This is a guest post from Zev. Many of you may know him from the forums and some of you may recognize his name from the copyright page in the book. He contacted me out of the blue earlier this year offering to proofread my manuscript for me. Knowing that my English isn’t perfect, I accepted his offer and we spent about three or four months going back and forth over the manuscript to get rid of 99.9% of my mistakes – I’ve never seen so much red ink on any of my papers. During that time he chose to become financially independent on his own. You can see the steps he actually took in his diary.
I had the honor of being one of the first readers of ERE, and after hesitating to follow ERE earlier this year after discovering and carefully browsing the blog—“I live in NYC; I don’t want to be an urban hermit; I fail to see the contribution of a miser to society”—the book gave me a broader perspective, which ultimately led me to decide to become financially independent—nothing resembling “retirement” really comes into it—in five years; my ERE/FI date is 7/15/2015, and so far I’m about a year ahead of schedule.
The main reason behind my decision, to put it in extreme terms, was to resolve the tension in my life between greed and passion.
Like many workers in the labor market, I based my decisions about what to do on what would give me the greatest return on my time. This led me to work for myself in the same copying business for my entire adult life (I’m 32). I became more productive, smarter, and more reputable at my job, and my income rose accordingly. I am one of those “rational economic actors” that economists tend to assume in their theories; I “followed the money.” As far as I can see, this puts me in the middle of the American labor force, albeit with much greater control over the fruits of my labor: I sell my work to the highest bidder, subject to the usual considerations of legality, ethics, and safety—if there is a black market in copying, I have never heard of it.
As with many people, working full-time has taken away from the activities I’m most passionate about, which are usually much less lucrative—reading, writing, playing music, and making films. For someone of average build, the best I can do—I sleep nine hours a night—is to achieve work-life balance, which in effect means devoting my best hours to my work and doing mostly passive activities and tasks during the rest of my waking hours. This pits my social life, my love interests, and my daily maintenance (not to mention my downtime) against each other for scraps of my schedule.
The truth is, I had made several unsuccessful attempts at pursuing other careers—music/songwriting in my mid-20s, filmmaking two years earlier—and while the meager compensation didn’t scare me, the opportunity cost of not maximizing my income, and the prospect of having no meaningful savings at all, did. Ironically, I hadn’t saved a single dollar until I set my goal of financial independence a few months ago. This lack of savings also put me in the middle of the American heap—“I have to be compensated properly, so I can spend, spend, spend, because I deserve it.” But the “why” was even more mysterious to me—“Why? And for what purpose?” Am I making what I’m making, and am I increasing my earnings? I had been championing my neglected passions—“My income allows me to buy the tools I use to compose music and make films; my flexible work schedule gives me time to pursue these things”—but as Jacob writes in ERE , the tools had largely become symbols of my interests rather than tools to execute them, and I was lugging them from one closet to the next. I had overestimated my free time, both in terms of the number of hours and the quality of my focus.
So while I’m wary of seeing equity investing and equity investing as a silver bullet, I see it as a potentially transformative opportunity to break free from “profit maximization” as my raison d’être, as well as a compelling answer to why I’m doing it now. I have a nagging feeling that this pursuit of profit maximization is too neurotic, too deep-seated, too cultural to be cured by a modest dividend-paying portfolio, but I feel an equally compelling urge to give myself the gift of the best 40 to 50 hours a week, free from all the worry of making a living indefinitely, and see the creative output that comes from it.
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Originally published on 2010-11-12 09:05:45.
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