Years ago, I read an account by an African-American woman who was working in finance. She had gone to a good university, had graduated with an MBA from Wharton, had gotten a good job. She was working extra-long hours, believing that that would put her on the map for promotions and salary raises. She felt she was following a script that she understood. In reality, she watched as various men in her professional world were promoted over her. She reported that it happened over and over again, and then she had an important insight: Being considered for promotions or other goodies wasn’t a reward for meritorious employee behavior. Those decisions were made on golf courses on the weekends, or in favorite bars and restaurants on weekday nights. There was a whole game going on, and this woman didn’t have the first idea about what the rules were. She had been operating with an entirely different playbook.
I’m feeling that a bit as I dip my toes into the grown-up financial world. There’s a vocabulary and a rulebook that might as well be written in Hittite cuneiform for all I know and understand about it.
But I persist.
I’m currently reading some books, checking out some blogs, watching some YouTube videos created by youngish people who made a lot (or in some cases, just enough) dough in about five years or so, then retired. Retired in these cases means they still often work, but they don’t need to work to survive financially. The model is useful to me because I favor the short timeline, not so I can retire early but so that I can retire ever.
One of these guys is Grant Sabatier, who retired at 30 after making over $1 million in five years. One of Sabatier’s short YouTube videos is called “Stop Thinking Time Is Money,” his point being that time is much more valuable than money AND if you’re serious about all this, you need to find ways to make $$ that are not simply selling your time for money. Basically, the only way I’ve earned money in my life is by selling my time, so this is a radical and intriguing idea to me.
At one point in the video, Sabatier says he recently checked his accounts and found that he had made more than $2000 in the last 24 hours without working a single hour. He continues, citing Warren Buffett, who apparently makes over $1.5 million every hour, even when he’s asleep.
My goals, at least initially, are more modest. Given the amount of ground I have to cover in terms of accumulating enough to retire in 10 years, I am very attracted to the idea of earning while I’m off in Dreamland. My teeny weeny, itty bitty, little Roth IRA is currently invested in stock and bond index funds and so I earn a very little bit there without working for it, although it always feels as likely that it could disappear as grow while I am asleep.
Still, I consider it a good exercise. All of these early retirement dudes cite two avenues to earn while you sleep, one being investing, the other being creating business opportunities that, once established, require little or no further input. Investing requires making a shift from wage slave to capitalist, or more accurately in my case, continuing to work as a wage slave while adding in a little side hustle as an embryonic capitalist. Capitalists, of course, are those who own the means of production AND make money from the labor of others. Someone who earns money from investments in the stock market is earning because of other people’s labors, other people’s consumption.
So I hope to grow my itty bitty retirement savings and invest that. But I’d also like to launch a side hustle—low stakes here; this is just an experiment—to test these waters. I’m considering writing short, targeted eBooks for Kindle or creating digital downloads on Etsy (I would make horticultural-themed visuals for others to incorporate into their collage or mixed media artworks). In either case, my upfront work would be uncompensated, but then I’d have a product that exists, available whenever (if ever) someone wants to buy it.
Honestly, there’s no way I can simply translate the experiences of these early-retirement youngbloods directly into my own life. My particulars are too particular: being a woman; being olderish; being someone with a set of responsibilities that are a foundational given; being someone who is not afraid to do things that are hard, but also being aware that some percentage of these young dudes’ financial triumphs were due—I strongly suspect—to the bottomless, turbo-fueled energy of youth. I no longer have that, but I do have an awful lot of life experiences, and I am able to strategize and curate my energy. So while I can’t do a direct transfer from their lives to mine, I can glean inspiration and ideas that I might be able to tailor to my unique circumstances.
So the playbook isn’t quite gibberish to me, but this whole project requires a very specialized kind of translation and improvisation for me to make these ideas and actions my own.
Here’s Grant Sabatier on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CozVXyli824