Why you should think about financial independence and mini-retirements | Lacey Filipich | TEDxUWA

A decade ago I was the definition of time poor. I was on the fast track to a vice president position at a major

mini

ng company and I thought my job was so important that I couldn't afford to take a single day off, so I didn't. 18 months I was working hard sadly only in the metaphorical sense in the literal sense my butt was expanding thanks to my neglect of everything not related to work that everything stopped when I got sick and not just a little. You were bedridden for five weeks If you've ever had the experience of being sick longer than you thought, you know, like a common cold that you

think

will last a week, lasts for two, lasts for three, some of The feelings are experienced with things like helplessness, like I have no control over my body, like I can't do anything to get out of bed, like all that motivation and getting up and going that had gotten me this far in my career wasn't going to help me. nothing also I felt desperate like that bed was going to be my future, I was just going to be surrounded by tissues for the rest of my life and it got so bad that in the fourth week I filled up on all the medications they had given me . and I got on a plane and flew 4,000 kilometers to my mom's house so she could take care of me.

Turns out it was a virus that sent me to bed, but it was my poor health decisions and lack of energy reserves that kept me there. As a result of that illness, I lost half of the hearing in my right ear and now have brown or gold crowns that I call my mouth bling on my back molars because I chipped my teeth from grinding them in my sleep from stress. Having your health irreversibly damaged when you're 26 is not fun at all, but it was the wake-up call I needed. I decided to take unpaid leave and went to travel to South America with my partner, and now that I've seen it, I can say no.

There's nothing like a man-made wonder, no matter how hard you try to put the insignificance of your work into perspective. Three months later, I had seen six countries and my eyes had been opened to a world beyond work and beyond Australia and me. I thought about why I had made work such an important part of my life when it seemed like there was so much more to discover, unfortunately all good things must come to an end. I flew home and returned to work when I returned to work it was a bit of a shock, but I soon fell back into my old routine until three months later, my little sister Megan committed suicide.

She was 24 years old and I thought she had everything to live for. Megan's death highlighted that idle reflection. I became consumed with questions about why. we worked ourselves to death why we spent so much time at work not enjoying it and sacrificing so much my life up to that point was a textbook example of how I had allowed myself to work to the point of physical and mental collapse for a while. company that would have replaced me within a week if I had fallen under a bus seemed like a waste of time and, like most people in personal crises, I went looking for help and started in the self-help section of a bookstore.

When you liked going to a bookstore, that's when I came across Tim Ferris's 4-Hour Work Week and it was a revelation, especially on the topic of time. It is not surprising that lack of time is the motto of our era because it is our most precious non-renewable resource, we lament the lack of hours in the day to do everything we would like to do, it does not matter that you and I have the same 24 hours a day like Beyoncé or Barack Obama, we never seem to have enough time and that's on the micro scale of a single day on the macro scale of our lives we spend over 40 of our best years sometimes grinding our teeth at work and finally get to the official retirement age and we can stop, we are finally at I am rich instead of time poor, we can do whatever we want with that time, we could travel, we could volunteer, we could spend time with our families, only now we are old, what we wouldn't give at that moment to have some of that. time, rich feeling when we were young, the thing is that we increase retirement at the end of life, it is not mandatory, retirement was invented in the 1880s in Prussia in response to socialists who demanded more for the public and at that At the time they set the retirement age at 70 years. years and that was the approximate life expectancy at that time, so not everyone was able to retire, they didn't really get to have what we have now and when they retired they probably only had a few years.

Retirement became widespread in the guest times after the works. the Great Depression, when it was seen as a way to get everyone in the workforce out of the way so that younger people could get ahead because they needed that money to support their families. Times have changed, life expectancy has increased and yet the end of life. lifetime retirement remains and the retirement age is fairly comparable at around 60 for most developed nations, so now, instead of having a handful of years for a handful of people to look forward to, most Of us are looking at two decades of that time, feeling rich when we enter the book and first ask ourselves: what if we could take some of that retirement at the end of life and bring it back to our youth in small portions so that we could have that feeling of wealth over time when we are young and healthy? these little periods of respite

mini

retirements

my trip to South America had a new name it was not a holiday it was a mini retirement and I was excited by the idea of ​​making them a regular part of my life so I said about redesigning my lifestyle and my work, I quickly stopped my job and in five years I took five mini-

retirements

for a total of 22 months off.

Between those mini-retirement periods I did consulting work in the mining industry and also tinkered with my startup, which later became my business. Now, the question that might be arising in your minds right now and it is a logical one is: how can someone in their twenties afford to take more than a third of their time off from work? How do you get a roof over your head or a car to drive how can you afford to eat is a really important question in the book Ferriss talks about a muse, an online business that can be used to fund your mini retirement so you can be sipping cocktails in the beach while money falls from the sky. from the web, but that's just one way to make many retirements a part of your life.

