It was a dark evening in March when I stared long and hard at the blinking cursor in the new Pretired.org dashboard before writing these words:
Many terms have been tossed about: “early retirement”, “pre-retirement”, “semi-retired”, “working part-time”, etc. None have really captured the exact meaning as well as “pretired” has.
If retirement is doing nothing, then pretirement is doing what you want to do.
Now, nearly at 50 posts, two Liebster nominations, a new Facebook page and Twitter account, nearly 700 comments and rapidly rising site traffic, I have to stand back in awe. Not so much of the body of work I’ve produced, but of all of you. The emails, comments and even your clicks keep me motivated to keep explaining my perspective on financial freedom.
The search engine terms people use to find the site tell the story of who is reading. These people are aching to be free of their corporate prisons, they’re looking for ways to pay off their mortgages quickly, they’re realizing they bought too much house and they’re figuring out how much house they should buy. In general, they just want to be free and spend more time with their families.
In other words, they’re just like me.
I am not an expert investor and I didn’t figure this out early enough to reach financial freedom in my 30s. I always knew I wanted my investments to cover my expenses so I could be free. Now I want to show the world not just HOW to do it, but to show how possible it is. For most people, pretirement is impossible because they believe it’s impossible. I love watching people do the math for themselves and suddenly undergo an abrupt mindset shift.
Finding the right path to pretirement is a challenge, but understanding HOW to get there was the big missing piece for me when I was still working full time.
And I’m still learning. I’ve made just about every mistake in the book and I’m making more each day. But I’m getting just a little bit smarter every day. This site has been part of that learning process. It’s made me think a bit more deeply about what I’m doing and it’s helped add discipline to my personal life as well.
I’m hoping to build the site that I wish I’d been able to read 20 years ago. Maybe I’ll suddenly get bored and stop blogging. But probably not right away. I still have a lot I want to say and a lot to learn so I’m not going anywhere any time soon.
Thanks for sticking around.