Early retirement / FIRE

frenchman

Eats cheese. Sells crack.
FIRE is not compatible with a bicycle addiction. Takes one hub standard change to destroying our wealth system.
I’ve avoided this buy buying a orange. It’s pretty much a 2000model era bike anyway o_O

I got "lucky" and got made redundant, twice. I had no commitments, no dependants, and figured fuck it! I'd been through a fairly stressful process and work load in the lead up to both, it was time to live. Then I sold the house too! I've spent the last 4 years (I think) doing a small amount of casual work (mostly in cafes/bars) riding, fishing, and snowboarding. Well the last 12 months has had 2 big patches of working way too hard for my liking, but I've kicked that shit off over the last 2 months. There have been times where I miss having the bigger cash flow of the adult world. This is mostly in the mind though. I haven't missed out on any fun and I certainly waste a lot of cash. A lot of my regular customers at the moment are people I used to work with, so I get a regular reminder of how good life is now without all that shit. The semi-retired life is good.
It’s the patches of working too hard that make me want to semi retire as well! My job isn’t very stressfull, however it’s a different story for the wife. Both of our incomes have doubled in the last 2years but we are still close to living within the means of our previous salaries but I’m feeling like we are not getting any more time off. What an excellent first world problem!
 

Flow-Rider

Burner
Any farkers / burners gone down this path?

Early retirement

Wife and I have just turned 30. We’ve both succumbed to the lifestyle creep that comes with well paying jobs. We’ve got no debt but also don’t own our house and are currently living in an expensive city (median house price is +1mil).
I think we’ve missed the boat for grabbing a place in Tassie (also it’s too farkin cold there). So that leaves Cairns, Toowoomba or Adelaide for what we believe would suit us financially, jobs and give the best riding. We’ve always lived a fairly simple lifestyle, it’s only in the last 18months that we’ve both realised the amount of junk we’ve accumulated is unnecessary.

I wouldn’t say we dislike our jobs, it allowed us both to buy in cash 2 new cars and bikes last year. We are also saving 30-40% of our income currently. However looking further ahead we’d rather spend more time riding and not working. Neither of us want to quit our jobs but would rather go part time. Unfortunately contract/freelance work isn’t possible for either of us.
There's ways of doing it but it will not come without some type of pain or sacrifice and being different to the general populace. You might want to look at one of those kit cabin style homes, they're small, cheap to maintain and most likely you can do most of the build yourself.

I've spent a lot of time living in Cairns through work and the living expenses there are not as cheap as some of the bigger cities, it's very humid and hot in summer, your air con will be running flat out for at least 2 months of the year.

It sounds like you're expecting too much of life "1 mil house to live in", I have a 4 bedder, 2 car garage 2 showers 2 toilets, fuck all yard to maintain, 25kms from the cbd of Brissy, multiple access to different trail parks, busses and trains, not even worth 420K.
 

frenchman

Eats cheese. Sells crack.
There's ways of doing it but it will not come without some type of pain or sacrifice and being different to the general populace. You might want to look at one of those kit cabin style homes, they're small, cheap to maintain and most likely you can do most of the build yourself.

I've spent a lot of time living in Cairns through work and the living expenses there are not as cheap as some of the bigger cities, it's very humid and hot in summer, your air con will be running flat out for at least 2 months of the year.

It sounds like you're expecting too much of life "1 mil house to live in", I have a 4 bedder, 2 car garage 2 showers 2 toilets, fuck all yard to maintain, 25kms from the cbd of Brissy, multiple access to different trail parks, busses and trains, not even worth 420K.
Yeah we figured there’d be sacrifices. But avoiding the general population wouldn’t be one of them.

We’d aim to own a house in the region of 400-600, we are currently in a 1mil median house price city.
 

Tubbsy

Packin' a small bird
Staff member
Sounds like it might be worth taking a sabbatical in one of these locations - let's say six months - live the lifestyle you're planning on and see whether it sustains your interest before committing.

Having a lot of time on your hands to do things you love is great, but if your friendship circle have regular lives and day jobs you may well start feeling something lacking?
 

Nambra

Definitely should have gone to specsavers
I'll have what you're having
It's probably meth...

Have an old friend from school that was more or less retired mid-30's. Was a parks ranger for a lot of years so he got to live for free around NSW for many years and was pretty frugal at the same time so accumulated a reasonable amount even on meagre ranger's pay. Bought a 5 acre block on the NSW far north coast and built a modest pad there without taking on any debt, started his own garden/orchard and menagerie (which he also eats from time to time), brews his own beer etc. Does work from time to time when he needs actual money as he has a young child now too.

