Who Is Retiring?

Health care costs will prevent me from retiring anytime soon, even if my savings are enough. (I am an American in the USA and emigration would be impossible for my family.)

Maybe, its somewhat appealing, but it's complicated. I guess I could definitely afford to retire, if I budgeted carefully, and lived in a modest cost of living location.

The thing is, I don't mind working per se, and the social, teamwork, learning/challenge aspects can be nice. I just don't need all the BigCo corporate bs, politics, agile, performance review, 80 hr week stuff. It's a pity there doesn't seem to be any such thing as a chill job with chill people any more.

I think a lot of "I'm retired" is just wealth signaling. I recently lost a 94 year old buddy who was working and curious until the end. No one wants to party with the "I'm retired" guy when that's all he has going on.

I'll prob always do side projects even when retired, since I am really interested in AI projects. But I'll work for myself at my remote cabin with starlink, garden, and raising some dogs. Cheaper cost of living too.

2025 will hopefully be the year I choose to retire, at 38, and $6M saved up in liquid assets (very boring index funds).

My tricks will be:

- Living modestly. I never spent more than $50-60k a year in my life even while living in Silicon Valley and traveling internationally a few times a year. I plan to keep it that way, it will probably go up a little bit if I have to pay for my own healthcare on the exchange.

- Traveling extensively but to cheap destinations and off season.

- I am also a dual citizen US/EU so if the US healthcare situation becomes too wild (e.g. ACA gets repealed) I can get universal healthcare in my home country, which is “free” (in quote because in order to get into the healthcare system there I would need to become a resident, which comes with a substantially higher tax on dividend/capital gains than US, but that’s still an infinitely better deal than the US healthcare situation).