Why strive for FIRE?

Why should you escape the rat race early? Only you can truly answer that question. For me, I enjoyed some things about my paid employment, but I did not find it to be at all fulfilling. I probably enjoyed around 80% of my job, but hated the other 20%. The biggest problem of all was that employment took up nearly all of my time.

Many people will tell you that they dislike their job, but they would be bored without it. Again, this isn’t a reason not to strive for financial independence. Of course, you may always choose to continue as an employee even if you are not reliant on the monthly pay cheque. Even some lottery winners do so (but not nearly as many as claim they would before winning).

Even when I wasn’t in the office at weekends, which was far from being every weekend, I was constantly fielding an alarming number of phone calls, emails and text messages. However, my real reason for escaping the rat race was to focus on things that were more important to me such as travel and spending time with family. The motivation will differ for each of us.
Since being freed from the shackles of full-time work, I’ve worked for a short time as a volunteer on the Hurricane Katrina disaster relief, taken an amazing 6 months to travel the world, and spent 3 months in a yoga retreat. I’m eternally grateful that I have been able to do these things. Travel was a major pull factor for me.

I was fortunate in that I realised at a young age that the corporate dream we had been sold was unsatisfactory. I looked at the people who were in the roles and positions I was supposed to be aspiring to and considered whether they looked fulfilled, happy and rich. Most of them didn’t look to be where I wanted to be 20, 30 or 40 years down the track.

Some of my friends and male colleagues who went on to become accountancy firm partners bemoaned that they were actually worse off than they had been before they reached their dream roles. They were expected to buy cripplingly expensive houses in Sydney and cars befitting their positions, their wives wanted to give up work and have numerous children, and the government stripped them of half of their pay packets through taxes before they could even think about paying the mortgage. They talked as if they were caught in some kind of a trap. I guess in many ways they were.

If you want to achieve financial freedom and be young and wealthy, an important step in achieving this is to know exactly why you want to reach these goals and to have a detailed plan for what you will do with your wealth. It is a valuable idea to visualise very specifically where you want to be if you know where you are headed, then you can take specific steps towards your goal. It is sometimes said that if the why is strong enough, then the how will take care of itself.