He's totally relaxed, self sufficient, debt free and semi retired living the simple life in paradise. We all hate him.

I still get to laugh though, he can't afford a Yeti... ah shit, neither can I.
 
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pink poodle

気が狂っている男
That’d be the plan if we could get something in one of the areas I mentioned. The median house prices currently of those areas would be achieveable with 3-4 years.
If you took out a loan...you could have it now and for cheaper, assuming the prices in those areas follows the usual trend and grows (risk of severe derail rising). You could still ploough your cash into the loan and pay it off quickly. Your effective value of those savings isn't likely to keep up with the usual trend of the housing market. If it crashes then you'll be stoked though.

The pressure on making a cash buy can be pretty real too. I used the loot from my house sale to buy the new place. The market for the area I was looking was pretty hot at the time which didn't help, vendors weren't in the mood to haggle.
 

pink poodle

気が狂っている男
Having a lot of time on your hands to do things you love is great, but if your friendship circle have regular lives and day jobs you may well start feeling something lacking?
This is very real. Ive worked weekends and nights for a long time. You miss out on a lot of social events and often your spare time doesn't coincide with your friends or family. I'm a bit of a hermit so it mostly works for me, but if you're a social person it weighs up pretty hard.
 

frenchman

Eats cheese. Sells crack.
Perfection.
I’d need to maintain full time work with how unreliable those frogs are.

Sounds like it might be worth taking a sabbatical in one of these locations - let's say six months - live the lifestyle you're planning on and see whether it sustains your interest before committing.

Having a lot of time on your hands to do things you love is great, but if your friendship circle have regular lives and day jobs you may well start feeling something lacking?
I’d really like to be able to do this but there’s no way for myself to get back into work if I were to follow this path. My wife could however. I’ve lived in Brisbane and Innisfail, so Toowoomba and cairns don’t feel to foreign. I’ve never been to SA but I’ve never been able to scope a place out before moving there. We turned up in Bris from Europe with a suitcase each and an AU falcon rental car.

My work would classed as shift work already so I feel that the friendship circle shouldn’t be too difficult, the beauty of our main interests being riding is that most people I usually ride with are uni students or kids. And they don’t work much anyway!

I think the biggest challenge would be as poodle mentioned, the financial freedom to buy things when we want.

If you took out a loan...you could have it now and for cheaper, assuming the prices in those areas follows the usual trend and grows (risk of severe derail rising). You could still ploough your cash into the loan and pay it off quickly. Your effective value of those savings isn't likely to keep up with the usual trend of the housing market. If it crashes then you'll be stoked though.

The pressure on making a cash buy can be pretty real too. I used the loot from my house sale to buy the new place. The market for the area I was looking was pretty hot at the time which didn't help, vendors weren't in the mood to haggle.
I think that’s actually a great idea. We’d already have a place if we were in aus. What we are currently planning is to buy in the city we are in to avoid loosing out to the housing market. Then when we come to buying in the next few years in Aus it should be outright.

Id have to let my wife do the haggling because I’m not great with purchase pressure.
 

Calvin27

Eats Squid
Having a lot of time on your hands to do things you love is great, but if your friendship circle have regular lives and day jobs you may well start feeling something lacking?
You can go back to work, but the reverse is not always true.
 

Dales Cannon

lightbrain about 4pm
Staff member
Toowoomba isn't as bad as it used to be however if it was me I would head out of town (assuming your work puts you in the city). Lots of little places within 30 minutes and generally good communities. Pittsworth for example. And you can walk to the sprints.

Bottom of the hill is good too but the drive up the range will give you the shits. Brisbane hinterland isnt bad either but the commute will be tough unless you buy west or a bit north or south of west and work in Ipswich.

Can you do what you do from home? The little I do is 90% from home and that is awesome. Though I have done nearly 25 hours in the last month and that is tough.
 

frenchman

Eats cheese. Sells crack.
Toowoomba isn't as bad as it used to be however if it was me I would head out of town (assuming your work puts you in the city). Lots of little places within 30 minutes and generally good communities. Pittsworth for example. And you can walk to the sprints.

Bottom of the hill is good too but the drive up the range will give you the shits. Brisbane hinterland isnt bad either but the commute will be tough unless you buy west or a bit north or south of west and work in Ipswich.

Can you do what you do from home? The little I do is 90% from home and that is awesome. Though I have done nearly 25 hours in the last month and that is tough.
Unfortunately no home work for me. My wife would be able to however. Although I think her working full time from home, whilst I go punching runs on the range everyday wouldn’t go down well.
 
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