Work Optional

Introduction

It’s eight p.m. on a Friday, and I’m asleep on the couch. Again. My husband, Mark, is asleep beside me. Again. This has become our pattern: work too much and sleep too little all week, and then collapse into the weekend, too exhausted to get through even a single 30-minute TV show. Around one a.m. I’ll wake up, wake up Mark, and then trudge off to bed, and somewhere in those few dozen steps, I’ll wonder, Is this really what I’ve worked so hard for? Is this what success feels like?

Work today is a far cry from work of the not-so-distant past. In the seemingly endless race to boost productivity and profits, companies expect their employees to work more and more hours for less and less pay, and to be connected even when we’re not working. Entrepreneurs and freelancers are told they need to “hustle” around the clock to be successful. Sometimes it all feels just as pointless as collecting virtual coins in a video game as we chase new jobs, promotions, or opportunities that may or may not actually help us get ahead or make us happier, all the while drowning in never-ending email loops and power dynamics. We work for that paycheck, live for the weekend, and spend our money trying to soothe the stress of it all.

But you don’t have to live your life according to this script just because it’s what most people do. You can write your own script, one that puts you in control of your time every day—from how much work you do all the way down to whether you ever set an alarm clock again. I’ll show you just how doable it is to create your own work-optional life.

I had a dream career filled with purpose, working as a communications consultant to political campaigns and nonprofits I believed in, and seeing my work directly impact people for the better. I had the privilege of working with incredibly smart, driven, and kind people, and that made the work fun much of the time. But even a great job and steady string of promotions couldn’t offset the stress and exhaustion I felt constantly or help shake the feeling that I wasn’t really in control of my life.

Though I loved a lot about my work, I also flew nearly a million miles during that career, spent hundreds of nights in hotels away from home, and banked more 70-hour weeks and all-nighters than I can count. The impact from my work might have felt good, but the pace of it wasn’t sustainable, and I knew it. I also knew that I wasn’t getting happier with each promotion. If anything, the added responsibility was making me more stressed and tired, more disconnected from the purpose behind my work, and less sure of the direction my life was taking. The higher up the ladder I climbed, the less time I had to spend with the people I care about and on the activities I love most. This put my career goals in direct opposition with the happiness and fulfillment I craved. And even when I enjoyed the work, I was still spending my time and energy on someone else’s agenda, not my own.

Maybe you’ve had similar thoughts. You’ve wondered what all that time you spend working really adds up to. Or how you’ll ever be able to find time in your life for the people and things that are truly important to you. You’ve worried that your life is passing you by, and that you might get to the end of it and realize you didn’t do what you’d always dreamed of doing or what would give your life meaning. Maybe you’ve chased money or prestige, but realized that getting it didn’t make you any happier, and you only had to work more year after year to hang on to your position.

It was during all that ladder climbing and questioning that I met my husband, Mark, who was also on a steep trajectory in an equally demanding career as a political researcher. We were proud of our careers and felt incredibly fortunate to work for companies and people we respected, but we saw the toll those careers were taking: how little we were sleeping, how much the stress was impacting our health, how unable we were to disconnect for more than an hour or two, how desperately we came to need the weekends (even if we often worked or slept through them) and too-short vacations. And not only did we want to free ourselves from the constant stress and exhaustion of our careers, but we also had other things we’d rather spend our time doing. Every chance we got, we were making the hours-long drive from Los Angeles up to the Sierra Nevada mountains, where we’d ski in the winter and hike and climb in the summer. We felt most alive zipping open a tent in subfreezing temps at dawn from some high-altitude vantage point, taking in the sunrise in solitude. Or racing to the ski slopes before the sun rose, in hopes of grabbing that elusive first chair on a powder day. And when we were home, we loved volunteering in our community, knowing we were directly helping people in need. But as we took on more responsibility in our careers, we had less and less time to get into the mountains and into the community, and we felt work pulling us away from what we loved most.

