I have been thinking about the possibility of ER for a couple of years, but only just found MMM (and other inspiring blogs like RetiredSyd and Simple Living in Suffolk!) and started to take early retirement “seriously.” So over the last few months I’ve been doing things like working out my actual spend (to my shame I never had a budget in my life so had literally no clue what I spent: luckily when I added it up it was if anything a bit less than I expected), trying to plan out how far into the future my pot could see me, and trying to get more of my pot invested (historically I’ve always lazily had too much in cash – now I know I might turn the tap off, the waste of letting inflation eat my money is just too much so I’m slowly getting more of it into the market).
Where I am struggling is just with the potential enormity of what could change looking 10 or 20 years ahead. For example, we don’t have kids at the moment – but are trying. If we do have kids that will be even more incentive to get myself retired. I am basically convinced by MMM’s argument that having kids needn’t cost much, but I’m sure it will cost something.
Similarly at the moment I live in a big city (London) and walk or take the bus everywhere, so don’t have a car (we belong to a car club for occasional car/van needs). But in the future we may well want to move to a smaller town, or even the countryside – in which case I think we would need a car. But how much will that cost? And petrol? If I retire at 40 and live until 90, will we even have cars then and what will they run on? What else might we have invented, and what will that cost? How about the basics like water and power, are they going to get really expensive due to climate change/population shifts or whatever else? Or get cheaper as we continue to invent cool stuff and get more efficient?
“Fixing the pot” by giving up work still feels a really big step in the face of so much uncertainty… I would feel so much better if I could put all this stuff in a spreadsheet 🙂
Am I alone? How do you guys deal with the fear factor?
I’ve only been an adult for 20 years and frankly only just starting to get the hang of it: so how can I envisage and plan for the next (hopefully) 50+?
switch2richnow 