Brad Barrett: 4 Mistakes I Often See Early Retirees Make

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Brad Barrett, who hosts the ChooseFI podcast. Business Insider has verified his professional history.

My journey to financial independence, or FI, started when I got my first job.

I began my career at one of the big accounting firms. I was fortunate enough to live at home with my parents, and I tried to save around 90% of my income when a lot of my friends began getting apartments alone or buying fancy cars. I’ve always been a bit frugal and never cared much about impressing other people. I saw saving and making sacrifices, like moving to Virginia instead of living in New York City, as a service to the life I wanted in the future.

I retired from my full-time job in 2015, when I was 35. I then began a travel and reward points website and later launched ChooseFI, which has been downloaded 70 million times since 2017.

FIRE, or Financial Independence Retire Early, is a cute acronym, and we used it a lot in the early days. But it doesn’t matter whether you are working full time, part time, or are completely retired. It’s all about financial independence — reaching a point where we can control the only thing that matters in life, which is our time.

From the countless questions I get from listeners or those who read our newsletter, there are four common mistakes I see early retirees make that keep them unsatisfied post-FI:

1. They’re retiring from something

One broad category of mistakes I see involves people simply not having ideas of what they want to do in their post-work life. In the 2013-2017 timeframe, FI was about getting to a number as quickly as possible, and little else mattered. It’s getting better, but there needs to be a mindset shift to: “I’m not running away from a job, but I’m running toward a life that I want to live.”

If it were just about reaching a number on a spreadsheet for me, and then I woke up the next day expecting it to be the greatest life ever, I would’ve been really disappointed.

2. They don’t experiment enough

I suggest people don’t have an arbitrary number of hobbies for post-retirement. Instead, they should experiment and keep an open mind.

You could make plans to travel around the world on a sailboat for the rest of your life, and within a month, you could get seasick and have to stop. But that’s not failure — it’s just an experiment.

Retirement can be decades long. You may be really active in the early years post-work and do things like climb mountains and walk the Camino, but you maybe can’t do that at 85.

This is a mistake I also made in my journey. I got very busy with raising two young daughters, and I didn’t experiment enough. I didn’t do a great job of leaning into what I love, including small things like watching soccer, and I’m trying to fix that now.

3. They don’t take pride in being FI

Lots of people have a hard time talking about hitting FI because there is a degree of others’ not understanding or jealousy. I’ve seen people avoid talking about it completely or making up some type of job, like “I’m consulting from home.”

Honesty is really important, and there should be a significant sense of pride attached to being FI. Just being able to say, “Hey, I worked hard at this. I saved for the most important thing to me, which was my own time freedom.”

There’s a way to communicate that with empathy, and it may lead to other people also taking an interest in FI. If you’re volunteering at Habitat for Humanity on a Tuesday at 10 a.m., and people ask you why you aren’t working, you can talk about it.

4. They wait too long to quit

The “one more year” syndrome is a mistake I still see. It’s when people delay quitting their jobs or moving onto something new because they’re worried their retirement nest egg isn’t big enough. Most of the time, it’s more than enough, and people are being too conservative.

People don’t understand the finite nature of their lives. If we are really lucky, we get eight or nine decades on this planet, and even fewer with good health.

Every day that you work longer than you have to is a day that you’re not doing something with the only resource you can’t get back — your time.

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