In April I quit my job to spend more time with my 2½-year-old daughter. I don't have another full-time job lined up and don't plan to work full-time in the near future. I like being productive so I'll work part-time on stuff I enjoy, when I feel like it.
Let me tell you: the summer has been amazing so far. On the drive home from a week at Waskesiu, instead of feeling back-to-work anxiety I felt serenity, gratitude, and peace.
This post is not a flex. I want to share the strategy I've followed for people who are curious but may be too afraid to ask. I believe that nearly anyone - and especially couples - can leave full-time work behind after about 15 years of using this strategy if they choose, whether they're starting at 25, 35, or 45.
The simple and obvious requirement is a substantial financial safety net. The term of reference is "financial independence" or "FI". But how can one get there?
Here are the 11 principles I've followed in my 15 years post-university:
- (Optional) Be lucky
- (Optional) Have an amazing partner and share a financial philosophy
- Track your net worth
- Avoid debt
- Be frugal (but not cheap)
- Pay yourself first
- Invest in low-cost index funds
- Get good at what you do
- Avoid lifestyle inflation and pay yourself a lot more
- Do this all long enough to acquire "FU Money"
- Leave work on your own terms
I'll expand on each of these and link to some of my favourite resources below.
1. Be lucky
I acknowledge the (unfair) role of privilege and family advantages. Not everyone is afforded these opportunities and not everyone is equally lucky.
I was lucky to:
- Be born in Canada
- Have a comfortable middle-class upbringing
- Have some good financial role models early in life
- Have an early interest and inclination for math and savings
- Have almost all of my university degree paid for (some scholarships, mostly parents) and live at home for most of my degree
- Enter the workforce at a favourable time, place, and profession (2010, Saskatoon, mining industry)
- Grow up and fall in love in a low-cost-of-living city
Recommended listening: I had lots of luck but it's not everything. The ChooseFI podcast is full of case studies of people who achieved financial independence (or are on the path) in all kinds of life situations that were way, way harder than mine.
2. Have an amazing partner and share a financial philosophy
Before Robyn and I got married we created a shared financial philosophy, plans, and goals in a Google Doc. At least, as best we knew them in 2012. We covered separate vs. shared accounts (we deployed a mix), how we allocated and spent money, attitudes towards mortgages/debt/financing, investing, insurance, wills, and backup plans.
It helped articulate our mutual roles and laid out the "rules of the road." It set us up for extremely high mutual trust when it came to finances.
Our roles are complimentary: Robyn is amazing at finding the best value for most expenses like groceries, clothing, and travel. I love the big picture stuff, (index) investing, and account management.
Robyn is an incredible life partner. I'm writing in the first-person "I," but what I've achieved is only possible thanks to us working as a team and making decisions together.
Looking back at our philosophy document 13 years later, the fundamentals have not changed.
Book recommendation: The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel helped me see how other people think about finances.
3. Track your net worth
I started tracking our net worth systematically in 2017 and wish I started earlier. To see debt disappearing and net worth increasing over time creates powerful positive reinforcement that you're making progress.
No fancy tools are needed; a simple Google Doc or Sheet will do. Simply track all assets and liabilities and sum them up. Make a calendar reminder to do it at the same time every year. I do it when I file taxes.
4. Avoid debt
I mean really avoid debt. In our 2012 philosophy document we wrote, "avoid debt all costs (mortgage excepted)".
Robyn and I had small student loans upon finishing university (add this to the "lucky" list) but paid them off within a year.
We have only ever paid cash for cars. Except for one single late payment, we have never carried credit card debt or otherwise paid interest.
We bought our first home in 2013 for $362k. We'd been out of school for ~3 years and had $100k saved for a down payment.
The mortgage was $262k and we aggressively paid that down, doubling every bi-weekly payment (from $700 to $1400) to directly attack the principal. We also had the option to pay 10% ($26k) of the principal annually, which we did most years. The result was our home was fully paid off in the spring of 2017, before our first 5-year mortgage term was up.
Paying down the mortgage was mathematically the wrong decision in the era of low interest rates and booming markets. Conventional wisdom says we should have put that money into the stock market and we'd be way ahead. However, paying off the house was emotionally the right decision. During peak COVID uncertainty, we were not worrying about our home, nor did we worry about post-COVID interest rate hikes.
