Setting my target retirement age and measuring my…

Transcript

The second most important factor that allowed me to retire early was the fact that I set an age at which I wanted to retire. The first most important factor was learning to get along with people. And I did a whole video on that, but I thought I'd mention it. But the fact that I set an age at which I wanted to retire allowed me to evaluate every five years or so to see whether or not I was sort of on track. If I hadn't set an age, especially an early age, I would have just assumed that everything was going to sort of work out. And I ended up missing that age by 10 years. So all through my professional career, I said I wanted to retire at 45 or I wanted to be able to retire at 45. I ended up retiring at 55, which is still early, but off by a bit. I'm pretty sure, though, that if I hadn't set the age of 45, I probably would. I would have retired at 65. And I think it's important because what it allowed me to do was it allowed me to look at how things were going every few years and say, OK, well, if you're going to retire at 45, that means you need to be here. So let's go back five years. You need to be here five years from then. You need to be here five years from then. I just keep working back until I got where I was and I'd say, OK, I'm off track and I would need to make adjustments. Now, there will be people who say nobody's going to retire ever again. Or I'll never retire. Or you're lucky, you know, nobody's ever going to retire early. And I'll say this. If you believe that you won't retire early, you won't. If you believe you won't retire at all, you probably won't. Now, that doesn't mean that if you believe you'll retire early, you will. It just means that at least you're in the game if you believe you can do it. And when I say if you believe you won't retire early, you won't. I mean, there will be people who retire early, even in this more difficult time. There will always be people who retire early. There will always be people who retire. If you're one of those people who believes you won't retire at all or you won't retire early, you're probably right. But that doesn't mean that this video doesn't apply to other people, people who do believe they can retire early. For those people, I'm making this video. And that is just to say that. But if you believe you can retire early for me, it was very important that I set a date. And I needed to set a relatively aggressive date because that put me sort of in high gear to make sure it happened. So reason number two, I was able to retire early. I set an age at which I wanted to retire and I tracked my progress regularly.