I Retired at 35 — Here Are 5 Lessons from My First 6 Months of Freedom
By: Charlie Brown
Tags: Self, Financial Freedom, Finance, Money, Life Lessons

In October 2020, I officially retired from work and life as I knew it. I was 35.

Through a series of largely intentional — but some fortuitous — events, I now have enough passive income to oversee all my basic living costs forever.

This is not a life I thought I would lead. Growing up, I thought early retirement was reserved for the rich, and ‘early’ meant 55. I grew up poor and just assumed I’d be working for money forever.

But if you’re open to it, life sometimes has a funny habit of taking you down avenues you never even knew existed.

It’s been 6 months since I pressed the big red financial freedom button. Here’s what I’ve learnt in the weirdest half a year of my life.

1. It takes time to crawl out of society’s prescribed work mindset

Someone on Twitter recently asked at what age their followers got their first job.

I was 6. I worked for my artist mother, selling her paintings and notecards to customers who loved the novelty of buying from a little blonde girl.

Working is in my blood, and I can’t imagine life without it.

Of course, no one who retires at 35 actually retires in the traditional sense; I’m not about to join my grandma’s Bridge club. I still want to work. I just want to work for something other than money. I want to work on meaningful projects, something that I care about, whether I get paid or not.

My guess is, if you’re on the path to financial independence, you don’t want to stop working either.

The problem is, I have 29 years of working for money behind me, and divorcing work from money takes some time. After all, society’s work rhetoric has been drilled into our heads since we were born.

“Don’t worry about the work; just think of the money.”

“You should take that job because it pays better.”

“It doesn’t matter if you don’t like your job; the pay is more important.”

The weight of society can be against you on this one. So what do you do?

You take some time to divorce the two. I took a couple of clients on a freelancing site who paid me peanuts for crappy work. It didn’t take long to realize that money was no longer my primary motivator.

Earning money isn’t the devil. After all, if you’re still earning cash, it gives your investments more time to grow, which is no bad thing.

But working purely for the money completely defeats the point of reaching Financial Independence in the first place. Don’t fall into the trap. Find the work that is meaningful to you and chase after that instead, not the dollar bills.

2. It will question your identity

My parents-in-law cannot understand why my husband and I chose to sell our wine business for a life of, as they see it, nothing. (They only think it’s nothing because they don’t ask what we do now, but that’s an issue for my therapist and me to unpack).

For almost everyone in the working world, your job is your identity. It’s called Workism, and it makes us miserable. When literally the first question anyone ever asks is ‘what do you do?’ how do you explain you’re a financially independent 35 years old who doesn’t ‘need’ to work without sounding like an entitled, lazy layabout?

It’s time to forge a new identity, one that is rooted in something more meaningful than your job title.

Ryan Nicodemus of the Minimalists once said he no longer asks people he meets what they do for a living. Instead, he asks them what they’re passionate about. He finds that the ensuing conversation is far more meaningful and interesting because he’s asked someone what they actually care about, not just their job title.

Hello, nice to meet you. My name is Charlie, and I am a financially free writer, feminist, full-time traveller, and wine-lover with a penchant for food, family, and friends.

Everyone can benefit from this way of thinking, not just the financially free. You are not only your job title, so why define yourself that way?

Your conversations with strangers could be so much more interesting if you forget the work identity and ask them what they really care about instead.

3. It raises a lot of questions

The Financial Independence Retire Early movement isn’t mainstream, however normal it seems to those down the rabbit hole. Considering 55% of the population are too scared to regularly check their bank balance when you have a spending spreadsheet and know your net worth to the nearest dollar, there’s definitely a disconnect.

So the questions will come. Sometimes they’re curious, sometimes they’re suspicious, most of the time, they’re just people trying to wrap their heads around the idea.

Are you just on holiday? What do you do all day? Aren’t you bored? What is your long-term plan? No, really, you can’t be doing this in 5 years, surely?

Questions are great because they open discourse and conversation. I don’t want to persuade everyone I meet to head down the financial independence path —not everyone has or wants the opportunity to do so, and I’m mindful of that.

But being open to alternative ways of living is one of life’s great skills. Financial independence, the tiny house movement, communal parenting. Whatever it is, if you’re open to listening and learning, you may discover something wholly unexpected that you can apply to your own life.

So when I receive questions about my financial independence, I’m more than happy to answer them. Maybe someone will take a nugget of an idea to help them better shape their own financial life. What could be better than that?

4. It sucker punches you when you least expect it

You think you won’t miss your old job. Then you remember something a colleague said that cracked you up. You feel the loss like a gut punch.

You wake up in the middle of the night, remember that you’re financially independent, and start to spiral. What if my entrepreneurial post-retirement venture doesn’t work? What do I do if I run out of money? What if I lose friends because they don’t understand what the hell I’m doing?

Perhaps it was naive of me to expect to be totally ay-OK with retiring at such a young age, leaving my old life in the dust.

But achieving financial independence is basically turning your life upside down, inside out. You’re sticking one finger up to accepted financial norms, and that takes time to process.

The sucker punches diminish as time goes on and your new life becomes the norm, but they are a good reminder of the magnitude of what you have achieved. Gaining financial freedom is no small thing. And it’s worth being reminded of that sometimes.

5. It’s awesome

For the first month, I didn’t think about being retired. I was too busy trying to wrangle my life into something that resembled what I wanted. I was moving from the most trapping of situations, complete with a house and a bricks-and-mortar business, to life on the road. I was establishing writing plans. I was fighting off parental naysayers.

There was no time to compute.

But around a month in, my husband Sam turned to me and said:

“You are aware that you never have to work on anything, or for anyone, you don’t want to again, aren’t you?”

The truth be told, I wasn’t aware. I’ve had my fair share of bad jobs. Recruitment. Administration for men who only thought I was good enough to make the tea. Even in my own company, I felt intensely beholden to my customers, my employees, rules, and regulations, always anticipating their needs, not mine.

Shaking off all of that is one of the greatest lures of financial freedom. That you have the freedom to discover what you like to do and how you like to do it. The freedom to shape your day into how you’d like it to look. The freedom to give back to the world in a sustainable, meaningful way.

There are no two ways about it. It’s fricking awesome.