Thoughts on Retiring at Age 45

I retired at age 45. At age 49, I un-retired and started Advisia Financial Planning.

Starting in college, with a reading of The Millionaire Next Door, I knew I wanted to be financially independent as early in life as possible — and probably retire earlier than the typical age. That motivation carried over into nearly every financial decision as I started and grew a career: Where should we live? How much house should we buy? What should our savings rate be? What kinds of investments should we hold? How could I get equity in the firms I worked for?

After a 22-year career of saving, investing, careful lifestyle choices, and — most importantly — being an owner in the businesses I worked for, I was in a position to retire at 45.

Here are a few thoughts looking back on the past four years, and some insight into why I likely won't retire again for a long time.

Extra time doesn't automatically change your motivations and habits.

I had a picture of what my physical health would look like in retirement: all that free time would make me fitter, keep me eating only healthy home-cooked meals, and leave me stronger, with more energy and focus.

In reality, I had extended stretches of physical progress, but I always eventually reverted to old habits. Four years later, I was four years older, in roughly the same shape I started in, and carrying a few extra pounds for good measure. I did put some of the extra time toward physical activity — running, walking, hiking, occasional resistance training — but those were things I already enjoyed. And that was offset by eating more than I did when I was busy commuting and working, which I also, unfortunately, enjoy.

Where I did pick up new habits, it was in areas I was already naturally drawn to: reading, learning, walking, traveling.

Work is good.

A surprising discovery in early retirement was that I missed having a vocation. There are profound benefits to meaningful work that I didn't appreciate while I was in the middle of my career. That shouldn't have surprised me, given my Christian background — in the Bible, work is given by God as part of humanity's purpose (Genesis 2:15).

That doesn't mean a person should stay in a job that's a poor fit, or that a bad manager is somehow justified, or that there's anything wrong with working simply because the money is needed to provide. It means work itself is good, and it can bring purpose to our lives.

I tried filling my time with other worthwhile pursuits, but in the end, the vocation I'd spent two decades building called me back. That's part of why I started Advisia Financial Planning — to fulfill God's call to work in a vocation. I plan to keep growing in this craft deep into life.

There are still constraints on your time — and that's not necessarily a bad thing.

As I approached early retirement, and especially during the decades of saving and investing with it in mind, I daydreamed about a wide-open schedule. Two things interrupted that daydream.

First, not working didn't fully open up my schedule. There were still real constraints on my time: my wife's schedule, my kids' schedule (the school day is surprisingly short), household chores, church and volunteer commitments, and intentional time with family and friends.

Second, those constraints turned out to be mostly a good thing. The first few months of early retirement genuinely felt like a vacation — the open days were wonderful. But soon a desire for daily purpose grew, and those "constraints" became the productive structure of daily life.

Time is precious.

My fear going into this was that I'd look back and feel I'd wasted the extra time I'd been given. There are things I thought I'd do that I didn't, but I don't regret how the time was spent. Still, I'm four years older than when I retired — and more significantly, my children are four years older.

Life moves fast, and the older I get, the more I appreciate the passage of time and want to use it fully. "Don't waste your life" is good advice. It's also easier said than done.

I sort of missed commuting.

This one surprised me. In the years before early retirement, I had a roughly hour-each-way commute to a workplace outside the area I considered my community. It slowly drained me. At best, it was a necessary inconvenience for working at a quality firm in a role I enjoyed; at worst, it was steadily draining my drive, creativity, and happiness. When COVID pushed us into working from home, I got to experiment with life without a commute — morning and evening walks and runs replaced soul-crushing time in the car. We eventually made a slow return to the office, but by the time I retired a couple of years later, the commute was a thing of the past.

When I was setting up Advisia Financial Planning, an early question was whether it would be a fully virtual firm with no outside office, or whether it would have a physical space that was part of its identity. For several reasons — face-to-face client meetings, a productive place to work, a clean separation between business and personal life — I chose to rent an office and spend most of my time working in person.

Which means I now have a (short) commute. And surprisingly, I see that as a good thing. It gives me structured time to transition between work and the rest of life — time to listen to a book or a professional podcast, to think, to pray.

If you're commuting to and from a job you value, in a place with purpose, a commute can be a genuinely good thing. A short commute is obviously better than a long one — I think that length was a major contributor to my dissatisfaction before — so it's worth making one work financially if you can. The ideal commute is probably a walk or a bike ride. Unfortunately, where I currently live, walkable office space is hard to come by. Someday.Column 1 Content