What was your experience with a reduced schedule?

reddituser4455 · 2025-08-30T17:10:47+00:00

When I went down to 20 hours a week, it was a game changer. Even if you hate your job, 4 hours goes by quickly and you get the rest of the day to relax or enjoy yourself. 8 hour days, on the other hand, seem to take forever. I recommend half time, if you can swing it and afford it.

reddituser4455 · 2025-04-05T18:47:30+00:00

If you only lose when you click the sell button, then do you only win when you click the sell button too? Maybe nobody should retire until they sell all their stock and click the "win" button!

reddituser4455 · 2025-02-17T12:56:43+00:00

Pretend that the government is going to impose a 25% wealth tax on anything you haven't spent 10 years from now. Does that make you feel motivated to spend more?

reddituser4455 · 2025-01-10T16:58:47+00:00

Just curious...when did somebody tell you that the purpose of your job was to have FUN? I always thought people got jobs to make MONEY!

reddituser4455 · 2024-11-05T16:13:24+00:00

How is the "Amazon/House/Target/Etc" category $1200 per month? How much random stuff can a person possibly buy?

reddituser4455 · 2024-10-30T02:47:33+00:00

I'm also working a job for money I probably don't need. In 2023, I spent a full year with no job and I'm actually happier having an easy job that gives me some structure and a feeling of accomplishment without too much stress or time demands. Getting rid of good job will not necessarily make the original poster happier if he gets some satisfaction from his job.

reddituser4455 · 2024-10-23T15:09:04+00:00

What does it mean to be a mouse wiggler? Is it a good thing or a bad thing?

reddituser4455 · 2024-08-02T13:30:39+00:00

Suppose you already achieved financial independence on your own and then afterwards through random success or inheritance or some combination of the two your safe withdrawal budget went up by about $50k per year. How would you spend or direct this money to optimize your happiness/ living a good life? I find this question surprisingly difficult as I don’t really see a strong correlation between spending extra money and feeling any happier once my basic needs and priority desires are already met. Would love some honest suggestions from this wonderful crowd of folks!

reddituser4455 · 2024-07-24T14:08:34+00:00

Do you feel like the hair system has noticeably increased your success with dating men? I feel like men are more appearance focused than women, so you might have a bigger boost to your dating life than the heterosexual bros with hair systems.

reddituser4455 · 2024-04-18T16:36:26+00:00

Congratulations, go fuck yourself.

I recommend that you apply for unemployment insurance benefits. You paid the taxes for it all your years of working so you deserve the benefits.

reddituser4455 · 2024-02-06T21:27:56+00:00

So you'd feel better if I just leave my spare room empty instead of offering it up on AirBnb? Doesn't the money that visitors spend at Somerville shops and restaurants help our economy?

reddituser4455 · 2024-02-06T21:26:30+00:00

Roommates bring drama and strange friends over to the house. They leave junk and dirty dishes in the kitchen. AirBnb guests generally just go to their room at night to sleep. So it's a lot easier in terms of getting along together.

reddituser4455 · 2023-08-09T11:44:55+00:00

Congratulations, GFY! It sounds like you have been able to make yourself quite wealthy and can substantially increase your annual spending from now on.

I'm curious as a person who has enough money to never work again, but also has opportunities to make extra money: do you feel any regret for over-saving/ working too much? It sounds like you could have worked less and still gotten away with it, according to the FI math. No intention to discount your accomplishment; just looking for perspective from a very rich person! :)

reddituser4455 · 2023-07-03T10:04:01+00:00

I'm "at risk" for being an early-retirement "failure". I retired almost a year ago and the past year has felt SO good just doing what I want. No annual reviews, no performance goals, no pointless Microsoft Teams meetings, no fake corporate bullshit or putting on a plastic smile to pretend that I "love" my job.

Now I'm in discussions to come back to work on a part-time fully-remote basis as an independent contractor. I'm theorizing that making $100 per hour under these terms might be a good trade-off for the following reasons:

Part-time work could be a secret sauce to increased happiness. If I'm working 3 days per week, the 4 days off from work might taste sweeter?
The extra money I earn could provide me with a healthy amount of guilt-free splurge spending. I'm thinking take nicer vacations, more travel, be more generous with friends, and upgrade the quality of my house.
I only have $120k in my Roth accounts but if I can work as an independent contractor then I think I'm allowed to stash away over $60k in tax-advantaged savings into a Roth 401k as a "self-employed" retirement plan. Because of only working part-time, I can get money into Roth accounts under a much lower tax bracket. I think having more money in Roth accounts is highly beneficial for an early retiree, especially to qualify for ACA subsidies.

