Advice on how to retire while still alive
Money doesn’t buy happiness… except that it kind of does.
You might have noticed that yourself, over the summer break. That’s the glorious thing about paid time off. You get to go to the beach, spend time with your family, and cook/burn food for hours on the barbeque, all while your regular salary keeps coming in.
Then the holiday period ends, and you grumble to yourself that you wish you could find a way to still get paid without going to work.
It’s a complaint I hear all the time, because in my day job, I am all about money.
As a financial journalist I break down how to invest, the latest strategies to try to scramble onto the housing ladder, and what’s going on with your KiwiSaver.
So it can surprise people when I tell them I don’t really care about money. I don’t.
I care about the lifestyle it can give us.
Want to spend more time with your kids while they’re young? It takes money.
Want good food to feed your family, and the time to cook it together in the evenings? It takes money.
If you want a stable roof over your head, it takes money. If you want to stop feeling stressed about money in the future, you’ll have to dedicate a bit of time to sorting it out now.
The great lie that we’re told is that caring about money makes us shallow or self-interested. When actually, if we want a full life, where we can care for the people around us, and dedicate our time to the things that matter to us, it all takes money.
So I care about money, and teaching people about money, for the happiness it can bring. Not to buy an endless mountain of “stuff”, but to buy back our time, our stability, and the mental headspace to focus on what matters.
I want enough to create a good life for myself and the people I care about. Then I want to stop.
If this is ringing a bell for you, then congratulations, you’re interested in the financial independence movement. And yes, it’s possible for normal people on normal wages.
Financial independence changes the way that you handle your money so that you have enough up your sleeve to walk away from bad jobs, bad partners, a bad life.
The best part is that by simply having the power to walk away, or say no, you often don’t need to anymore. It shifts the balance of power, so that you can renegotiate situations to your favour.
There’s more than one version of financial independence, just like we all have different versions of our ideal life. It could be the ability to go part-time at work, and spend more time with your family, or on outside interests.
It could be having just enough stability that you can quit your job to work on that business idea that you’ve always wondered about, but that may not pay off.
Or it could be quitting the world of paid work forever, so that you can read books, volunteer with animals, or travel… once borders open again.
All of those are possible, through a combination of strategically earning more, investing carefully, and then letting time work its magic.
You don’t have to earn a million bucks, stick it in a savings account, then kick back to tell everyone else how easy it is. Earning a million dollars by going to work every day would take forever.
But you can put any extra money you’ve got into investments, which then start earning money for you while you sleep. Those profits can be put back to work to build up more profits, a money snowball that rolls along to become bigger, until it eventually stops you needing the original money from your job.
If you have more money, you can of course achieve this faster. If you have less, it will take longer.
But it can still be done. Without earning a CEO salary, without getting a business degree to learn to invest; simple investments, made regularly, are more powerful than many of us realise. Even starting with $5 is worthwhile.
Even if you can’t retire in your 30s, surely it’s still worth achieving financial freedom in your 50s? That’s so many good years of life left to enjoy, however you choose, without the need for money dictating the terms.
Building a secure life on my own terms is what happiness looks like to me. Being able to walk away from bad situations, to have a stable roof over my head, to spend quality time with the people I care about.
Unfortunately, it takes money. Fortunately, that’s something we can address.
Your Money, Your Future by Frances Cook (Penguin Random House, $35) is available in bookstores nationwide.
