In 2015, at the ripe old age of 32, I was promoted to the position I’d been striving for since I decided to make construction a career. I bought a nice home in a nice part of town that same year. My wife also achieved success in her job, rising through the ranks from receptionist to become an HR manager. Things were good. Things were better than good, they were great. Life was great. The American dream was being dreamed.

Except I began to notice that the more success I achieved at work, the more restless I became. The busier I became, the more stressed out I was. The more arguing I had to do with subcontractors at work, the more problems I had to have answers to. The more responsibility and higher pay at work, the more time I spent away from my loved ones.

Commute

My daily drive to and from work is roughly 3 hours total. That adds up to 780 hours, or 32.5 days a year on the road. And this is a grueling, 10 mph stop and go commute. All this just to get to work.

Commuting 3 hours in traffic everyday gives you some time to reflect on your life. During this alone time I began to question if I could keep up this grind for the next 30 years. I began to question if I was happy at work. If maybe what I’d worked so hard to achieve hadn’t been what I wanted once I’d arrived.

Was this really it?

This endless circle of giving up the best hours and years of my life to my job in exchange for money to pay my bills? And to top off the stress of my job, I have a brutal commute that only gets worse as the population grows.

None of it seemed like happiness. Every day on the way home I would think to myself: Was this really the best I could do with the short amount of time I have on this earth? There has to be another way.

Work

I joined the Navy out of high school. After I got out in the summer of 2004, the plan was to go to college in the fall. That was the plan. Sometimes making money gets in the way. My father offered me a job for the summer, as a laborer in commercial construction. This was a good chance to pay off some bills and get some cash saved up before I started school. So I accepted.

I hated the work. I moved smelly bathrooms around the job, emptied trash, swept, and chipped concrete till my hands were numb and head throbbed. The other trades treated me like a second class citizen on the job. After I proved myself a little bit, the company I worked for offered me a chance to switch over to the carpenters union, and so began my career as a 1st period apprentice making $19 an hour back in 2005.

Being a carpenter suited me better than being a laborer. Yes, it was still hard work, actually harder physically: I had to pack around lumber and formwork and climb, but I was actually building things, making good money, and most importantly having fun. They also paid me for my overtime, something the Navy never did. I was 22 on that first job. We were building a high rise, and I was having a blast. Up early in the morning hanging off the side of the building like a little monkey, I’d wonder how I’d lucky I’d been to have found such an adrenaline producing job, all the while making more money than anyone else I knew at the time. So I decided to stay in the union. College in my family would have to wait for the next generation.

The things we did (and still do) were so dangerous and complex that I found myself struggling to explain exactly what I did for a living to people who weren’t in construction. It wasn’t the typical carpenter things you think of; like building a wood framed home or hanging cabinets. We were forming up decks for concrete pours–a floor every four days, flying things around with a giant tower crane, jumping massive core wall systems up the building. I was in love with this work. My body healed easy and I was eager to learn. I loved that everyone pulled their slack and those who didn’t were laid off. It was the opposite of the Navy where there are so many lazy people who don’t do shit to help out because they know they can’t be fired.

Becoming a superintendent looked so glamorous and it immediately became my goal. They looked so happy all of the time. And why wouldn’t they be happy? They drove nice company trucks. They didn’t get dirty. When it rained they went into their warm dry offices and ran the job from their desk. Big commercial jobs looked so utterly chaotic to the uninitiated, but these guys were the calm in the storm, they knew exactly what was going on, and had all the answers. I wanted to be the guy with the answers.

In the fall of 2015, I was hired on as an assistant superintendent with the large company I’d spent the majority of my career with. I went salary and got out of the Union for a few years (eventually I would go back in the union as a super for my pension). Not only had I risen up to run the concrete scope, but I’d somehow managed to convince work I could run all of the other subcontractors that come with building a big commercial job. I became the General Contractor superintendent. Suddenly I was in charge of concrete superintendents nearly twice my age, people I’d once worked under. Those guys now come to me with questions. And I have the answers.

The FIRE Seeds

In 2010 I got married. Our wedding was a frugal one, and small, only 20 close friends and family attended. We thought a big wedding probably served others more than ourselves, and we selfishly wanted to use our saved up money for our honeymoon. I convinced my wife that we should take an extended honeymoon, rather than one expensive locale and 5 star hotel for a few days. She agreed, though reluctantly at first.

We traveled for months until we had barely enough to get home.

When we got back, we found we loved traveling for long periods of time so much, that we did it again a year later. We moved into her parent’s house and saved up aggressively for the next trip. We worked and put everything we could into a savings account. Everyone thought we were crazy for not saving for a home or buying new cars, but we had a goal and a passion and nothing could shake it from us. This year of frugality at the in-laws was 2011.

We took the year 2012 “off”. A gap year if you will.

In 2013, we returned from our travels, having run out of all of our money from a year abroad. We promptly had a baby girl the first few months back.

We bought a home in 2015.

Had another baby in 2017.

And for a few years I thought this was just the way it had to be:

Commute. Work. Commute.

Come home in a daze and try to get the most out of our 2-3 waking hours with our daughters. Repeat.

During this haze, during rare down times, we would watch the shit out of Anthony Bourdain RIP and House Hunters International and devoured any travel food show we came across. All the while reminiscing of those good free times travelling the world. We dream talked of possibly quitting and finding jobs overseas…the only problem is we both don’t have degrees. Nearly all international jobs and work visas require degrees.

Returning To Our Roots

All this time we never considered the idea that we could return to our roots. Aggressively save. Then quit our jobs…again, just like we did twice before, but this time we’d save enough to be free from the rat race forever.

The COVID-19 lock down was the straw that broke it for me. Never before had I felt so helpless. My industry was deemed essential and so I had to go to work during the early weeks of shutdowns. Which at the time felt like a giant mistake. All of upper management at my company went into compliance with the shelter in place order and worked from home, including the leader of my project team.

Those of us who couldn’t work from home had to report in to work everyday. I’d never felt so helpless and expendable in those early days of the lock down. Looking back on it, I should have just been grateful that I had work available to me, while so many have, and are still suffering with income loss. In those early days of the lock down it felt as if the sky was falling. Panic was thick in the air. San Francisco became a ghost town. And I was angry my company was forcing me run their jobs and expose myself to this scary virus, while the higher ups were safe at home, and other companies in my industry voluntarily closed down.

While all of this was going on my company conducted mass layoffs and cut our pay. It wasn’t like I could start sending out my resume. They were paying me well…better than I could possibly get at another company. So I was trapped. The golden handcuffs were as real as ever.

It was this feeling of complete dependence on my employer that I despised. It’s something I never want to feel again.

So yes, I want to retire in 7 years when I have enough saved up that my investments can passively fund my annual expenses. 25 times my annual expenditure of 80k a year.

For those of you reading who are already on the path to financial independence, or have achieved it, I’d love to hear what it was that that led you to finally take the plunge? Was there a single moment?