There’s a Movement Forming to a Different Way of Living Life
By: Rocco Pendola
Tags: Personal Finance, Money Mindset, Retirement, Money, Life

I feel like the things I write about the relationship between life and money should be so commonplace as to not generate such a kind response.

When you write articles on the internet for a living, you welcome and appreciate any positive feedback. It helps offset the criticism and vitriol you regularly receive.

However, I don’t write anything all that special. I’m just countering a horrifically low bar.

With the American dream and its attendant 9–to-5 and then some grind as the benchmark, we live in a society where people naturally look for something markedly more hopeful.

And it appears, people — particularly the young and young at heart — might be starting to embrace the idea of doing more with less and living the semi-retired lifestyle now via cash-focused personal finance strategies:

It’s not just a coincidence. I prefer to call it synchronicity. There’s a trend bubbling collectively among large swaths of the population, yet we’re coming to our own conclusions independent of one another. This is how I define synchronicity. There’s a groundswell of retire early or semi-retire to live well now articles saturating the internet. I’ve been writing quite a few of them since last summer. But it’s not just the message; it’s the strategy and sentiment that accompanies the message that has me thinking something’s up.

Add to that the data from a recent survey asking Americans the net worth required to be considered wealthy:

Here’s the net worth each generation says you need to be considered wealthy in 2021: Millennials (ages 24 to 39): $1.4 million Gen X (ages 44 to 55): $1.9 million Baby boomers (ages 56 to 74): $2.5 million

If you’re cynical, you’ll say young people just don’t understand what it takes.

Quite often, though, we can interchange cynical with bitter and jaded.

Given that home equity and mortgage debt usually make up the two key components of net worth, I’m not a big fan of the metric. That said, it’s relevant here if you’re trying to get at the mindset of different groups of people.

It’s telling that the younger you are — generally speaking — the lower the net worth you think it takes to characterize somebody as wealthy.

It all ties together — the desire to value experiences over things, to get the most out of life now rather than wait for old age, and the general idea that you just require less to live well and experience “wealth.”

This is encouraging.

It will take a lot of work — and people coming to the conclusions we discuss on these pages independent of one another — to undo the hold the American dream of what amounts to an absurdly high cost of living has on our collective consciousness. But we’re headed there.

For every person who decides to spend less than market rate on rent.

For every person who decides to drive a Hyundai rather than a Mercedes or Tesla.

For every person who decides to abandon traditional employment — designed to service the American dream — in favor of schedule flexibility, following their passions, and ample cash flow to fund semi-retirement now and for the duration.

As the trend intensifies, we come together.

We come together and redefine the American dream without calling it anything in particular. Because it’s decidedly not American and it’s different for everyone.

Semi-retirement — as I like to riff — is a fluid concept that literally looks different for each and every person.

Even if you have a partner, the way you live the semi-retired life might not look identical between the two of you. Chances are you’ll be close to one another on the spectrum. But, even as you experience semi-retirement together much of the time, you’ll do different work to get and keep yourself there.

The key — supporting one another.

This is how movements start. At the individual and household level.

On the negative side, that’s how white flight and buying your second home in the suburbs developed. I watched it happen as a kid in the 80’s and 90’s.

Around kitchen tables decades ago, families talked about moving from the city to the suburbs.

A wholly racist move cloaked in the platitude that you wanted a big backyard. You knew your neighbors were plotting the same moves. They said it without quite saying it in conversations over the fence about how the old neighborhood is going downhill.

Before you knew it, these independent actors had created a movement that fills a page in every history, sociology, and urban planning textbook in America.

Racist white flight fueled the American dream.

Now, we’re coalescing to flip the script and reverse the toxic effects of chasing home ownership and expensive cars.

We’re saying no to 80 hours a week.

We’re saying no to credit card debt.

We’re saying yes to shorter workdays and workweeks. We’re saying yes to a low cost of living. We’re saying yes to semi-retirement to facilitate blowing off days and traveling more for longer periods of time.

We’re saying yes to living the life you want to live now and for the duration.