Life After Enough

044: 82 days left until 5 February - my last day after resigning from corporate law at 41 to retire early. Don't quit your job until you've used your notice period to test real life after work while you're still getting paid - the cheapest chance you'll ever get to try the life you're leaving for. Most people waste it. I wasted mine completely in 2016. This time the first thing I changed was a hab...

043: I just quit my job to retire early at 41, and this episode is exactly what I said to my boss, what I didn’t say, and when I told them. I’ve resigned from five jobs in my life. This one was different because I wasn’t leaving for a new role, I was leaving for financial independence. If you’re planning to quit your job, whether for something new or for good, this is how to do it properly and kee...

042: I’ve been financially independent since April 2024, and this week I finally did it. I quit law to retire early at 41. If you’re chasing early retirement and quietly wondering why the number still isn’t enough to make you move, this is the one. Two years of having enough. One conversation I’d rehearsed a hundred times. When it finally came, it took about 30 seconds and felt like admin, a line...

041: You know your early retirement number to the dollar. Do you know a single number for your body? Financial independence gets planned to the decimal. Your body gets planned by accident, and that’s the trade most of us make without noticing. So I made myself the test case. Could I fix my health inside the corporate law job I’m retiring from, instead of waiting for the exit? June: 218 pounds, 27....

040: I was stopping breathing 36 times an hour, all night, and I had no idea. If you snore, you wake up with your heart racing, or you live in a fog you've been calling stress, these are sleep apnea symptoms, and they're worth three minutes of your time. The year I turned 40 I was diagnosed with severe sleep apnea, and most of what I'd been calling my bad mood turned out to be broken sleep. If you...

039: Five months ago I quit drinking, and it was only meant to be a three-month break. If you're sober curious, sick of the hangxiety on a Saturday morning, or quietly asking yourself "am I drinking too much?" while you chase financial independence and early retirement, this is an honest account of what happens when a completely normal drinker stops. My last drink was a glass of champagne on a fli...

038: Thirty thousand hours. That's roughly how long I've spent sitting in a chair since I started work, and early retirement won't give a single one of them back. If you've been in a corporate job since your twenties chasing financial independence, you're on a similar number, and there's a ten-second sitting rising test in this episode that shows you exactly what it's cost. Most people on the road...

037: Everyone chasing financial independence pictures the quiet day at work as a win. Well paid, nothing on fire, nobody chasing you, and you got paid anyway. This week I had exactly that day and it was unbearable, and once you retire early or hit your number, I think it happens to you too. This is the final Purpose check-in on Life After Enough, and it's about the strange moment when financial fr...

036: Everyone thinks early retirement is the moment you finally escape the cage, and that financial freedom on the other side of the number will feel like pure freedom. Here's the warning nobody gives you. The people who escape the cage are the ones who quietly build a new one, with better views, and call it purpose while they're doing it. I know, because I'm still employed and I'm doing it right...

035: Everyone asks what you'll do all day once you retire early, with the same little head tilt, as if a day without a job in it must be empty. If you're chasing financial independence retire early (FIRE) and wondering about life after retirement, this one is for you. Nobody asks the other version of the question. What am I doing all day right now? Sitting in an office, doing work that stopped mea...

034: Here's a strange thing about getting everything you planned for. You can have the money sorted, the exit mapped, the last big obstacle out of the way, and still dread Monday morning as much as you ever did. That's where I am right now. On paper I could resign tomorrow and be fine. In practice I'm still walking into the office some mornings needing a pep talk from an app to get through the doo...

033: An email landed last Wednesday that I wasn't expecting until spring. A barrier I'd always treated as fixed just went away, six months early. I got out of my chair and danced round the living room while my husband watched, baffled. Then, five days later, the job ate most of my weekend. So here I am, officially freer than I've ever been, with barely a minute spare to feel it. This is the Relati...

032: Almost every FIRE plan is secretly written for one person. One saver, one number, one clean exit. But most of us aren't doing this alone. There's a partner in the picture, and their career, their timeline, their money and their sense of safety are all wired into the decision. The spreadsheet has no column for any of that. This is the close of Relationships month, and it's the conversation the...