Blog recommendation: News Flash: Your Debt is an Emergency!! on Mr. Money Mustache.
5. Be frugal (but not cheap)
I've never had expensive hobbies. As a teenager and young adult, all I needed was an electric guitar, a computer, and an Xbox. Except for a phase with records, I've never collected anything.
We love reading and have an informal goal of trying to "pay" our property taxes with library withdrawals, e.g., comparing the total value of materials borrowed every year to our city tax bill.
Lately we have been buying used clothing on Poshmark, and almost everything our daughter wears and uses is from Facebook Marketplace. We shop at Superstore and Costco and fill our freezer when stuff is on sale. We moved to Lum Mobile when that became available in Saskatchewan and our phone expenses are (each) about $400 per year.
We cut cable years ages ago and pay for "just enough" internet. Every once in a while we'll get a sports streaming subscription. Our primary bank is Tangerine.
It all adds up. The money saved on all the little stuff unlocks a high savings rate and guilt-free fun stuff like travel and eating out. We've been doing fewer excursions since our daughter was born, but we're ramping up again.
Our wants are calibrated low and this is great because if I don't want a cabin and a truck and a boat, I don't feel like I'm missing anything by not having them.
Tool recommendation: For the last year I've been using the free and open source Actual Budget to track our spending across accounts and credit cards. This helps visualize where money goes and we review it together monthly. Simply by monitoring spending we're on track to spend $2k less on groceries in 2025 than we did in 2024. Actual also helped me slash and optimize the small number of subscriptions I carry.
6. Pay yourself first
I've followed the classic Wealthy Barber advice of paying myself first, setting aside at least 10% of every paycheque since I read the book in late high school or early university. I was fortunate that a copy was in my parents' house.
Early on, the amount does not matter so much as building the habit of automatically saving on every paycheque. Since I was in high school, automatic saving has become an order of magnitude easier thanks to better banking technology.
Early on, the goal wasn't retirement or leaving work. It just seemed intuitively good to have a cash buffer. More on this in #10.
Book recommendation: The Wealthy Barber by David Chilton
7. Invest in low-cost index funds
Around 2007 I had saved enough money from summer jobs and, having just read the Wealthy Barber, I had a hunch I should invest it. But what should I invest in?
The RBC advisor talked me into a "moderate risk" mutual fund with a ~2% management expense ratio (MER). Of course, the impact of these fees would have flown completely over my head at the time.
In 2011 I read Andrew Hallam's Millionaire Teacher: The Nine Rules of Wealth You Should Have Learned in School and nearly flipped my lid over the investments that RBC had talked me into.
In this extremely readable and important book, Hallam lays out how financial advisors at Canadian banks make money through fees and commissions baked into the funds they steer customers into, and how index investing can generate better returns than the vast majority of human-managed funds at a fraction of the cost.
I immediately called RBC to switch to index funds. The first rep I talked to was aggressive and talked me out of it - I didn't have the confidence to win the argument. I ended the call, re-read a few key chapters, then called again and made the switch.
I'm not going to explain the mechanics of index investing - everyone should read Hallam's book to get the full explanation in a Canadian context - but I will share my costs (fees).
Using index investing, management fees on my investments plummeted from over 2% at RBC (and this is the about the rate on most actively managed funds) to about 0.13%.
If one has $1M invested in an actively managed fund at 2% MER that'll cost $20,000 per year, regardless of whether the investment goes up or down. $1M invested in my index fund mix (which is basically what Hallam laid out) would cost $1,300 per year. The amount of fees saved over 10 years is $187,000 and that doesn't even factor in growth, dividends reinvested, etc.!
Who can afford to be in high-MER managed funds!? Who can afford not to learn about this!?
Book recommendation: Millionaire Teacher by Andrew Hallam
8. Get good at what you do
I had great opportunities early in my career to work on tough projects, build experience, and get good in my field.
Lots of personal finance books focus more on frugality (no lattes!), savings (pay yourself first), and investment strategies (index funds), but few books emphasize earning more money in the first place.
The skills I built unlocked new growth opportunities and challenges and these always came with salary increases. This helped supercharge our savings rate (see #9).
When I quit my job in April of this year I honestly couldn't believe what I was getting paid after 15 years in industry. The imposter syndrome never quite goes away.
