The Quest For Financial Independence

Mr. ReddHedd and I have been talking a lot about financial independence lately.

As we age, contemplating what is needed for retirement comfort is a more and more prevalent topic of conversation at our house.  Which is probably a normal, albeit slightly morbid, consequence of getting a few more gray hairs.

There is a quote from Mr. Micawber in David Copperfield that sums things up nicely:

Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.

Part of our strategy is to sock away as much as we can afford in our 401(k), Roth IRAs and the like as well as paying down every bit of debt we can possibly pay down as quickly as we possibly can. (Those student loans take a while, don't they?)

But haven't we all learned the lesson that no matter how much you plan in terms of investment, the stock market doesn't always play along with what you want from it?


If nothing else, the real estate bubble from 2006 onward ought to wake everyone up to the fact that any prudent planning requires that you pay attention to the worst case scenario, no matter what.  That way if the worst happens, you were already planning for it.

And if it doesn't?  Well, that's just an enormous bonus, isn't it?

To that end, we've been contemplating ways to reduce our expenses -- a sort of return to the frugality of our law school days when our expenses never exceeded a set income level because, honestly, we barely had any income to speak of anyway.

I'm not talking about heading backward to subsistence living and ramen noodles, though.  (Oh good lord, no.  That's way more sodium than my system could handle these days.) 

What I'm talking about is a consciousness about what we are spending our money on and why, and reining in those "$50 here, $50 there" purchases that really add up at the end of the month with nothing much to show for them in the end.  We've become way too unconscious in our spending because we have been able to be that way -- we've worked hard to get where we are, and we've been enjoying it a little too freely, I'm afraid.

So we're talking about a return to personal fiscal discipline.  To what Micawber terms as "happiness."

Because when retirement comes around, we figure it will be a little happier if we've already managed to learn to be happy on less, to live well within the boundaries of a fixed income rather than depending on the vagaries of the market and a hope for additional cash from the retirement income fairies.  (As if...)

So what am I doing to further this beyond reducing my spending a bit?  I'm revisiting a lot of the frugal reading and simple living reading that I did in our younger years.  Things like The Complete Tightwad Gazette, which has some great foundational thinking for ratcheting back your need to spend, and coming up with ways to be satisfied with what you already have.

Which, when you think about it, is pretty much what living more simply is all about, isn't it?

Anyway, I'm going to try and detail some of the back and forth on this as we go along because I thought some of this might be useful for other folks in our same age range.  We want to live comfortably, not some miserly, Ebenezer Scrooge-like existence.  But to have money for the travel and fun we hope for at the end of our working years, we need to start thinking about how to make that happen now.

I know other folks have to be dealing with some of the same questions and concerns.  So let's try to get through this together.  I'll let you know what is and is not working for us, if you'll do the same.


(Gorgeous photo via paul (dex).)