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Oh, it’s Saturday
Oh, it’s Saturday
High nigh nighny and a ha cha cha
—Spanky, upon discovering that the weekend has arrived and he doesn’t have to go to school
Our Aussie blogger friend Frog Dancer Jones is retiring next week. Bully for her! She’s a wonderful person, and she really does deserve to own one hundred percent of her time.
Well, in honor of her pending emancipation, I thought it would be nice to show her what she can expect from ditching the 9-to-5 world and diving headlong into early retirement. Here we go.
Every Day Is Saturday
The below video perfectly sums up the eternal beauty of early retirement. Every day is freaking Saturday.
Mrs. Groovy and I have been retired for four years now. And we still get up every morning and sing, “High nigh nighny and a ha cha cha.” Yep, owning one hundred percent of your time is that exhilarating. No rush-hour commutes to suffer. No pointless tasks to complete. No idiotic bosses to please. Our days are ours to seize or waste. We can be energetic ants or lollygagging grasshoppers. And that degree of autonomy has yet to get old.
And of all our Saturdays, Sunday is our favorite. Why? Well, despite the angelic face we put forward on this blog, Mrs. Groovy and I are far from angels. And Sunday night is the perfect time to allow our inner malice to surface. We just love to sit on our couch and gloat while sipping adult beverages and binge-watching The Block. For come Monday, millions of our fellow Americans will be starting another week of 9-to-5 hell and we won’t. Suckers!
You Naturally Crave Structure
Man does not live by hedonism alone. If all you do is slake your base desires, you will soon find yourself with a shabby mind, body, and soul. Not good. In the words of the immortal Dean Wormer, “fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life.”
So how does one avoid a shabby mind, body, and soul in retirement? Well, for starters, you put some structure in your life—meaningful structure. You designate certain blocks of time in your day for doing things that nourish the “better angels of your nature.” Here, for instance, is how I structure my mornings, Monday through Saturday.
- 6:30 am to 8:30 am: Make my bed, answer emails, and write amazing blog posts.
- 8:30 am to 9:30 am: Workout.
- 9:30 am to 10:30 am: Walk three miles with Mrs. Groovy.
And that’s all the structure I have in my life. I’m freewheeling after 10:30 am, Monday through Saturday. And I’m freewheeling all day Sunday.
Is that enough structure? I think so. Remember: the objective here is not to make your early retirement as productive and stressful as your working days. The objective here is to make sure your mind, body, and soul don’t turn to mush. And I’ve found that four hours of structure, six days a week, is enough to beat back the forces of decay.
You Naturally Crave Purpose
Another way to make sure your mind, body, and soul don’t turn to mush in early retirement is to have a purpose. And it doesn’t have to be anything grandiose. It just has to be something that you enjoy and makes your community a little less nasty, a little less brutish. Here, for example, are three things that are currently bringing purpose to my life.
- Fostering dogs (a new-found purpose thanks to Mrs. Groovy).
- Picking up litter.
- And making Groovy Ranch the number one attraction in Louisburg, North Carolina, by constructing a life-sized scrap-metal Bison that will one day next Spring be planted on our front lawn.
Quick aside: I’m making nice progress on the bison build. Here are some pictures of the beast’s head.
You Can’t Avoid Loneliness
Perhaps the biggest downside to early retirement is that most if not all of your family and friends are still working. So this means no one will be able to hang out with you before 5 pm on weekdays and no one will be able to do mid-week getaways with you. Loneliness will thus be an unfortunate side-effect of your early retirement.
You Got to Force Yourself to Spend
Finally, another downside to early retirement is that you will find it difficult to spend money. This shouldn’t be surprising, of course. After all, one doesn’t find oneself in early retirement if one spent the previous couple of decades flexing one’s spending muscles and totally neglecting one’s frugality muscles.
So how does one start pumping one’s spending muscles in early retirement? Here’s a suggestion.
Recalibrate the four-percent rule every two years, and if your new safe-withdrawal rate is larger, increase your annual spending by fifty percent of the difference. Here’s an example.
Year One of Early Retirement
Investment portfolio: $1,000,000
Safe-withdrawal rate (portfolio amount x .04): $40,000
Annual spending budget: $40,000
Year Three of Early Retirement
Investment portfolio: $1,200,000
Safe-withdrawal rate (portfolio amount x .04): $48,000
New annual spending budget: $44,000
Final Thoughts
Okay, groovy freedomist, that’s all I got. I hope you join me in congratulating FDJ on her well-deserved early retirement. And if there’s anything else that FDJ should be expecting from early retirement, please let her know. Peace.
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