.Don’t Let Early Retirement Box You Into Stupid Corners

Don’t Let Early Retirement Box You Into Stupid Corners

By  Steve Adcock 

How many of you good people have [formally or informally] entered contests to see how little money you can spend during a period of time? Like those “No Spend” months?

If you read enough personal finance material, those money challenges are common. But, I haven’t entered a single one of them.

Not because they’re useless. Not because they are harmful.

It’s because I don’t need to enter a contest to see how much I can scrimp to get by in a certain area of my life.

That’s not the point of early retirement. Or financial independence.

These competitions have a way of “encouraging an assumption” that we need to do certain things or believe in specific philosophies in order to achieve our financial goals.

Things like:

Early retirees don’t spend money on clothes (they do)

Early retirees never spend money at restaurants (they do)

Early retirees never buy new cars (they do)

Early retirees always own instead of rent (they don’t)

In reality, financial independence and early retirement looks different to each and every one of us. We all spend money differently, and I’ve met early retirees who go out to eat regularly, or lease cars, or rent their homes instead of own. Homeownership is overrated.

The rhetoric that you hear isn’t necessarily wrong.

It just doesn’t speak for everyone. If you do things differently than the rest of us, that’s okay. Just because you love going out to eat or buying that Starbucks coffee doesn’t mean that you’ll never retire early.

Early retirement = Quality over Quantity

Here’s the biggest problem with these contests. They make it seem like simply spending less money is a major accomplishment. Like, “Yay, I didn’t spend a dime on such-‘n-such item for a whole month!“.

To continue reading, please go to the original article at

https://thinksaveretire.com/dont-let-early-retirement-box-you-into-stupid-corners/