Goodbye 9-to-5: Retiring at 34

I am guessing retirement feels a lot like Papaya Beach in the Philippines.

I submitted my resignation letter as a government consultant yesterday.  I made clear that I was retiring from the workforce, not just leaving for another opportunity, and bravely outlined my reasons for leaving.  Some consider this the unwise burning of bridges.  But I am retiring, not just quitting.  Plus, I complimented a previous supervisor who managed the former contract on which I worked and the previous manager on the current contract.  I only pointed out the deficiencies on my current contract and of the company as a whole.

My plan was always to retire early, but the initial plan was to retire at 36 years old.  The initial plan was also for Patrick to keep working at the Department of Justice rather than become a full-time entrepreneur.  In late 2022, I made a lucky bet when I told Patrick to leave his job rather than comply with a sudden lack of flexibility.  His entrepreneurship already paid more than his GS-15 salary last year, and this year surpassed my annual private sector salary.  Why not make more money while also being able to travel through Sicily for a month?

However, it is not just the money that pushed me to leave my 9-to-5 now.  If I still had my old role, I might have stayed longer.  If the company I am leaving had maintained its benefits and values, I might be staying.  If I had both the role and the company as it was, I would definitely be staying.

Why Now?

Being an employee is terrible right now.  Employers have the power in the job market, and they are using it for disaster.  Benefits are disappearing, values are thrown out the window to maintain contracts and relationships, and employees are expected to work longer hours since they are supposed to do anything to show how grateful they are to have a job.

While it is bad everywhere, I am particularly disappointed in my soon-to-be former employer.  (Or maybe already my former employer, if they told me not to come back after I submitted my two weeks notice after the workday yesterday!)  I worked for a company that took care of its employees for years.  It had the best benefits and was ranked highly in the region.  Supervisors took care of employees.  Because of all these qualities, the best employees stayed at the company.

Here is what has changed:

• The company scrapped unlimited leave and replaced it with “flexible leave.”  It advertised flexible leave similarly, saying the company wanted employees to have the time they needed for non-work priorities.  However, the company established a “direct-to-total” ratio, meaning a percentage of an employee’s time needed to be charged to a paid contract.  Not only does this effectively put a cap on leave, it also means that working on business development opportunities requires employees to give up leave because those are not direct charges!  On top of this, the ratio resulted in 24.5 days of paid time off per year, and that no longer puts the company at the top of the industry.  To make matters worse for me personally, the direct-to-total benchmark was established in March 2025 after I received a competing offer with more paid time off in September 2024.

• Since reducing paid time off generally was not enough, the company stopped observing Indigenous Peoples’ Day.  This announcement also came after the start of 2025, beyond the point when employees could negotiate salaries in the standard career advancement cycle.

• The 401(k) match is going from 7% to 6% in 2026.  That 1% does not sound like much, but it is literally devaluing employees!

• Insurance premiums are going up in 2026.  This is happening everywhere, but it hurts more in light of the other benefits declining.  (Fortunately, we have a plan to keep health insurance more affordable—more on that in the “How Can I Do This?” section below.)

• The contract I have worked on since October 2024 is a horribly-run project with managers who micromanage employees to the point of reading emails before senior consultants send them.  All the managers are extremely busy, mostly because they micromanage and obsess over how we “present ourselves” to the client rather than what we deliver to the client.  On my last contract, I got away with sending off dozens of flippant emails because my work products were undeniable.  Here, our work products take forever despite their lack of complexity, so we are expected to take an hour to write an email.  I have never experienced such inefficiency on a government consulting project.

• The project leaders consider employees work units rather than people with unique skills and aligning employees to help them have the greatest impact.  This is infuriating because every task is boringly similar and it prevents the celebration of individual successes.  To contrast, the project manager of my previous contract supported me when I worked to make my own new position within the then-current contract to work a portfolio I enjoyed more and that used my skillset on a daily basis.

• The only successes that are celebrated hinge on employees working extra hours to accomplish something.  Overtime is entrenched even though it is evident which employees are putting in overtime because they struggle to concentrate on simple decisions and tasks.  Working more than 50 hours a week makes a person less productive than someone who works 40 hours a week, and it shows!  On my previous contract, I was celebrated when I actually delivered innovative products that saved the team thousands of hours of work, but there is little opportunity to replicate such work on my current project because…

• Overtime—with no additional compensation, of course, because our entire team is salaried—is also the only solution for employees who want to innovate or work on any kind of creative project.  There is no room for innovation during regular business hours because all regular business hours must be charged to the client, and those hours should only consist of our standard tasking.  I am starved for some creative engagement in my 9-to-5 despite being labeled as a key innovator on my last contract.

