I’ve had a big change of perspective regarding the accumulation of wealth. That came from the book “Die With Zero” by Bill Perkins. The core premise of the book is that there is very little utility in living life accumulating more wealth than you can use, consume, or give away in a lifetime. The argument is that, working for money you’ll never use or enjoy deprives you of some other experience that would have more utility. As a result, how you save for your later years and how you think you’ll spend them probably isn’t what you think. And, your concept of “retirement” doesn’t need to be so binary.
Here’s the thing. To assume that you’re going to be able to project what you want to do, where you want to be, and how much you’ll be spending 10, 20, 30+ years into the future is a rather ridiculous exercise when you think about it. I certainly didn’t predict that my life would look like it does now when I was 23. I can’t imagine I’ll be right about what life will be like when I’m 63 either. So while you can make some basic predictions about your needs and expenses, most of that is going to be incorrect.
What this mindset has done is caused us to really think about what we want life to look like as we age. We no longer think about our lives in terms of “work years” and “retirement years”, where we are focused on achieving some “freedom number”. We think of it more as an exercise in improving our ability to do what we want, when we want, over time.
So instead of just accumulating for the sake of some “future us”, we do this. We look for ways we can move from active sources of income and more on passive or recurring ones. That’s caused us to purchase more investment real estate and look into other income streams like property management to support our sales business. We look for opportunities to leverage our active income so we can do our jobs from wherever we want. Hiring people, implementing systems, and referring out more business. And looking for ways to support our kids and people we care about with our wealth in the present rather than the future.
We take a gradual approach to improvement of our lives, focused on what our priorities are at the time. And we work to improve those year over year, and to have a more free and enjoyable life in the present instead of some distant future.
If you’re just saving money because a financial planner told you to, I really encourage you to read this book and do some deep reflection on what you want your life to look like in the years leading up to retirement and beyond. I think we’ve been told that working full time until we’re 65 and then retiring is the way so much, we don’t stop to think about whether that’s what we really want. I’m here to suggest that it’s probably not. You should decide what’s right for you and your family.