I was watching a recent episode of My First Million featuring Nick Gray, who I’d honestly never heard of until this week. Nick is a quirky fellow who seems to throw out ideas like a machine gun, and once again being honest, I kind of like the guy.
During the episode, he cited an article he wrote borrowing from Tony Robbins asking people what they would do if they had enough money to retire today. In Nick’s article, he defines that amount as $10MM, which is actually far beyond what I feel I’d need, but you can adjust for your own situation as needed.
The exercise asks you to not just daydream, but to get really specific. Sure you want to eat healthier, but how? Would you shop differently? Would you use a grocery delivery service? Maybe hire a food prep service, or hell, even a personal chef. The idea is to really lay out what you’d do if basically time and money were no object.
For example, in my own exercise, my list looked like this:
- Hire a nutritionist to create meal plans for my family
- Use a meal prep service twice a week
- Work out daily, 3x per week with a personal trainer at a gym
- Housekeepers once per week instead of twice per month
- Laundry pickup/drop off service
- Pool maintenance service 2x per month in summer
- Create a personal finance focused podcast
- Quarterly family vacations to interesting places including on kid focused trip per year
- Spend a lot more time on warm sandy beaches
- Fly to visit my parents for long weekends 2x per year
- Family restaurant night every other week
- Weekly date night with my wife which necessitates us finally getting a regular babysitter
- Monthly dinner parties with friends (instead of most being in Summer)
- Convince friends to get together more often, or visit them where they live
- Spend more time working on hobbies. Specifically trying to cook new things (for the dinner parties!), brewing beer, and wood working
My list is currently incomplete and I noticed the full list includes a lot of one-off things I’d do immediately instead of putting them off until I had time and money (like closet organizers on the small end, or buying a rental house on the large end). The point is to really envision all of the things you’re not doing now that you’d do if you had your full retirement amount tomorrow.
Provided you didn’t attempt to burn through $10MM as quickly as possible and instead though of how you would legitimately live with that amount of money, the next step is to really look at what each of those things would cost you to do today.
The truth is that you probably need considerably less time and money to do the things you really want to do right now than you think. In fact, your dream retirement may not even require nearly as much money as you think.
This has been a really interesting exercise for me because I can easily afford to do a lot of the things I listed right now. I think the next step for me is to follow Ramit Sethi’s advice and think bigger. To really take each of these bullet points and expand them out a lot more. For instance what if my monthly dinner parties included a chef preparing the meals at my house? Or if that extra time on warm sandy beaches meant renting a beach house for a month each summer and working from there?
Overall I think this is a great exercise to answer the question of what you are retiring to, and look for areas where positive lifestyle creep may really improve your life.
Freed by 50 