I recently read that the most popular brand of vehicle among billionaires is Toyota. The most popular single vehicle for billionaires is Ford F150. Relatively inexpensive, reliable vehicles with a high resale value. What does that tell you.
Worked with a guy who was going to retire in 2010. Instead he bought a Lincoln pickup truck and was going to work an extra year to pay it off. But the plant closed in 2011. Never got a chance to talk to him and find out what he was going to do.
When I decided to retire I made a simple Excel spreadsheet that took one's 401K investments, other investments, Social Security payments, monthly expenses, etc. and expanded that out for ten-twenty years. You could change variables like the inflation rate and percentage earned on investments. I showed it to my immediate superior and he wanted a copy, within a week every single manager up to the production manager had a copy and was sitting in their office figuring out if they could retire. So I made another spreadsheet for figuring monthly expenses with an explanation on how to figure it out and a place to adjust for inflation. Within a week they were all using that one too.
I was shocked that none of those people had any idea what their financial condition would be if they had to retire. I was called into the 'down the hall' offices a few times to explain the spreadsheet. Usually a call there was a bad sign but all they wanted was explanations on the spreadsheet.
So I decided to retire/quit work and made an appointment with an accountant/financial advisor to see if I could afford to. I printed out all these spreadsheets where I had laid out twenty different scenarios and took them in to him. When I explained what we were there for and what the sheets were he started laughing. Said most people came in not even knowing how much they had in their 401K, what their pensions would be, or what their monthly expenses were. And I had laid out all these different scenarios up to age 92. Said if I had given it that much thought then he was sure we would be okay to retire. He did ask why everything stopped at age 92 and I explained that was the age my oldest male relative lived to. That set off another round of laughter. So I quit work a few days before my 57th birthday and haven't looked back with any regret.
There is a book called "The Psychology of Money" by Morgan Housel.
I think many of us would find we agree with the ideas in the book. He made a statement that there are two types of people. Those who don't know how to make money, and those who don't know when to stop.
I had some life circumstances really weigh on me, that caused me to have some deep reflection on my life, career and future. I mean, I left a $300k per year job at 47, at the pinnacle of my career. That isn't something my peers will walk away from.
That life takes a toll however. Also true is that many of my peers lived like they earned 125% of what they did. We lived like we earned 20% of what we did.
It would have been very easy to not know when to stop making money.
He also said, that doing something you love, on a schedule not of your choosing, quickly becomes something you can hate. That was true in my life. A passion, a true joy, became a thorn in my side, because my life was not my own. No part of my life was. Everything I did on my days off, was still structured around the thing I did as a vocation.
Contentment and having "enough", not only leads to financial independence. It's also how you choose to stop being the slave, and grasp the independence you have won. It's possible to have it, and never grasp it and experience it.