The company is in sharp decline, and my current project is not engaging.  Even if it were not time to retire, it is definitely time for a move.  Retirement makes sense over job hopping at this point since being an employee is still terrible in other places.  Other companies are in freefall too.  I do not want to be an employee at a declining company, and I do not want to be an applicant agreeing to a subpar contract due to the current environment.  Instead, I am opting out entirely.

How Can I Do This?

Easy, I just sent an email saying bye!  In reality, I get that many people will be shocked by the timing of my exit.  When people think about economic issues right now, they think about rising inflation, fears of a market downturn, concerns over rising healthcare costs, difficulty finding a job, and fears that AI will replace jobs.  I was one of the lucky ones because I had a job, and I decided to say “no, thank you.”

We can start with inflation: We barely feel it.  Some of this is the privilege of being able to afford buying food in bulk, and some of it is the decision to not prepare steaks for dinner.  Some of our insulation against inflation is the fact that we still really appreciate a meal at the Cheesecake Factory and feel that is an all-out splurge while many of our friends think it is necessary to go to The Bazaar by José Andrés for $200+ per person.  Some of it is the privilege of living in a neighborhood where we can go pick up our food a couple blocks away and avoid delivery fees someone in a food desert might incur.  We are less impacted by inflation because we do not buy trivial stuff, but we also do not have to buy new clothes every few months for a growing child.  Avoiding inflation is partially a privilege and partially a choice.

A market downturn would certainly impact our net worth, but we still make money because Patrick is running a tax business.  This means we do not yet need to withdraw money from our investments, so it does not yet matter to us if we experience a bear market.  This brings us to one aspect of my retirement that would scare many FIRE enthusiasts: We are not yet at our FI Number!  We are about 75% of what we would need to live in perpetuity.  But we have enough to feel financially safe because this business can fund our entire lifestyle plus some.  It is also in a fairly safe industry, at least as long as the United States still decides to have laws.  Additionally, we have the peace of mind of knowing that the amount of money we have would be enough for either one of us to survive if anything happened to one of us.  

Even if we did not have this business, the biggest area of spending in our lives after our lovely home is travel.  (Yes, we spend more on travel than transportation because we live in a city with an economical paid-off car and walk or run a lot of places.  We also devote a high percentage of our spending on travel!)  Travel is important to us, and we are unwilling to give it up in an economic downturn, but travel is an easy category to dial up or down.  A month in the Mediterranean is less expensive and more enjoyable in June than July or August.  It is even less expensive in May.  And if there is a big economic downturn, maybe two weeks in the Mediterranean in late May is satisfactory to pinch pennies.  A true economic depression means two weeks in Ocean City, MD.  Enjoying the average American vacation is not a terrible plan for economic turmoil.

Healthcare is the reason I remained employed in 2025.  The rising cost of healthcare has millions worried.  A perk of being married to a tax attorney is that Patrick figured out a workaround.  College students in the District of Columbia are required to have health insurance.  If they do not already have health insurance, universities offer low-cost health insurance for the student’s whole family.  As a result, I will be taking a class at a local university starting in January 2026 to get health insurance for both of us for approximately $6,000 a year instead of the roughly $20,000 annual cost on the exchange.  And that $6,000 includes the cost of tuition!

While I may be happily going back to school, I will not be returning to the workforce anytime soon, so fears of the job market or AI replacing jobs do not concern me.  The fears of AI replacing jobs just make me happy I started on the journey to financial independence years ago.  It would be a scary time to need a job for the next thirty years to survive.

What Will I Do?

My favorite part of this question is how the same people who asked me how I possibly found the time to play rugby, coach rugby, run an Etsy shop, run the Phippen Tax newsletter and website, and work on resumes ask me what I am going to do with all my spare time when I do not have a job.  The answer is easy.  I talk a lot about protecting your time and energy for a reason.  Almost none of my energy was going to my job over the past year.  I gave it some time, but removing my job from my list of big responsibilities does not make a significant difference on my energy allocation.  The main difference it provides is an increase in time flexibility that will lighten my mental load on balancing a job with my other commitments.

In short, I am going to continue playing rugby, coaching rugby, running an Etsy shop, and working for Phippen Tax.  I will be doing more for Phippen Tax now because the business has grown and can use the expertise of a management consultant.  Plus, I will have a fun college class to attend and continue learning!  I will also spend too much time planning global travel, as I usually do.  In the spare couple hours that exist after all that, I am sure I will find the next creative idea I want to pursue.  But I do not plan to jump into anything yet.  Lately, I tend to be short on time, not short on ideas.  I am more excited than anyone to see what I do next.  I just know it will not be a 9-to-5.