Last year I lost one of my closest friends from high school. He was 49.
Not an illness that gave us time to prepare. Just gone. The kind of thing that arrives without warning and stays with you differently than other losses — because 49 is not old, and because you went to school with this person, and because somewhere in your mind you had always assumed there would be more time.
I have thought about him often since. About what he did with his time. About what he postponed. About the things he was saving for later that never arrived. And I have thought, more than I am comfortable admitting, about my own version of the same question.
Bill Perkins opens Die With Zero with a simple, uncomfortable observation: most people optimise their entire financial lives to have money available at the end. They save carefully, invest patiently, defer gratification consistently — and then discover that the life they were saving for requires a version of themselves that the years have already changed. The energy is different. The health is different. The children are grown. The parents are gone. The moment the money was being saved for has already passed.
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"The only reason to have money is to be able to have experiences. You should be investing in experiences when you are young enough to enjoy them." — Bill Perkins, Die With Zero (2020) |
My friend did not die rich or poor. He died at 49. The calculation was interrupted. There was no later.
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I want to talk about money. But not in the way money is usually discussed. Not returns, not allocations, not optimisation. I want to talk about what money is actually for — because I think most people, including me for most of my career, have had the answer slightly wrong.
Financial independence, to me, does not mean retiring to a beach. It does not mean never working again. It means something much simpler and much harder to put a number on:
Not having to ask anyone for permission.
Not needing to report to someone about where you are going. Not asking for a week off when you need to think. Not filling in a form when your child is sick and you want to be home. Not setting an alarm for a Monday you do not want to face. Not planning a trip around someone else's approval. These are not dramatic freedoms. They are small, daily, completely ordinary — and for most working adults they are not available. We trade them, every single day, for the salary.
I am not saying the salary is not worth it. For most of my career it was. But I am saying that what we are actually buying with financial independence is not luxury. It is permission. And permission, once you have lived without it for twenty years, turns out to be worth more than almost any material thing money can buy.
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Now the number. Because it exists whether we look at it or not, and most people do not look at it because they are afraid of what it will say.
I came across a video by a former McKinsey consultant — precise, German, direct — who decided to calculate in public what most people in that world never say out loud. What does financial independence actually cost? His number for a comfortable life in Europe: €10,000 per month. His method: the 4% rule.
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The 4% Rule Based on historical market returns, you can withdraw 4% of a diversified investment portfolio per year with a high probability of never running out of money. The reverse calculation: multiply your desired annual spending by 25. €10,000/month × 12 × 25 = €3,000,000 |
Three million euros. Then he asked who actually gets there as an employee. His answer: partners at major consulting and law firms, senior doctors, a handful of C-level executives who made it to the top and stayed long enough without a divorce, a lawsuit, a serious illness, or a restructuring ending the run early. A very small number of people. Lucky, skilled, and uninterrupted.
For most professionals — including very successful ones — €3 million through employment savings alone is Everest.
Morgan Housel puts his finger on why:
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"The hardest financial skill is getting the goalpost to stop moving. If expectations rise with results there is no logic in striving for more because you will feel the same after putting in extra effort." — Morgan Housel, The Psychology of Money (2020) |
Most people do not fail to reach financial independence because they did not earn enough. They fail because the lifestyle expanded with the income. The €5,000 per month life became a €10,000 per month life, which means the goalposts moved at exactly the same speed as the runner. The distance never closed.
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One more thing the traditional calculation assumes: that capital remains the scarce resource. In a world where AI automates knowledge work, trust, judgement, and reputation may prove more durable than any portfolio — and those are built differently than a brokerage account. Worth building both.
There are two camps with different answers to the Everest problem.
The minimalist position — Ryan Nicodemus and The Minimalists — says most of what we spend money on does not make our lives better. Cut aggressively. Live on €2,000–3,000 per month. The portfolio needed drops to €600K–900K — genuinely achievable for many more people. The trade-off: a deliberately smaller life.
Fat FIRE says do not compromise. Earn more, save more, arrive at the full number. The trade-off: you spend your most energetic years building toward a number you might reach in your late fifties — by which point, as Perkins would note, some of what you were saving for is no longer available to you in the same way.
My honest position is the middle. Never cut core experiences and genuine necessities — the holiday with young children, the meal with people you love, the health that keeps you functional. Cut aggressively everywhere else. The status expenses. The subscriptions you do not use. The lifestyle inflation that happened automatically without anyone choosing it. That middle path lands at something between a hill and a mountain — not Everest, but not deprivation either.
And one more reality the calculations never account for: the world does not stay still while you are building the number. A pandemic, 8% inflation, a land war in Europe, trade wars, and a US administration that can move markets with a single post before breakfast — none of that was in anyone's spreadsheet. The 4% rule is a useful starting point, not a guarantee. Hold the number lightly. Keep a buffer. Do not retire the week after hitting it.
(The universe does not offer refunds. Unfortunately.)
My friend from high school did not make it to 50. I do not know what he was saving for later. I do not know what he postponed. But I think about him every time I am tempted to defer something that matters for a calculation that might not hold.
The goalpost only stops moving when you decide where it is. The number is closer than Everest. And later is not guaranteed.
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This week's insight Financial independence is not a retirement number. It is permission — to not ask, to not report, to not wait for approval. Calculate your actual monthly expenses honestly. Decide which version of the number is yours — Everest, the hill, or somewhere between. Then remember that the calculation assumes time you may not have. The goal is not to die with the most money. It is to use the money at the time in your life when it can actually do something real. |
If this landed, there is one piece every week at stillnavigating.com — honest writing about the stuck middle, from someone still in it.