There is another alternative and it is called fire. What does fire mean? very simple concept, which is not to say easy, basically you stop spending so much on things, you take the money that you would have spent on things and save it and once you have saved it, you buy assets with them. Assets are things that pay you. things like property, shares, bonds, index funds and you continue like this throughout your working life and eventually you reach a point where the income from your assets is enough to sustain your lifestyle, at which point you no longer have to work because you don't You don't need a salary to survive, working becomes a choice, let's use an example.

I'll talk about Fred Fred is a software engineer, he graduates from college, gets his first job and doesn't make the mistake most of us make: quit. and spending every penny he earned because he was so excited to finally have an income, instead he keeps living like a student, you know, baking beans on toast, that kind of thing and keeps going and manages to save 60% of his money. income. Think about that for a minute living on 40% of your salary, you keep it there for 10 years, you take the money and put it in an investment property and some index funds and then at age 30 all of a sudden the income from your assets. is enough to cover your living costs, which are about half of your peers' because you haven't gotten into the habit of spending so much money in your 30s you can choose to stop working you can retire Fred is a real person his name is actually Pete adonai and he goes by the nickname mr money mustache and he is one of many vloggers who have gone through this experience, they have had the opportunity to reach for the fire and now they teach other people how to do it, lucky for me, I came. to shoot and my start of that journey much earlier.

I started when I was 10 years old. My mother taught me the importance of saving and taught me about the power of compounding, and as a result, I saved half of every dollar I got from that trip. age, whether it was pocket money or birthday money or the profits from my first business that I started at that time when I was 14 years old. I was old enough to get a job and I kept saving and then at 19 I was in the second year of my degree in chemical engineering and I had a pretty impressive bank balance and I was going to buy a car with that bank balance and it wasn't going to be a old shit bomb like the one my friends drove. to be beautiful at least it will have air conditioning and power steering and I was very excited about the fact so I showed it to my mom I said mom look what I have saved I am going to buy this car my mom said a phrase That changed my life, Lacey said, that could be the deposit on a house.

I was speechless. I planted a seed that took root and within a couple of weeks we were buying an apartment and a few months later I was the proud owner of the ugliest, brownest one. The most horrible Tania Palmer you've ever seen, but at 19 she was pretty exciting. A couple of years later, I graduated from college. I flew 4,000 kilometers to the wild west of Australia to join the mining industry and because I did a bit like Pete Adonai. I didn't extend my life to the income I had. I was able to save quite a bit of money so I bought another property when I arrived, a couple of years later I bought another property, then my employer introduced a share scheme and that's how I started.

I learned about stocks and got interested in it, so I started trading stocks and continued into property and stocks, so when I was 26 and had that experience of the health scare, I was actually on the path to finance.

independence

and that's a point I reached when I was 31, which was a fabulous time because that was when I had my first child and I had the luxury of being able to stay home with her and not have to

think

about how I was doing. to earn an income because my assets paid my living costs after about 18 months at home I finally got some sleep like you do and started thinking about the meaning of life and what I wanted to do, which is also what you do When It turns out I was at home with the toddler and growing increasingly frustrated with my friends who had been making terrible

financial

decisions, going into debt, paying too much for things they really wanted, like cars, and not saving or investing, and I look.

We go back to our school system and realize that they don't teach us about money, they don't even teach us that fire is an option in school. I had never heard the term and so my life became focused on teaching young people the skills they need to become

financial

ly independent so they can have what I had at the time. I moved full time to my startup money school and a couple of years later I started a second business, creating a kids club that approaches the same problem from a slightly different angle and that those two businesses, in addition to being a wife and mother and A handful of volunteer roles are where I spend most of my time now.

That doesn't sound too much like retirement, does it? This is where the fire falls. Drinking cocktails on the beach eventually gets boring. You'll have to take my word for it, young people, when you get to the fire, don't actually retire, just read their blogs, these aren't the kind of people who surround themselves, twiddle their thumbs or do nothing or watch endless reruns on the television, they are out. changing the world, the difference is that their work is not motivated by money, it is motivated by other rewards, they do not retire early, in fact, they have a lot of time, they can choose how they spend their time and that is the goal of this exercise. able to choose how you spend the second minutes hours and days that will make up your life you choose if you work when where how on what and perhaps most importantly who you work with you can choose when to stop working and you can choose when you start again, you can choose why not You need a salary to support your lifestyle, so if you're thinking this fire idea sounds fabulous, don't make early retirement your goal, make your goal the time you can achieve and if you're not already.

I am convinced that we all need you to have plenty of time. Humanity has pressing problems. Overpopulation. Pollution. Homelessness. War. Food production. The list is endless if we can't solve those problems. All our time will be meaningless. We need our brightest minds focused on solving these problems. I don't know how to get us to click on an app, so I implore you to save and invest. Light the fire. Get rich in time. Discover the joy of work that doesn'tis motivated by money and begins to solve those problems that fascinate you. Humanity needs you. Thank you.