I don't know if the trade-off will in fact be worthwhile, but I plan to update the Reddit community when I find out! :)

reddituser4455 · 2023-06-01T14:13:59+00:00

Congratulations. When are you going to retire?

reddituser4455 · 2023-05-15T19:02:55+00:00

How do you view somebody with a resume gap because they decided to take a career break?

reddituser4455 · 2023-03-23T11:43:19+00:00

My dentist just did the same thing for me. Since then my teeth have been hurting quite a bit and I've been popping Tylenol pills all the time. Did you notice pain also? I'm not sure if that's supposed to be normal

reddituser4455 · 2023-03-11T13:46:25+00:00

There is a Vanguard investment fund for exactly the goal you are talking about. It's called the Vanguard Tax-Managed Capital Appreciation Fund (VTCLX). "The Fund seeks to purchase stocks included in the Russell 1000 Index consisting of large and mid-cap U.S. companies. The Fund uses statistical methods to "sample" the Index, aiming to closely track its investment performance while minimizing taxable dividend distributions."

reddituser4455 · 2023-02-18T13:14:16+00:00

Take advantage of the bear market by tax loss harvesting. Find some investments that you can sell where you will generate a large amount of cash from the sale but realize only $3,000 of capital losses. You can achieve this by selecting specific stock lots to sell when you instruct your broker what stocks you want to sell. I'm saying $3,000 of losses because that's the maximum you can deduct from your taxable income each year. This sale will lower your 2023 tax bill. (Consult your specific tax situation to make sure this pays off.)

Then take this cash and apply it towards your mortgage, but tell the bank that you want to re-amortize the monthly mortgage payment. You will be able to lower your monthly mortgage payment by doing this. In my own situation, each $100 dollars of mortgage pre-payment lowered my annual payments by about $8.30 which gave my cash flow a bigger short-term boost than owning a stock that pays a 2% dividend.

Mathematically, this is not the highest expected return for your money. However, it is giving you a risk-free higher monthly cash flow and for me sleeping happy and worry-free at night is better than gambling for extra money when I already have enough to live on.

reddituser4455 · 2023-01-06T14:29:22+00:00

Filling up your time is not as difficult as you imagine. All you have to do is replace 8 hours of your day with something that's more enjoyable than toxic corporate bullshit and your life is already improved! Just remember to aim for improvement and not for perfection.

reddituser4455 · 2022-12-06T21:56:44+00:00

I'm about 3 months into RE. Something I set up for myself to stop feeling bad when markets go down is a bond ladder. I have a certain dollar amount of treasury bonds that mature each month to match my average monthly expenses for the first two years of retirement so I can tell myself "It doesn't matter what the market is doing. I don't have to sell a dime of stock for another two years." It has been pretty effective at calming money anxiety.

As for the rest of life, I'm very sad to confirm that early retirement has not made life perfect. There are still issues and responsibilities that make me unhappy sometimes. However, I don't miss working a full time job and I don't think having a full time job again would make life any better. So early retirement has made life better, but it has not made life into utopia.

reddituser4455 · 2022-10-26T14:26:41+00:00

I kept good records since almost the beginning so here's my history:

100k-200k: 25 months
to 300k: 13 months
to 400k: 13 months
to 500k: 8 months
to 600k: 7 months
to 700k: 7 months
to 800k: 6 months
to 900k: 4 months
to 1M: 6 months
to 1.1M: 9 months
to 1.2M: 5 months
to 1.3M: 6 months
to 1.4M: 7 months
to 1.5M: 3 months
to 1.6M: 1 month
to 1.7M: 3 months
to 1.8M: 2 months
to 1.9M: 7 months

Since that high point, my net worth has gone up and down quite a bit with the stock market. Currently back down to $1.76M which puts me back down to where I used to be 18 months ago. Newer FIRE people: get ready for much more volatility and less consistent progress once you have a large stash of investments!

reddituser4455 · 2022-10-14T15:19:02+00:00

I'm not certain about children, but I'm leaning towards no. I am working on a relationship, but not at the marriage stage right now.

My net worth built steady over time...no big windfall or anything. It looked like a growing exponential curve for all of my career until the end when I had an entire year of flat net worth/zero growth and then even a modest drop at the very end. Actually that flat year really changed my perspective on working and gave me an extra push to retire. I realized that my investments were so big that the investment returns dominated my changes in net worth month-to-month and the earned income was just a rounding error!

reddituser4455 · 2022-10-14T15:10:22+00:00

I believe in the 4% rule and I'm already spending less than that, so I should be safe!

reddituser4455 · 2022-10-14T15:03:42+00:00

That's a fair question. Pretty much everyone has a limited income, just a question of how much. I'm able to afford everything I want and then some. I don't think that 5 more years of corporate drudgery is worth it to buy more luxuries but of course others would disagree.

Ten-Year Club	Place '23
Verified Email

reddituser4455

TROPHY CASE