We all know about the FIRE movement – Financial independence, Retire Early. One of the big criticisms is that it really isn’t realistic for the average person, just white tech guys who earn 100K+ a year. Furthermore, a lot of people don’t even WANT to retire that early. They have ideas and passions they want to continue putting out into the world and for some, a job or business is a great way to do that. But financial independence, temporary retirement? Now THAT is something most of us can really get into.
As I write this, teachers and parents throughout the US are panicking about returning to schools with a COVID-19 pandemic raging out of control. My heart breaks as I read about teachers who are pregnant, have newborns or immune-compromised kids, or have personal health challenges. With little guidance from the government or their administrators, they don’t know what they are facing or how they will manage to keep themselves and their students safe. Some have stated “I will not go back to school in this situation.” But others say, “I have no choice. I’ve got bills to pay.”
For me, financial independence was mid-range; we planned for 2 years without income. But you don’t have to have enough money to survive 2 years for it to make a major difference in your life. So many teachers would benefit right now from being able to take a semester off, or even an extra 9 weeks of maternity leave without pay. Don’t get me wrong, this would still be a tough choice. But it would at least be a CHOICE. (If you are interested in seeing how your finances would play out if you left teaching for a while, you can sign up to receive my free spreadsheet here.)
My FITR Journey
My husband and I had been planning to move to Norway for almost 2 years when I resigned from my teaching job and started telling my co-workers about our weird and outlandish plan – move to Norway without jobs. He would study at the University of Stavanger, and I would – well, I wasn’t sure what I would do – but we had enough money put away to live on for 2 years without any income.
I didn’t even realize that our plans were a version of FIRE until one of my personal finance buddies at school said, “So you’re really doing it, huh? After all our talks, you’re doing FIRE and headed to Norway.” I started to protest, “Nah. It’s not FIRE. We’re only doing it for 2 years.”
And then I stopped.
Yeah. We were doing it. Moving to a place we chose, a place where we wanted to live and raise our kids, at least for a few years. We were doing it on money we had saved, and without touching our retirement savings or the equity from our house.
Hell, yeah. We were really doing it!
And who cares if it wasn’t forever? It was what we wanted and needed as a family. And so when I saw a FIRE blogger mention his version – FIOR for ‘Financial Independence, Optional Retirement’ – I felt seen. But I knew it wasn’t exactly what we had done, and started calling our path Financial Independence, Temporary Retirement. (OK, so originally, I was calling it Financial Independence, Retire Temporarily. Then I realized that FIRT sounded WAY too much like ‘fart’ for a mom of three to say out loud without a chorus of uncontrollable giggles. So there’s that.)
The first few months of FITR in Norway
July
After arriving in Norway in July 2019, we spent that first month on the fun and not-as-fun that comes with a new adventure. We enjoyed family trips to the beach, helping the kids learn to ride their bikes (an essential here in Stavanger), discovering the 1001 nearby playgrounds, picnicking by the fjord, and basically drinking in the wonder of a new culture. We also spent time on more mundane tasks like making immigration appointments, finding the best grocery store, enrolling the kids in school, and managing new country-induced meltdowns (both on the part of the kids and the part of mom).
August
When school started in August (intensive Norwegian instruction for the kids, Master’s program for my husband) I blogged, cooked, shopped, and basically kept everything running. In case you have never moved overseas with a family of 5, doing even the simple things can take a tremendous amount of time, because you have to learn to do them in a new way. For example, in Norway kids go out for recess no matter WHAT. There is also no school lunch nor any water fountains in most schools. Consequently, to get them to school, they had to have rain boots, rain pants, rain jackets, a packed lunch, morning snack, and water bottle, as well as all the things needed for a normal school day like homework or signed forms.
I don’t know how we would have done it if I hadn’t been able to be a mom/family manager 24-7 during those first months. It was essential. But I am not really cut out to be a homemaker. I was managing, but started getting antsy, especially when I saw posts from my former colleagues about going back to school and prepping their classrooms. (#pikeproud). We were also doing OK money wise. But I am super conservative and I did NOT like the feeling of having money go out, but not come in. Just made me nervous.
September
So when I saw a posting in September for a job at a local international school, I put my best CV forward. Nothing.
Crickets.
More crickets.
Blogging to the sound of crickets.
Oh, well we would survive.
And then a call.
Them: “Can you come in for an interview?”
