vand wrote:SalvorHardin wrote:I retired in 2003, age 39, but I never followed any FIRE promoter. From what I've seen, the vast majority aren't fully retired. They and/or their spouse may have a part-time job, or they're making money from their FIRE advice.
Can we ask how you do managed to do this? was it through real estate?
It was through shares. I got lucky with work, which gave me a lot of spare cash to invest (I had been investing in the stockmarket since the early 1980s). I live cheaply as I'm single (not divorced), no children and here in rural Somerset house prices used to be very cheap. I could have easily gone back to work, maybe as a teacher (degrees in Maths and Physics, which are always in demand), so it wasn't too tough to decide to try retirement.
On the assets side: My income rose dramatically in the late 1990s and early 2000s as the demand for anyone with Actuarial skills soared to sort out the pension mis-selling mess. Importantly, unlike many people that I worked with, I didn't acquire any expensive spending habits to absorb the extra income.
Most of my excess income went into the stockmarket, first into several Warren Buffett wide moat shares and later in small oil explorers (E&P). I avoided the dotcom boom and bust. Then in the early 2000s the Oil E&P sector took off (Soco is a name well known to many who were on TMF back then) and I rode that wave for several years. I had made 24 times my total investment in Soco, when I largely sold out in 2008.
Why retire: in 2003 the pension misselling review finished. My net income would have fallen by at least two-thirds as there was no demand for pension review Actuaries, who had gone down a career dead end. I was offered several jobs, all in Central London, but I fancied a break.
When I retired I wasn't 100% certain that I had enough, but I would have if the previous couple of years worth of gains in oil E&P shares were broadly repeated. It turned out I was more than okay. Mentally I fully retired in a hotel in Munich when on holiday in 2005, after seeing that my oil E&P shares had gone up by over £100,000 in the previous week (my best ever weekly gain, back then). The following week, when I returned to the UK, I started diversifying out of E&P.