Quick update if anyone is interested, plus a potential pillar 2 tip:
TL;DR: Pulled the trigger, feels like my best decision in at least a decade.
In more detail:
Pulled the trigger last year, a quarter or two later than I had originally planned, mainly thanks to tactical timing advice from a colleague and thanks to COVID-19. Thanks also for additional vesting stock options. Early retirement felt awesome from day 1.
Original plan was to enjoy life without work for a year or two before looking for enjoyable part-time work. I even successfully fenced off all the headhunting sharks who circle you even closer once they see that you left Hoolie. Siren-style they throw number-wise tempting offers at you, but you know it would be just more of the same, and you’d work for, say, Foolie, instead of Hoolie … or for some hip but actually unremarkable and overhyped FinTech startup with basically zero prospect of ever being cash flow positive (except for maybe getting acquired some day by a cash flow positive but dumb incumbent). Anyway, I digress.
About a month after I left I came across this interesting part-time job ad somewhere between IT and finance (professional asset management mainly for institutional investors) in a very small company (< 20 folks). Sat on the job ad for a month, applied after all, and - you guessed it - was hired a couple days later. As a former product SVP at Hoolie expressed it to me maybe a dozen years ago or so: “Don’t leave, but if you do, that Hoolie stamp on your butt will really help you find a new job!.”*
What’s changed since my original post?
- Family: I’m committing a lot more time to family and myself. Everyone seems happier. I could stop here, the remaining changes are minuscule in comparison.
- Perspective: I’m developing a selective attitude towards normal work-space interactions and tensions. I tend to ignore those who seem to have a potential negative emotional impact on me, I relish those that feed me positively. Previously, I would have spent lots of personal energy on addressing the negative ones … at the expense of my personal well-being.
- Risk tolerance: this one’s a bit surprising for myself, but I’ve substituted about a 3rd of my portfolio (prior to and independent of my new job) from US index market investments to handpicked and actively managed (by myself) dividend growth, dividend and value investments, mainly over the course of the past year or so.
I’m slightly panicking about how well these investments have faired so far (when taking into consideration the recent rotation from growth) as I was a true believer in index investments and dollar cost averaging (or the IMO better variant of value averaging). - Perpective II (please take this with a grain of salt): instead of looking at my meagre low 7 digit portfolio, I now sit at the engine of multi-billion dollar investment portfolios - I would have never guessed how much easier it is to manage your own money versus other people’s money.
BTW, all of these changes could have theoretically been implemented without FIRE, but me personally, I would not have been able to, psychologically.
Anything else? Ah yes, one of the teasers, the potential pillar 2 tip. I’m afraid I’m almost sure it’s been mentioned numerous times elsewhere on this forum already. But if not …
Hypothetically speaking, if your goal was to stop working, and possibly pick up work again at some later point in time, but you wanted to manage part of your existing pillar 2 money in a Freizügigkeitsstiftung account, even after you picked up a new job? Of course, that’s against the law, so you can’t really do this. But suppose someone did want to proceed anyways …
What I think they would do is split their pillar 2 amount at their current/formal employer into 2 buckets into two different Freizügigkeitsstiftungen. Maybe half half, maybe 1/3 and 2/3, whatever their preferences may be.
Then, upon taking up their new job, they would transfer one of their FZ accounts to their new employer. They would unintentionally forget about transferring the other FZ account.
Coincidentally, I’ve even heard from new employers that at this time, they’re not even interested in “new money” piling into their accounts from a current risk return perspective under current regulations.
So, that concludes today’s quick update. Sorry if it was a bit long.
* Any current day exec at Hoolie would not speak in such words and the message per se would not be approved by internal PR, but back in the day some people would speak openly, sometimes for the good, as this SVP, sometimes for the bad, as many other SVPs, including the inventor of one popular mobile OS, or the first Swiss at Hoolie.