big money just wasn’t that important to me. What I want is freedom of my time and enough resources to be flexible about how I spend it. Suddenly, I stopped spending money on stuff I had no strong feelings about, even selling the car when I lived in a city.
This snowballed by the way. Spending intentionally and embracing a moderate degree of minimalism has rapidly accelerated our campaign for financial independence. I’m no less happy for it.
Recognising that learning is an investment in itself
I don’t think it’s possible to live a life of grinding and ending in relaxation to be happy. Like most people, I need to see some kind of progress towards something I want to achieve.
My financial independence campaign involves investing in myself. At first, I thought this would be to boost my earnings and therefore accelerate my savings rate and therefore the campaign.
While this is definitely true to a point, it’s not the biggest take-away. I’ve found that incorporating this mindset has changed the way I think about learning in general and the value of adding new skills and knowledge. Learning itself has value and investing in learning is a big deal.
For example, last year I took a remedial swimming course for adult learners. I can now swim front crawl pretty well, and it turns out that it’s quite a cheap hobby to take up. Swimming pools are quite cheap as gyms go, and all you need are trunks, a towel and some goggles, equipment which doesn’t get that much wear and tear. I reckon it’s roughly on par with running when you factor in the wear and tear on running trainers, but it’s low impact so you don’t need to worry so much about joint damage.
Without deciding to fix a weak swimming stroke by taking lessons, this wouldn’t have been an opportunity that was open to me.
Increasing security builds confidence
Before I started my financial independence campaign, I believed that earning more money meant having more spending power.
A little way into it, I realise that’s the Johnny, Aged 5 picture of the world.
Earning more money means very little other than as a tool to achieve an end. Having more money means you can choose to earn on your own terms.
We’re not super-rich by any means. However, my partner has pretty much decided that her well-paid consultancy job isn’t working out. She hates it. Before, we would have been looking for other jobs before she considered handing in her notice.
Now, we can easily absorb the loss of income if she were to be unemployed for several years. Our expenses have been rationalised, our budgets make sense and we have quite a big pot to draw from if we really had to.
At the time of writing, we’re on our third year of serious financial independence campaigning. Sure, we have sold a house and made money from the equity, but the serious lifting came in the last couple of years. The deliberate effort.
That’s control of your destiny that many people will never have, regardless of how much they earn, and it grows over time as the liquid investment pot gets bigger.
What this ultimately gives you is confidence, which affects other aspects of your life, too.
You can always go back…
If personal growth and confidence don’t seem rewarding enough, consider this:
You Don’t Have To Continue If You Don’t Want To.
The financial independence campaign is one of the few things in life that has no irreversible downside. You could go too far and be too frugal, but the worst that’s likely to happen is that you have a pot of capital that you could spend if you decide it’s not for you.
There are worse things in the world than having a bigger pension pot waiting for you than you would have had if you’d never heard of FIRE.
Final thoughts – where is this all going?
My point here is that even if financial independence was to prove unachievable and all the pessimism in the world proved to be reality, you’d still gain from the financial independence campaign itself.
You will likely experience personal growth, you will likely gain a measure of choice in your life and confidence.
But, if you’re finding that it’s a big grind and you don’t think those are reward enough, you can always just quit and at least be better off than you would have been if you’d never tried it.
I know it’s human nature to crave certainty, and fear of economic doom/ demographic collapse/ climate change/ world war three/ chocolate shortages are understandable concerns for people. All the same, I hope that you’re not overly dissuaded from taking action by all the doom and gloom and that you might appreciate some of the benefits of getting started on your own financial independence campaign besides simply hitting your FI number.