After one too many of those early Friday nights asleep on the couch, we decided that we didn’t want to live that way for another 30 or 40 years. And we made the choice to design a different kind of life: a life we’d live on our own terms, not an employer’s or a client’s. And so our journey to a work-optional life began, starting with a move from LA to the mountains near Lake Tahoe. I blogged about our journey to early retirement on my site, Our Next Life, and quickly heard from readers all over the world that they felt the same way we did. They didn’t want to wait until their 60s to wrest control of their lives back from their employers. And because you’re reading this now, I bet you’re in the same boat.

Six years after formulating our escape plan, we waved goodbye to our careers and embarked on a new life in which we never need to work again. I had just turned 38. Mark had just turned 41. We now ski more than we ever have, and we spend time on the trails nearly every day. We volunteer much more than we could while in our careers, which replaces the sense of purpose we used to get from work, and we have time to devote to creative projects that are meaningful to us. At least once every day, I think to myself, I can’t believe this is real life. We’re so grateful to have realized that by approaching our money a little differently than most people do, we could reclaim our time and embark on the work-optional life of our dreams.

If you’re willing to change your money mindset and occasionally go against what we’re all taught is the “right way” to do things, you can craft the life of your dreams, too.

This book is not anti-work. Work is a good and noble thing, something nearly every person ever born has had to do in some form, whether or not they were formally employed. As humans we are wired to be productive, and work provides an outlet for that need. Work can give us a sense of purpose, a sense of contributing to society, and a sense of usefulness. The problem isn’t work itself, but our current societal work culture. The culture in which too many of us wear our busyness and the bags under our eyes as status symbols. The culture that says you must hustle around the clock to be worthy. The culture that says our employers or clients own not just our work hours but every waking moment. We aren’t wired to handle that.

That’s why we see study after study confirming what most of us already know: Today’s work culture is crushing us. Workplace burnout is at epidemic proportions,¹ and workers feel stressed and exhausted.² Large numbers of us work 50, 60, or even more hours every week.³ While our parents or grandparents rarely had to take work home with them, and certainly weren’t reachable after leaving the office each day, we’re now expected to be connected at all times. A full half of us who use email for work check that email over the weekend. Almost as many check email when we’re sick, and a third of us check work email on vacation.⁴ (Is that even really vacation?) Typical senior-level employees are buried in more than 200 emails a day.⁵ We feel overworked and eager to escape, even if we like the work we do.

Today we also work more overall: In 1979, Americans worked an average of 1,687 hours a year, but now log 1,836 hours. This is the equivalent of nearly four more weeks of full-time work every single year.⁶ Nine out of 10 workers at all levels feel they don’t have enough time to get everything done that is expected of them.⁷ We’re asked to do the impossible, and we no longer have enough time to unplug and protect our physical and mental health.

At the same time, we feel less secure in our jobs than ever before, even those who love their jobs and can’t imagine retiring early. Many industries are being forced to adapt to technological changes and to downward price competition that result in outsourcing jobs overseas, replacing humans with robots, or closing up shop altogether. Some whole industries have gone extinct or are in danger of doing so. And other workers find themselves in occupations with a high risk of injury or disability, which could end their careers in an instant.

So it’s no wonder that so many of us are craving freedom from this fast-paced, high-pressure work world. We want to work on our own terms. We want to do something slower, something healthier, something more secure—or maybe just something different, something that makes our lives feel more meaningful.

That’s what Work Optional is all about: reclaiming your life from our nonstop work culture so that you decide what role work will play in your life, instead of society deciding for you.