031: Everyone warned me that retiring early would cost me my friends. The awkward dinners, the drifting apart, the "what do you even talk about now" problem. I spent three weeks believing them. Then I sat down and counted who's actually been cancelling the dinners, skipping the trips, and sitting silent at the table for the last seven years and it wasn't retirement doing any of it. In this episode...

030: On your last day at work you hand back the laptop and the pass and without noticing, you also hand back around a hundred people. The colleague you debriefed the weekend with, the person who knew how you took your coffee, the work husband or wife, the whole cast of your day. Gone by Monday. Not because anyone fell out. Because the building that generated all that contact, effortlessly and for...

029: We spend twenty years compounding one number and almost no time compounding the other one that actually predicts whether we'll be happy. This is Relationships month, and it's the pillar the FIRE community ignores as it can't be modelled, automated, or optimised on a spreadsheet. The Harvard Study of Adult Development has tracked people for over 80 years and its headline finding is blunt: the...

I had a bad week at work. Four late nights, no time that was mine, and by Friday the same thought I'd had ten years ago: never again, when I'm out I'm out. Last time I had that thought I acted on it inside a few months - quit law, chased a dream, and lost nearly everything I'd saved. So this check-in is really about one question: can I trust my own wanting? Because last time the wanting turned out...

027: A friend joked recently: enjoy the business class while it lasts, because this time next year you'll be slumming it down the back with the rest of us. It made me laugh. Nobody in my life is actually accusing me of anything. The worst that's been said out loud is a joke about leg room. But there's a voice in my head that's harsher than anything anyone's ever said to my face, and it's my voice....

026 If you told me to start a different career next week, I honestly wouldn't know where to begin. Twenty years as a lawyer, good at it, the person people come to and take that away and I'd be writing a CV with AI like everyone else. That's the paradox. Being brilliant at one thing means the second you step outside it, you're starting from scratch. That's the bit waiting for you the morning after...

025 I hate telling people I'm a lawyer. I never loved the job, and it never felt like it was mine. So work this out with me, because I can’t. If I'd happily never say the word again, why does leaving it feel like losing myself? That's the bit that doesn't add up. You're not meant to hate the job and dread the leaving at the same time. Unless the leaving was never really about the job. Mine isn't....

024: In twelve months I walk out of corporate law for good. This is the first in a monthly check-in counting down to that date, documenting whether I'm actually ready, one pillar at a time. Not from the safe side after it all worked out but from inside it, while I still don't know how it lands. The number landed in April 2024, years of saving all pointing at the moment I'd finally be free, and I f...

023 I've walked out of law before. Actually done it. I came back. When I did, I made myself a deal: take a corporate job for one reason, to carry me on a fixed schedule to my FIRE number, and then I'm free. The number landed in April 2024. But the day you become free on paper is not the day you feel free. The salary kept landing. Every month it landed, some part of me still couldn't let it go. Tha...

022 You spend twenty years teaching your brain one lesson until it stops being a thought and becomes a reflex: spending is danger, saving is safety. Every raise, you keep more. Every bonus, you bank it before you can feel it. You get really good at it. Then one day you hit the number. The one that was supposed to mean you could finally stop bracing. You wait for the feeling to change. It doesn't....

021 I'm 40. I'm about a year from my corporate exit. Two weeks of flu just forced me to face something I should have faced years ago: the body that's supposed to walk out of corporate law in 2027 might not be ready to live the life I built. The FIRE community obsesses over money. The number. The portfolio. The withdrawal rate. But money on its own is the least useful leg of the trinity. Money buys...

020 I'd already said yes. In my head. In the shower. In the version of the conversation I'd rehearsed. I'd pictured the title. Tried it on. Told people. Then two weeks later I called my boss back and pulled the yes. I said no to a $100k promotion. Three colleagues from London called me the same day to tell me I was being stupid. The the real offer was "commit three more years and we'll pay you for...