By Dr. Leif Dahleen of Physician on Fire, WCI Network Partner
Browsing the Bogleheads forum, my eyes naturally gravitated to the thread titled “What is FI if you love your job?”
The short answer is that FI is financial independence. Nothing more, nothing less, and it doesn’t look any different if you love, hate, or feel indifferent toward your job.
The long answer is that after learning that the man asking the question is about 10 years away from FI and that the person or the job is quite likely to look and feel quite a bit different in 10 years, FI is a smart play for anyone. Quite a few nuggets of wisdom were dropped in the replies, and I added my two cents, as well. I think everyone should try to work toward financial independence, regardless of their current contentedness.
The flip side of that question is what do you do when you reach FI and still love your job? The good news is there are no rules that dictate you ought to retire once you have reached or surpassed FI. Vagabond MD has questioned the ethics of working past FI, but the notion that it is somehow unethical was soundly rejected.
Why might someone continue working beyond FI?
The Top 5 Reasons to Work After Becoming Financially Independent
#1 You Love Your Job
If you truly love your job and the knowledge that work has become optional hasn’t changed your mind, then, by all means, don’t change a thing.
If you love your job but can think of ways to make it better, take every step to make it so. You’ve never had more leverage than you do now since you can afford to walk away tomorrow.
If you love what you do for a living but aren’t in love with the particular job you’ve got, you can explore ways to do that work in a different manner. That might be doing it for a different patient population or a different employer, or it could mean taking your skills overseas on a medical volunteerism trip. Local free clinics often need volunteers to meet the community’s needs.
With FI, money is no longer your primary concern, but that doesn’t mean you can’t keep doing a job you love.
#2 Ease the Transition to Retirement
Maybe you don’t love your job, but you’re not ready and willing to go from working a demanding full-time job to having no job at all. Rather than slamming on the brakes to bring your career to a screeching halt, it might make more sense to downshift and continue your work at a more relaxed pace.
You might get lucky like me and be able to work part-time in your current job. Taking a job across town or in a new locale may be another option. If you have a practice that allows you to “sell your call,” you can just offer it all up and only work the shifts that no colleague snatched up.
Locum tenens can be a great option in this situation, particularly if you can be location independent. That’s how I started my career, and it could be a pretty cool way to wind down a career, too.
#3 Your Patients Need You
So, you can easily afford to retire and you have an inkling it would be good for you to step away, but you owe it to your patients to stick around. If you’re not there to care for them, who will step up to take your place? You spent decades building a practice. It’s not like you can turn off the lights and leave your patients and staff in the lurch.
It’s true that in a situation like this, you don’t just give two weeks' notice and say “Peace, out.” However, with some preparation, you may be able to coordinate a smooth transition.
Perhaps a young, enterprising physician will be interested in joining and eventually replacing you. A competing practice may be interested in an acquisition. Hospitals and private equity firms are increasingly buying up small practices.
While you may feel you’ve got no easy way out, that doesn’t mean you don’t have any way out. As my radiologist friend The Happy Philosopher says, “You are replaceable. Congratulations!”
#4 Your Life Needs Purpose
If you’ve reached FI at a relatively young age, you’ve probably done so by serving a worthy purpose of some kind. At a minimum, your job was worthy of a high income relative to your salary. And many of you have held a job in which you served the public and saved some lives.
If much of your life has been devoted to serving a singular purpose, letting that go may leave you as lost as the cast of Lost.
You may experience an initial euphoria and satisfaction from the initial combination of leisure, catching up on reading, cleaning out the garage and storage room, and actually watching Lost (which I have yet to do). But eventually, you may find your life lacks meaning if you’re not serving a bigger purpose.
The easiest way to fight that feeling is to keep working until you’ve identified another purpose you would rather serve that might give you more freedom and possibly an even greater sense of accomplishment than the purpose to which you’re currently devoted.
Until you figure out what’s next, keep working beyond FI. Early retirement can be bad for you and your health if you do it wrong.
#5 Fear
You understand the 4% rule, dialed in your asset allocation, oversaved, and planned for contingencies and redundancies. Still, you can’t stop asking “What if?”
It’s completely understandable. I say “you,” but I’m really talking about me. I don’t want to walk away from this lucrative position and regret it.
Ideally, you choose to leave when the likelihood of regret is in perfect balance between working too long and walking too soon. But if I’m going to err, I’d rather err on the side of caution and one more year. Leaving a little too late would leave me with a little too much money, which is a “problem” I can learn to live with.
After all, you never know when that extra money might come in handy. There are many ways FI can be derailed, and I don’t expect to fall prey to any of them, but . . . what if?
Healthcare costs keep rising. Did you know a fingertip injury could set you back over $1,500? That happened to me once! Somehow, my boys have managed to avoid the emergency department and have utterly failed to break a single bone, but knowing their father, I guarantee their good fortune can’t last.
Hopefully, I can make our monetary fortune last no matter how many bones we break or surgeries we require (the boys have each had a couple of those). I’m quite confident we’ve got enough now, but I can’t pretend a modicum of fear and insecurity didn’t play a role in my decision to continue working after reaching FI.
Honorable Mentions:
For health insurance: That stuff ain’t cheap!
Because everyone expects you to work: Life has a script. Follow it!
Charitable aspirations: You don’t need the money, but someone else does!
Do you continue to work despite having reached FI? Are there more reasons to keep yourself in the workforce? Comment below!
