“But, wouldn’t owning your own micro-brewery make you the happiest man alive,” you might reply?  (I mean seriously, what man wouldn’t want their own brewery?)  Why wait?  If you know you want to do something eventually, why wouldn’t you just go ahead and do it?  Tomorrow has a nasty habit of never coming.

But I Can’t Do That Right Now!

How do you know?  Have you tried?  What’s the worst that could happen?  It may not be as bad as you think.  What exactly are you afraid of?  Poverty?  Billions of people around the globe survive and thrive on less than your worst-case-scenario even if everything blows up in your face.  Starting over isn’t all that bad because using what you’ve (just) learned, you can climb back towards the top pretty quickly.  Every failure gets you closer to success.

When it comes right down to it, you have far less to lose than you think you do.  A job you probably don’t like, a car you bought for the good gas mileage, and a house that probably isn’t your dream home is the most you stand to lose, if you’re like most Americans.  Big deal?  You could get those back in matter of years (if not sooner) if you had to.  You lose very little by failing.  Oh, but those “what if I’d done…” questions will bug the crap out of you for the rest of your life.  Count on it.

Mitigating The Risk Of Failure

Fortunately, living your dream needn’t be an all-or-nothing endeavor.  Some, like Tim Ferriss of Four Hour Work Week fame, are perfectly content with the constant threat of financial collapse (they may deny it, but deep down they are).  I applaud that quality in a human being, but  me being me, I’m a bit more conservative than that.  If I fail, I only want to fall halfway down the ladder.  Call it a cheap insurance policy (much cheaper than auto insurance, at least).

Ferriss calls them muses, Frugal Dad calls them side hustles, and I say call them whatever the hell you want to call them, so long as they pay the bills.  The 40-hour-per-week, 40 year career is dead as a doornail, or at least it should be.  My generation (35 and younger) are bound to live a volatile life as far as work goes.  Where many decry the loss of the 30-year company man (those people tend to lack imagination), I applaud it.  Why not work for a year or two on a project you enjoy and then, 2 years later and just when you’re beginning to lose interest, take a 6 month mini-retirement?  Or maybe just spend a month or two at home working on more sources of alternative income between contract jobs?  These income streams will pay your bills when you aren’t working regularly, and maybe even fund construction and see you through the early lean months of that new brew-pub you’ve been dreaming of.  It’s easier than you think.

Alternative Income Resources

I’ve opted to go the online income route, but there are many roads to Jerusalem, including investment income (if you have sufficient capital, this is by far the lowest-maintenance way to go), speaking gigs, freelance writing gigs you can do from anywhere with an internet connection, freelance web design, and virtually limitless other ways to make a buck without holding down a traditional job.  Here are some resources to get you started.

• Problogger – If your goal is to make money blogging, this is your first stop.  It’s where I started.
• 10 Ways To Earn Extra Income by Dough Roller
• 50 Resources To Raise Your Income by My Super-Charged Life.  Everything from boosting your investments, to negotiating a higher salary at your job, to home business ideas.
• 40+ Alternative Income Ideas And Resources by Moolanomy

Why I Want To Retire Early

Simply put, where most people see early retirement as the freedom to do nothing, I see it as the freedom to do anything. The true goal, then, is financial independence. It doesn’t mean I won’t choose to work on a part-time or even full-time basis, it just means I’ll only do work I enjoy and will have the ability to leave any job that wasn’t personally satisfying without having to consider the practical financial consequences. And I don’t have to wait until I’m middle-age to get there.

Once retired, I will travel. I will take contract jobs for projects that interest me and move on to other projects when the contract expires. I will exercise diligently. I will learn foreign languages. I will write about my experiences around the world (a travel blog, perhaps?). I will blog (and perhaps even earn some non-passive income). In short, I will do everything in life I wish I could do now but for some reason am unable to accomplish. Or at least, that’s the plan.

How I Will Make It Happen

I will formulate a full-fledged early retirement plan in the near future, but the basics of it will boil down to three main points:

1. I will live well below my means – I will have to save and invest a minimum of 1/3 of my pre-tax income in order to retire by 40 (or better yet, 35). More is better, of coure, but 1/3 is an absolute minimum to make this a realistic goal.
2. I will continue cultivating alternate income streams – I have had a fair amount of success the past few years creating a nice online income via blogging and, to a lesser extent, niche mini sites. I will continue growing these income sources until they exceed that of my day job, at which point I will consider managing my online business full-time.
3. I will invest for income – Retiring early necessarily reduces the amount of capital you have to work with since you don’t have as much time to accumulate it. While my focus will continue to be capital appreciation for the foreseeable future, at some point before semi-retirement I will need to figure out how to generate more than the traditional 3% yield from my portfolio. Whether this means dividend-paying stocks, rental real estate, or something else I don’t yet know.