I started this blog as a fresh-faced, idealistic 22-year-old. I had just started my dream job at Google and was doing my truck thing, living life my way. The sky was the limit. I had a full head of hair,¹ money rolling in, and aspirations to retire young. After six months of living this brave new life, precocious and optimistic at 23, I wrote a post titled Decimals And Dollars: Planning the Next Decade where I talked about financial independence and retiring early (FIRE).

I proudly proclaimed:

I’m already on track to make this a reality, and retire at 30* (or earlier, who knows)

This begs the obvious question: it’s been a decade, and I’m not retired yet, so, uh…what happened?

The shortest answer is that I did more or less follow Past Me’s plan and could retire right now if I really wanted. Like truly, not work another damn day in my life.

But I’m not doing that, which means something has changed, so let’s trace the arc of the decade I actually lived and see what’s really going on.

2016: I write that post and proudly proclaim my imminent retirement.

2018: I buy a house on the east coast for a family member.

2020: I buy another house on the east coast, for a different family member.

2021: I leave the warm and cozy embrace of Google to join a startup.

2022: That startup gets acquired², and I start a nonprofit software firm with one of my best friends. I sell the truck and buy a real house (for myself this time!)

2024: The nonprofit runs out of money, I pick up some part-time contracting/consulting work while I figure out my next move.

2025: The pendulum swings back and I sell my soul to the highest³ bidder.

Folks with a knack for numbers might already see the problem here.

For everyone else: How early you can retire is almost purely a function of how much money you need in retirement.

The formula is basically:

Annual Spending × Magic Multiplier = Total money needed to retire

Spelling it out:

• Annual Spending is how much money you need in a year to live
• Magic Multiplier is generally a number between 20 (riskier) and 30 (safer)
  • This comes from a combination of the Trinity study and Monte Carlo simulations
  • I’m hand-waving this away for now but it’s genuinely interesting stuff if you’re so inclined
• Total money needed to retire is how much money your total invested “nest egg” needs to be before you can pull the trigger.⁴

Let’s apply the formula to my life and see where we’re at.

If you look at my day-to-day life, I’m kinda killing it on this front, even without the truck:

• I own the home I live in outright⁵
  • Only cost is maintenance, utilities, insurance, and property taxes = ~$6-7k / year
• I own a 2004 Honda Civic, but bike or walk most places
• Biggest expense by far is groceries for two humans and two animals
  • We’re big adherents to the Church of Costco™ these days
  • Yearly grocery + home/pet supply spending is handily under $15k
• My hobbies are (intentionally) very cheap
  • Hiking + biking don’t require more than shoes + bike stuff
  • Building websites and random computer things just requires a laptop
  • Strength training really only requires a squat rack
    • Aka the literal first piece of “furniture” I bought when I moved here
    • Giant rubber bands are not a suitable replacement here

So my expenses are ~$25k / yr. Let’s add a generous $10k / yr budget for discretionary spending, which includes trips to visit family and assorted debauchery. And let’s also add another $10k / yr to budget for healthcare in retirement.

This estimate should be on the high-end. In practice, I’m seeing my yearly spend closer to $20-30k, but I also have employer-sponsored healthcare for now. Anyway, that puts my annual spending at $25k + $10k + $10k = $45k / yr. Back to our formula above, let’s choose our magic multiplier with the (incorrect) assumption that I’m extremely risk-adverse:

$45,000 per year × 30 = $1.35 million

So tuning the knobs to be as about as conservative as possible (overestimating expenses, using a higher-than-necessary multiplier, no rental income), I could retire right now if I had $1.35 million in the bank.

Well that’s the fun part, I crossed that threshold back when I was still living in the truck. Turns out working a high-paying job and investing all your money during one of the longest bull markets in history tends to pay off, who would have thought?

The frugality + truck livin’ helped of course, but less than you might think. My thoughts there are a topic for another day though.

Because I lied to you, that’s why. While my personal expenses are in the ballpark of $30k a year, I conveniently omitted the cost of owning two rental properties with aggressive 10-year mortgages, being rented out to family at deeply below-market rates. Short of buying a new Lamborghini every few years, this is about as close as one can get to early retirement self-immolation.

Taking that into account, my yearly expenses are closer to $70k a year, which takes my early retirement math and, well, Past Me™ said it best, eight years ago:

In short, it takes my plans, pulls their underwear clear over and around their head, kicks them to the ground, beats them to a pulp, sets them on fire, and snorts the ashes.

Which is why I could retire today: I could just throw my family out on the street, sell those houses, and walk off into the early retirement sunset. But I’m not going to do that.⁶

Aside from questions of familicide, there are a few other self-imposed spanners in the works of my early retirement machinations.

The first is about how I want to spend my “retirement”. If you’ve read anything else I’ve written, you can probably guess that my retirement doesn’t involve sipping mojitos in Tahiti. It does involve building stuff. Stuff of all shapes and sizes. Some of that stuff will require money to build.

As an example, I’ve been building an ISP in my free time,⁷ as a way to learn more about networking (and because I think this stuff is neat). Building an ISP requires hardware: servers, switches, routers, cables, etc. All those things cost money. I earmarked about $20k to bootstrap the project. And I can imagine lots of other projects that require similar budgets: building things for nonprofits, experiments in machine learning, physical projects that require fabricated or 3D printed parts, etc. So I want to have a war chest of $100k-$200k set aside for such adventures. This raises the overall required “nest egg” amount, which pushes out the retirement date. I accept the trade-off this entails.

The second one is a bit more philosophical. I think that once you’ve got a handle on the lower levels of Maslow’s hierarchy, it behooves you to think about what you want to do with your limited time on this planet. Nothing so serious as “what is my purpose?”, more like “what is my purpose right now?”. You can change it whenever, there’s no pressure. Don’t overthink it. Once you pick something, you can use it as a kind of North Star to help you make high-level decisions about the path your life takes.

I’ve written about this a bit in my “Truck Tenets” and in talking about starting that nonprofit, but for the last few years, my focus has been on doing whatever small part I can to tackle what I believe the biggest problems are. When the nonprofit folded, that killed my hypothesis that I could do more good by giving my time rather than my money, at least for the moment. And so now I’m trying to contribute with money instead, which is why I took the highest-paid job I could find instead of joining another nonprofit, or doing something in green tech. So for the next few years, I’ll work this job to pay off the rentals, build my war chest, and keep throwing money at those causes I care about until I get some better idea for how to use my time more effectively towards my goals.

I frequently imagine meeting myself at various ages. A whole continuum of Brandons. What would 20-year-old and 30-year-old Brandon talk about? How would younger Brandons feel about the older ones? Would they be disappointed? Inspired? Confused? How would 27-year-old Brandon react finding out that 31-year-old Brandon is bald, or that 32-year-old Brandon is married? What would I think of who I am another decade from now? Sometimes I imagine a whole group of us hanging out and reminiscing, asking excited questions about harrowing points in our faded pasts and unknown futures. And I wonder, at what age do older Brandons stop showing up to the party?

23-year-old me clearly had some expectations about how his future would unfold. I think in some ways, I’d be as alien to him as he is to me now. But if we could chat, I like to think he’d understand those places where I’ve diverged from our plans, and he’d find beauty in the life we’ve built, in no small part, for him.