9. Avoid lifestyle inflation and pay yourself a lot more
As our investments grew and our earnings increased, we maintained our frugal ways and funneled more and more money into our savings.
We upgraded plenty of stuff around our home, did some small renovations, and travelled a bunch. I made some dumb purchases that I regret (luxurious theatre chairs for a cold and unfinished basement). But because we were both working, the Wealthy Barber's 10% pay-yourself-first rule seemed like a low bar. We often had the ability to save upwards of 50% of our pre-tax income.
The blog post linked below is another must-read resource. The "shockingly simple math" suggests that with a savings rate of 55%, you can "retire" in 15 years.
Note: I do not like the term "retired." I do, however, have ample runway to leave full-time work after 15 years of working, saving, and being frugal, picking up part-time work when I feel like it.
Blog recommendation: The Shockingly Simple Math Behind Early Retirement on Mr. Money Mustache. This is such an importance post; it articulates how one's progression towards financial independence is not actually income but spending. So: you don't need two engineers to achieve FI.
10. Do this all long enough to acquire "FU Money"
FU Money is a term I'm borrowing from author JL Collins. I am not throwing shade on any past employer!
Collins says FU Money is any amount that puts you in control of your own destiny for the phase of life that you're in. Early in his career, he saved up a few thousand dollars so he could backpack across Europe. After his employer denied his vacation request, his few thousand dollars were enough for him to say: "actually, I quit."
FU Money dollar amounts are completely contextual on your life situation, work prospects, expenses, and what you are trying to achieve. If you have enough resources to feel in control of your destiny, you have FU Money.
Robyn left her full-time job to go back to school in 2017, and when we looked at our balance sheet (and just having paid off our house), it was clear we shouldn't worry. We had FU Money to make that change. ~8 years later, we have enough for me to make this change.
Note: A less spicy term for FU Money-driven change is "fully funded lifestyle change."
Book recommendation: The Simple Path to Wealth by JL Collins. There are a few US-centric chapters that can be skipped, but the meat of this book is terrific and reinforces the principles of index investing.
Tool recommendation: To get fancy and stress-test the effect of your FU Money on your working situation, or see just how long you have to work, or compare a lifetime of renting to buying a home, or almost any other situation you can imagine, ProjectionLab and Adviice are two (subscription-based) platforms that enable complex scenario building, testing, and Monte Carlo simulations. Adviice is Canadian, but I've only used ProjectionLab (US-based, but functional for Canadians). The simulations and scenario testing helped me built confidence to leave full time work.
11. Leave work on your own terms
With a supportive partner, no debt, a frugal lifestyle, and "FU Money" I gave 2 weeks' notice to my employer in April. It was nerve-wracking. I had a great role and team and doubted if I was making the right decision right to the end. I don't like quitting.
But it was the right decision for me, right now. My leaders respected my decision and I left on good terms.
The safety net I (we) built made the process of quitting easy. When asked, "is there anything we can do to keep you?" I thought briefly about all the possible financial and non-financial perks - and my answer was a quick and honest "no."
A close friend of mine has run his version of this playbook a few times: saving a ton while working and long restorative breaks between roles.
Wrapping up...
In some ways I feel silly posting this: big deal, anyone can quit their job. But not everyone can quit their job completely debt-free without any pressure to return to full time work.
But I believe almost anyone can achieve this in 10-15 years, at any point in their careers, if they are disciplined and intentional. Almost anyone can avoid (or get out of) debt, live below their means, replace high-fee managed funds with low-cost index investing, get good at their craft (or change it), and increase their savings rate.
Which is why, despite the negative internal voice telling me not to publish, I wanted to share this strategy. It doesn't require being born rich, getting lucky with pot stocks or crypto, flipping houses, or picking and micromanaging individual stocks.
Where do you want to be in 10-15 years? Even if you want to work forever, wouldn't it be good to have FU Money, just in case?
What's next?
I'm going to take the rest of the summer off and spend lots of time with my daughter. She has definitely picked up on my positive vibes over the last couple months.
In the fall my goal is to line up some contracting and consulting work in areas of work that I love. The income will be nice but mostly I like staying busy and solving puzzles.
If anyone I know is reading this, whether you're an "out" or "closeted" personal finance geek, get in touch if you want to have a coffee. I love discussing this stuff, but don't lead with these topics in everyday conversation since these are not comfortable topics for everyone.