Them: “Do you want the job? Part-time 3 1/2 days a week.”
Me: “Yes, PLEASE!”
And it was true. I really WANTED the job. Not just the paycheck, but the job. I missed getting out of the house, talking to adults, and the feeling of learning and meeting new challenges. But our FITR strategy gave me the time to be home when I needed it. Plus, it kept me from freaking out when I applied and heard crickets.
Previous FITR
And while this is the most unusual of my flirtations with FIRE, it is definitely not the only one. During the 1996-97 school year, I lived in Caen, France and studied at the university there. In 2010, I stayed home for a year on maternity leave. A few years later, I left teaching for 2 years to build a micro-business and spend more time with my kids.
Every time I have left teaching, I come back renewed and even more in love with the profession. And every time I have returned to teaching, I have been, like, on fire (No, not the financial kind, just the excited-to-be-back kind.) Let’s face it, teaching is great, but it can eat your soul. (Seriously!) Especially when you are teaching in a high-needs position or a high-needs school.
This model works for me. I would be a basket case working for 30 years straight. Old, bitter, and cynical – all by age 35. But I would be a basket case if I stopped teaching forever, too. How exactly is it that something that can eat your soul (seriously!) also feeds your soul in a way nothing else does?
When I see people dreaming of leaving paid work forever, it just doesn’t resonate with me. I’ve tried it. Four times. Each time I prepared myself for the possibility that I would not be able to re-enter the teaching job market. Each time I went back to a job I loved even more than the previous one.
Don’t hate me
Ok, I can hear some of you gagging in the background. “Must be nice. What I wouldn’t give to be able to just pop in and out of jobs like that.”
I am lucky in a lot of ways, I’ll admit. We lived on my husband’s salary during 3 of the 4 times I was not teaching, and that made all the difference. But there were reasons that we were able to live on his salary. (Full disclosure: Yes. He is a lawyer. But he worked for the state government as a consumer advocate, so he didn’t make ‘lawyer’ salary. He made a little over half of what one would expect for someone of his experience – and never touched 100K.) We bought used (sometimes VERY used) cars, paid off his student loan debt the year after we got married, and never carried a balance on our credit cards. And our big eating out splurge was take out pizza every week or so; other than that, I cooked from scratch.
Your FITR Journey
But this is the important thing about this whole post. When you stop thinking about FIRE as all-or-nothing, it gives you SO MUCH more hope. The term FU money is used a lot to mean the amount of money you need in investments to be able to live indefinitely without a job or other assistance and pay for your lifestyle, and a lot of people say that having 25 times your expenses should do it.
But for most of us, that’s a crap-load of money. If your yearly expenses are $36K ($3000/month), which is really low, you would need to have $900,000 in investments to achieve FIRE. (This is a super-simplification. Do NOT rely on my calculations because there are a lot of variables, but it gives you an idea of what we’re talking about.) That is a really big amount of money for most people to even contemplate.
But when you think of your life as a series of FITR chapters, AND/OR only one of you is interested in leaving full-time work, the numbers change a lot. The other part of this is that even if you can’t walk away from work forever, having a plan in place to being able to take one school year off – or even 3 months off – can make a tremendous difference in your life.
For example, let’s use that same $3000/month base line again. Missing 9 weeks of school would be about 3 months worth of income. That means a teacher would need to have $9,000 to draw on IF they were the sole income earner in the family. Don’t get me wrong, $9,000 is still a LOT of money to have sitting in a bank account ready to access. But returning to the COVID-19 situation, it’s a LOT less than a stay in ICU would cost.
So maybe you are on board, but you feel like any kind of financial independence is so far away you don’t even know where to start. Don’t worry, I’m not going to leave you hanging. Check out my blog posts on The Snowball Method or Saving an emergency fund.
Or better yet, if you want to see where you stand TODAY and how long you could go without your teaching income, check out my Money Master Spreadsheet.
It’s a lot of information. And it’s not going to happen overnight. But when you think about the peace of mind that FITR provides, it starts to look like the only choice. Being able to take a leave of absence when others are trying to force you back into an unsafe classroom. Choices about where to live and whether to move. Knowing that you have enough money to cover an extended illness. We’re not talking about saving up money just so you can have a new car or countertops. We’re talking about decisions that affect the things we value most in life. There are going to be a lot of times when it seems impossible. But with commitment and persistence, you’ve got this.