With the Covid mess, I considered hanging it up, and was at risk of not having a choice as I am, wait for it, unvaccinated just like my nurse wife. But that cloud passed, and I do like what I do. I have been FI for a while now, but why quit when I’m compensated well and my skills are still good? I make my own schedule which clearly helps. So if you like what you do and you maintain skills, why not? It keeps me engaged, my retirement funds continue to grow, and I do a lot of work others don’t want to do so there is good demand. I’ll keep going as long as I enjoy it and as long as I and others feel my skills have not eroded.
I’ll pick number two. This is in accord with surveys of physicians that suggest about half of us want to “step down” to part-time work in the transition to full retirement. It certainly can ease the transition.
I always find the “Your Life Needs Purpose” options to be amusing. If you have worked decades in Medicine/Surgery or other white coat professions, it is likely that you have fulfilled your purpose by the time you retire or step down…or one would hope.
It varies quite a bit, but most of my retired friends had been cobbling together a post-retirement purpose or focus for years prior to taking down the wall certificates.
Retirement timing, transitional specifics, and effects on ones self image are very individual and tend to evolve. I hope I’m right that I will have plenty of fulfilling things to do. First and foremost I’ll be trying not to die soon and hopefully for the subsequent twenty-five years.
I look forward to collecting social security at FRA (and my wife’s “half of mine” allotment too) for at least fifteen years. Even if they don’t fix social security and the benefit drops to 75%…that is $670,000. If they “fix” the system to allow us to collect our current proposed benefit, it is almost $900,000, both numbers with no COLA.
I’ll be spending a large share of my retirement time on pursuing continued health and functional longevity.
Another great read. I have written about this before both on my website and in response to a prior post written by Leif. I think commonly (myself included) we tend to put our jobs and our financial goals of financial independence into silos. Because of this we get into a situation where it feels like ‘one or the other.’ Oh you reached FIRE? Then retire! For many (certainly not all…especially after the pandemic) there are many more factors playing a role in the decision to retire, not always just the ability to financially.
My father was a dentist in a rural town. He practiced there for 40 years and recently retired. He had an incredible career. Similar to a point made in this article, he felt an obligation to his patients and didn’t want to ‘peace out’ overnight as he approached his retirement date. He made the transition slowly. This was great, but what I learned from my father’s retirement is that he only ever defined himself as a dentist. Because of this, when he retired (complicated by slowly progressive dementia) he did not know how to be anything other than a dentist. And since he really didn’t have the mental bandwidth to do that anymore, he could never see himself in another role. He was unwilling to try out new things. Even if that meant failure… thats ok! He has the time and finances to fail multiple times over! It has been really heartbreaking to watch him slowly wither away in his retirement without something to fill his time and passion.
I have learned that it is critical to retire ‘to something.’ For individuals lucky enough to retire and retain their health, having something to occupy your time is essential. Achieving FIRE is such an incredible goal… life altering really (financially and mentally speaking), but its important to still make sure you still feel a purpose to get up in the morning.
As always… great post. Stay motivated!
-The Motivated M.D.
I think you nailed a lot of the main points. I’ve given much thought to this, as I’m 63 and currently FI but working. I’m reducing my hours, and plan to get down to 5-10 hours a week in a year. I like my job, but want more time for other things. The income will allow me to avoid tapping into other resources for a few years, and in the meantime I’ll have more time for the many other pursuits that are important to me. I appreciated reading your description of my planned strategy!
Thanks for a thought-provoking post.
My financial planning software said “You can retire now!” Since that was many years ago, I must work because I want to, not because I need to. That’s a great position to be in and one I want all doctors to experience.
From the point of FI you have a lot of options to spend your time how you want to. I don’t think there are universal answers.
I work for many reasons. Some of them include:
Earning a paycheck (even when I don’t need it)
Intellectual challenges.
Structured day.
Pleasant work environment with people I like.
Good benefits.
Helping people.
Meeting new and interesting people every week while learning intimate details of their lives.
Identity as a respected professional.
Feeling comparatively affluent, blessed, and respected at work.
I worked too dang hard to get to where I am to give it up without a compelling reason.
Being a mentor to your doctors.
Lecturing at conferences.
Helping friends and relatives get into good specialists promptly.
Being able to pick my nurses and anesthesiologist for my surgeries.
Serving my own moral purpose of serving others.
My employer wants me to work. Referring doctors send to me. Patients want to see me. To stop all of that due to chronology or a calendar date seems silly.
I will continue for as long as I physically can. Or until I change my mind. HA!
Very educative post.
A whole lot of people think FI means not working again.
I can name about 5 more, such an underrated post. Too many are talking about HOW to attain FI, but not about WHAT happens after FI. I wrote a post a few months ago about why we can’t have a functioning economy where everyone retires. We already see, especially in retiree heavy areas alike Florida and Arizona, the lack of labor to cook their dinners and service their cars. Working to FI in a fun or passionate role is the key, and if you don’t need the money, you’ll become a favorite of local nonprofits!
I think I am weird. I really love biking, traveling, and so many other things. But I also really enjoy working. I am FI and have cut back my time at work, but I don’t think I want to stop for a while. I am at the age where retirement is reasonable, but I am having way too much fun with things exactly the way they are balanced right now. I have been around long enough to know that my concept of the right balance will continue to evolve.
Not that unusual. A survey I did a while back said that if they had the money, 33% of docs would retire today and 45% would cut back. if you’re already part-time but still working, you’re in the majority.
I keep hearing about retiring early being bad for your health, but when adjusted for if people were unhealthy before they retired, it seems this is bogus: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7307664/
Interesting.It’s true that bad health forces a lot of people into retirement though.