It can take any form you imagine, from full early retirement with no paid work ever again, to a life with part-time or periodic work on your own terms. Maybe it’s a life in which you escape traditional employment and go to work for yourself with a big financial safety net in place to keep the work fun instead of stressful. Or a life of full-time travel, in which you can work when and where you want. Maybe it’s a service-focused life filled with volunteering or activism. It’s completely up to you to define what a work-optional life looks and feels like to you. And your journey to that life is completely yours to shape, too—from what path you’ll take to how fast you’ll go. If you find yourself getting hung up on the word retirement, then choose another word. You might call what you’re aiming for financial independence or financial security. Or maybe you simply call it a work-optional life. The words you choose are far less important than knowing what you want.

How to Use This Book

This isn’t one of those financial self-help books that’s going to push you to leap in hopes that the net will magically appear, or that’s going to ignore the financial realities of the world today and pretend that anyone can make a million dollars in a month or get out of debt overnight. I’m not going to try to convince you to take big risks or promise that if you do exactly what I did, you can achieve exactly what I achieved in exactly the same way. This isn’t ultimately about my journey. It’s about yours. That’s why the process in Work Optional is all about embracing your reality and finding your best options for reshaping your life. You’ll come away with a solid, cautious, comprehensive financial plan, tailored to your specific circumstances, that sets you up to weather whatever future storms come your way and with a purpose-filled life plan that will keep you motivated all along your journey. If you choose to take a less cautious approach, that’s cool! My goal is to empower you with all the information you need to shape your work-optional life, and to make your own choices about what’s right for you and your unique situation.

Work Optional is divided into three sections. Part I is all about envisioning the life that you would be thrilled to live in early retirement, semiretirement, or a series of career intermissions, such as taking a year off from work every five years or once a decade. We’ll look at what will provide you with a sense of meaning and fulfillment in lieu of a traditional career, and I’ll ask you to take a close look at what you would be willing to change or give up in your life now to make that dream a reality. For example, whether you’re willing to live in a smaller home, give up a car, or stop shopping for nonessentials. (Don’t worry. None of that is mandatory, but the more you’re willing to change, the faster you’ll reach your goal.)

Part II is the financial planning portion, guiding you through the process of understanding your current spending and projecting your future spending. You will come to understand all the principles that underpin a solid early retirement financial plan, determine how much you need to save to retire or semiretire securely, create a plan and timeline to save without having to pinch pennies, and put systems into place to ensure you succeed, such as automating your saving so that you aren’t continually drawing on limited willpower to set aside money each month. This section also covers strategies to speed up your progress toward your savings goal by increasing earnings and decreasing spending, perhaps by changing to a higher-paid career path or moving to a lower-cost-of-living area, and to build in contingency plans to create extra safety and security.

Part III gets back to the life part, when life after work becomes optional, planning how you’ll adapt to a post-work life financially and emotionally, prioritize your well-being, and make the most of your newfound free time. Most of all, this part is about actually living your best life.

Throughout the book, I share our story so that you can see one possible route to early retirement: how Mark and I envisioned the work-optional life we wanted to live instead of the work-centered conventional one, how we built our financial plan behind that, and the completely doable steps we took to make it our reality in a short period of time. But I want you to be inspired by other possible routes as well, and that’s why you’ll find lots of other people’s stories included here, too. Especially if you have kids, you may think a work-optional life is out of reach for you, and that’s why the majority of examples included here are from parents, not from child-free people like Mark and me. From families with kids who retired early, to single people pulling it off, to couples earning under six figures combined saving faster than you might think possible, you’ll see that some form of work-optional life is achievable for nearly anyone who can afford to save even a little. No matter what your circumstances are or where you’re starting, you’ll come away from this book with a detailed, concrete plan to make your dream of less work and more life a reality.

My hope is that, by seeing so many different paths to early retirement, you’ll finish this book inspired to envision your work-optional future and pursue it doggedly, like your life depends on it. (It does!) But doing that requires hard work on your part. There are some tough questions here, like:

Get ready to do some introspection, to question some things you’ve been taught, and to consider what it might be like to walk down the road less traveled. I promise it’ll all be worth it. Because there’s no right or wrong way to pursue a work-optional life, only the way that’s best for you.