Summary of Tanja Hester's Work Optional

Everest Media

Description

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.
Sample Book Insights:
#1 We’re taught from a young age that there’s a right way to do things: get good grades, go to college, choose a career path, start a business, collect a steady paycheck, and upsize our spending as our pay increases. But life doesn’t have to go that way.
#2 Retirement is a loaded term that is filled with imagery of sipping an umbrella drink on a beach. But in reality, retirement has only existed since the late 1800s, and very few people have ever actually retired.
#3 There is no correct time to retire. The idea that age 65 is the right retirement age is an arbitrary number chosen by economists and actuaries when Social Security was created, and it happens to make things balance out financially.
#4 You can call yourself retired in some form if you feel like it. And after you detach yourself from the age 65 and its limiting notions of what retirement means, you open yourself up to a different way of seeing life.

Sujets

• Personal finance
• Retirement planning

Informations

• Publié par: Everest Media LLC
• Date de parution: 25 mars 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781669364665
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Insights on Tanja Hester's Work Optional
Contents Insights from Chapter 1 Insights from Chapter 2 Insights from Chapter 3
Insights from Chapter 1

#1

We’re taught from a young age that there’s a right way to do things: get good grades, go to college, choose a career path, start a business, collect a steady paycheck, and upsize our spending as our pay increases. But life doesn’t have to go that way.

#2

Retirement is a loaded term that is filled with imagery of sipping an umbrella drink on a beach. But in reality, retirement has only existed since the late 1800s, and very few people have ever actually retired.

#3

There is no correct time to retire. The idea that age 65 is the right retirement age is an arbitrary number chosen by economists and actuaries when Social Security was created, and it happens to make things balance out financially.

#4

You can call yourself retired in some form if you feel like it. And after you detach yourself from the age 65 and its limiting notions of what retirement means, you open yourself up to a different way of seeing life.

#5

Noah and Becky Bouillon are a young couple who took the career intermission approach to their work-optional life. They have saved money since their early days together in college, and thanks to scholarships, natural frugality, and work over summer breaks, they graduated from college with no debt and plenty of savings.

#6

I was taught that if I worked hard and proved myself, I’d put myself on a fast-track career path to happiness and fulfillment. But adulthood brought me to realize that I didn’t need those accomplishments to be happy. I wanted to make my own path.

#7

Early retirement is not about not liking work. It’s about creating a work-optional life based around your values and passions. You do not have to be good at money to put yourself on the path to early retirement.

#8

You do not need to be a magical unicorn with a computer engineering degree, earning six figures in your first job, with no student debt and no kids, to be able to retire early. Even if you are just learning about early retirement in your 50s or 60s, you can still achieve a work-optional life well before others retire.

#9

In early retirement, your time is your own. You can spend it on whatever you want, and earn the all-encompassing sense of freedom that comes with it. Money is simply the tool to help you achieve this.

#10

The money part of early retirement is deceptively simple: spend less than you earn, invest the difference until it generates enough money to support you forever, and then wave goodbye to mandatory work. The life portion, however, is significantly more complex. You need to know what your future life costs and figure out what your best and most purpose-filled life looks like.

#11

When you are stressed, what do you daydream about. What would you call your happy place. What do you want to make time for every day. What are your favorite hobbies.

#12

Think about what you want to achieve in your life. Are you a homebody who loves nothing better than to wake up in your own bed every day, or do you dream of seeing every corner of the world.

#13

After you’re gone, how do you want to be remembered. What kind of person do you want to be remembered as being. Is that different from how you are now. Do you want to be remembered for any accomplishments or contributions.

#14

You should ask yourself whether you’re trying to live up to someone else’s expectations, and whether any decisions you’re making in your life are because it’s what you feel is expected of you. If any of these are the case, you should ask yourself whether those expectations are positive or negative.

#15

Create a vision that is specific, measurable, and time-based. Who is a part of this vision. Is this life you’re planning just for you and a partner. For you and a family. For you and close friends.

#16

To figure out your life vision, go through each answer and circle or underline anything that stands out as surprising you. Then, create a summary for each category. Finally, identify common themes that emerge across different categories.

#17

Think about how your list of priorities clusters thematically. Then, look at your own themes and give them a gut check: do those themes feel right to you. If you made your entire life about the themes you identified, would that feel meaningful. Would it feel like enough. If not, what is your gut telling you.

#18

When you’re figuring out what you want out of your life, consider what you could change now, what’s realistic, and what you’re willing to change when work becomes optional. Cross off things that aren’t realistic, and underline the things that feel worth making big changes in your life.

#19

The exercise you went through reveals what you value most in life, and that’s huge! We don’t often take the time to consider the big questions like this. Make your themes a central part of the story you tell yourself about who you are and where you’re headed.

#20

It is important to have a shared vision of life after retirement, and this can be done by asking each other the questions in this chapter and doing the priorities exercise together. It is better to figure out now, when you have time to grow together toward a shared vision, than to coerce one partner to go along with a plan they aren’t excited about.

#21

Having children will affect your early retirement planning in a big way. They will cost you money and require you to save at a slower pace than you might be able to without them. But children may also inspire you to sequence your work-optional life differently.

#22

Early retirement requires you to save a significant amount of money, which can seem daunting at first. But this approach isn't about clipping coupons or living cheaply. It's about getting the biggest bang for your buck, playing to your strengths, and spending only on what you value most.

#23

Lifestyle inflation is the result of a psychological phenomenon called hedonic adaptation, which is the tendency we all have to adapt quickly to changes in our lives and return to a baseline level of happiness, regardless of how many good or bad things may happen.

#24

The second biggest obstacle