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This article originally appeared on Business Insider.
Nupur Dave thought the decision to retire at age 40 in 2022 was easy.
At the time, she was living in Bengaluru, India. She worked at Google’s Atlanta, Mountain View, and Bengaluru offices for 10 years. In addition to that, she has experience working in a start-up company, she is financially stable, and her company’s 9 to 5 shift is no longer on her own. She was sure it wasn’t for her.
“I quit my job on Friday,” Dave told Business Insider.
“By Monday evening, I was just crying,” she continued. “I had tears in my eyes because I realized that I needed to be with people.”
Coworking space wasn’t exciting
Dave when he worked at Google. Nupur Dave via BI
Dave was planning his retirement. She planned to write her third book, hang out with her old colleagues, and network with founders and artists coworking her space.
However, the reality of early retirement was quite different.
She quickly realized that she could no longer have the same relationships with her former colleagues.
“When I actually walked into the co-working space and sat down, I was struck by the loneliness of the co-working space. It was completely empty,” Dave said of his first day as a retiree.
She spent the next few weeks “hopping between coworking spaces.” Dave said some of the coworking spaces she visited were sold out, but others were empty as most were being used as placeholders for companies in remote areas. It is said that there was.
“I couldn’t make friends and I wasn’t inspired by the physical environment of a coworking space,” she said.
I was also afraid of being too independent.
Regarding his retirement, Dave said, “Even though people say, “It’s good to follow your own will,” it can be scary to be completely unrestrained.” “It felt like I was on a spacewalk.”
Savings and financial independence
On his last day at a financial services company, Dave stands in front of an early retirement ad. Nupur Dave via BI
Retiring at age 40 made Dave a member of the FIRE (Financial Independence, Early Retirement) community.
For her, the decision to retire early came from financial security.
Working for 11 years in the United States allowed her to accumulate savings that served her well in India, where the cost of living was low. When Dave left her job, she was making about $100,000 a year in San Francisco.
Before retiring, she worked with a financial advisor to make sure her savings were enough to cover her expenses and that her previous book and consulting sales would help pay her day-to-day bills. But the important part was her location.
“The whole idea of FIREing was made possible because I’m in India,” Dave said. “There’s no way I’d be fired in the U.S.”
“Everything is much more doable in India and you can maintain a luxurious lifestyle,” she added. Dave said she hires helpers to help with cooking and cleaning, which she said costs between $100 and $200 a month.
Challenges of early retirement
While Dave’s challenges in retirement were social in nature, some in the FIRE community chose to return to the corporate world for other reasons.
“Early retirement is not for everyone,” financial planner Jovan Johnson previously wrote in BI. He said people who plan to retire before the age of 60 are a minority of workers, and those keen to pursue that lifestyle should have a clear idea of what they will do after they retire. They wrote that people should be aware that that lifestyle can lead to isolation. , and create a passive income stream to make your money last.
Gwendolyn Mertz previously told Business Insider that she returned to her corporate job nine months after leaving her job. For her, it was an economic thing.
After tracking his spending and savings down to the penny, Merz retired at age 28 in northern Illinois. However, shortly after his retirement, he encountered an unexpected problem. She couldn’t access some of her savings tied to her retirement account, her side hustle didn’t bring in enough money, and her health insurance bills went up.
Michelle Jackson wrote in BI that she was once seduced by the FIRE movement, but realized she didn’t want to wait years to live her best life. She was in debt and professionally exhausted, so it didn’t make sense to invest more than 50% of her income.
As for Dave, her early retirement lasted four months.
Shortly after retiring, she secured a role as head of special projects at an electric vehicle infrastructure company in Bangalore.
“I work for a company now, but my goals are different,” Dave said. “It’s not about building a career or building wealth from it, it’s about meeting people every day and creating something like a predictable routine for yourself.”
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