My Mom recently told me a story about myself that I completely don’t remember, but SPOILER ALERT: I’ve always been this way y’all. Apparently my dreams of retirement were not born out of frustration after job hopping once a year and finding more ways that traditional work is incompatible with the life I want to lead. Here’s the proof. This is an interaction between 10 year old me and my uncle:
Uncle: What do you want to do when you grow up?
10 Year Old Me: Retire.
Uncle: No – I mean what do you want to do as a career? What are your goals?
10 Year Old Me:…That is my goal.
Now joking aside I was (and still am) pretty sassy so that might have factored into my response, but what kind of 10 year old even thinks about or mentions retirement? Maybe one that had been seeing what jobs did to her Mom and hearing about how restrictive they were. Maybe someone that dreams of more. That was me at 10. It’s a wild thought, but I guess I’ve always been on this path – it just took a 15 year detour to start it 🙂 .
I have a similar origin story somewhere on my blog! I wondered a lot when I was younger: I one can live on $20,000, can’t one who makes $100,000 cover five years with one of work? Why is everyone working so long? I assumed this had been considered by everyone and I must be missing something about inflation or something, and I let it go for years. Til my brother showed me Mr. Money Mustache and it clicked!
Haha – you were way head of me. You had an approach – I just had the end goal in mind. I’d forgotten about the goal in my adult years too and it was also MMM who opened my eyes. It took a few tries, but after a couple of face punches I was back to trying to live my childhood dream 🙂
Hah. I used to say that I wanted to be independently wealthy. But I couldn’t figure out how to reverse engineer the necessary rich relative to leave me wads of dough.
Yeah that’s a tough one. Maybe a stolen identity of someone who does have a rich relative? I hear that might be illegal though…
I was similar as a child. I got my first job at 15 and I told my parents I was going to retire by 30. 15 years of working was plenty. I still agree with teenage me haha.
Haha yeah I don’t disagree with my goals at that time 😉 .