Fully Funded Lifestyle Change (FFLC): Origin Story

Our journey down the path to Financial Independence Early Retirement (FIRE) began with the usual suspects, unhappiness at work and a doggedly busy schedule. While Mrs. SSC was convinced that we could do it, I wasn’t so on board with the idea. This was because the few examples I saw were too extreme and so I resisted. It took years for me to come around to the fact that our plan didn’t have to be like anyone else’s.

What didn’t take that long to come around to, was the concept of a Fully Funded Lifestyle Change, or FFLC as we call it. What’s different about that concept is that it isn’t focused on FIRE, it’s focused on making the best lives for ourselves now. In short, we wanted to be able to abandon the fast paced, hectic days filled with long hours away from the kids. What we didn’t want to do was abandon the safety and security of not worrying about money, bills, and more that we had grown accustomed to. So, we made a plan that when we hit a certain number in savings, brokerage accounts, and 401k’s we would jettison our hectic lifestyle here and relocate to a better lifestyle somewhere else. The better lifestyle for us meant more time with family and freedom of schedule, even if it came with a greatly reduced income. This was the basis for our Fully Funded Lifestyle Change concept.

Retirement Didn’t Motivate Us

We were pushed more into thinking about the “FIRE concept” from a Fully Funded Lifestyle Change perspective for a few different reasons. One was that while we could appreciate having the free time to do whatever we were passionate about, neither of us wanted to quit working just “to quit working.” We just weren’t motivated by the “retired” lifestyle, even though it would be really early retirement. There’s always talk of “retiring to” something, so we decided for us, it could be a third career since we both had a previous career prior to oil and gas. Plus, we didn’t see an early retirement lifestyle of both us un-employed and being stay at home parents any more sustainable than our current one. Instead, at least one of us would be doing something that would bring in income, even if it was, gasp, A JOB… This would most likely be Mrs. SSC as she is a bit more worried about finding her purpose, or ikigai, in retirement than I am. This meant that we had to tailor our relocation appropriately and this had its own set of problems.

No longer, just a motivational picture!!

Our Degrees are Limiting, Whoops

Another reason is that with our advanced degrees in geology and geophysics, there are surprisingly limited job opportunities available. This isn’t to say there aren’t jobs out there, just that they are limited, especially in academia as Mrs. SSC found out when she started looking at teaching jobs.

We found that most jobs fit a few categories such as teaching, environmental work, or government work. Also, most of the positions that came up in our job searches had salaries ranging from $30k/yr to ~$50k/yr. I did get a job offer from the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) that I had to turn down because even with a $112k/yr salary we couldn’t get the numbers to work out to make it worth moving. Most of that was driven by the fact it was located in Camarillo, CA and while beautiful, it’s pretty damn expensive.

We can’t afford this view…

However, this led us to realize that while these jobs may not be high paying, they were almost always located somewhere beautiful AND in a low cost of living area. This sparked our thought that if we could front load our retirement, and cover that gap between 40’ish yrs old and 59.5 yrs old when we could access our 401k’s it would allow us to be able to take a lower paying job without worrying about funding retirement savings. As long as we kept our spending low enough that our expenses were covered by whatever job one or both of us took, we saw it as a great way to fund our Lifestyle Change.

We could afford this one though.

Won’t Someone Think of the Children

Having kids, and even more than having kids, moving to Houston amplified the ridiculousness of our crazy lifestyle. Sure, prior to Houston we had our son and our social life took a hit, but we were still able to keep a good social network. Also, we were only 15 minutes from the office, so we still kept easy schedules, and our oldest wasn’t in daycare for more than 8-9 hrs a day tops. This afforded us a lot of time to hang out as a family.

My favorite pics of the kids! They’re great motivators!

When we moved to Houston, that all changed. Because we carpooled and both worked at Megacorp, the kids days got substantially longer, even with a “short” 30 minute commute to the office. The kids would get dropped off at 6:30am and picked up at 5:45pm IF traffic went smoothly. That is a long time to be in daycare. Poor kids… Plus, our days were now about 12 hours long before we even started dinner and getting the kids ready for bed. Since they went to bed at 7pm we had very little time with them during the week, and not much more time with each other. That was when it was driven home that this was an unsustainable lifestyle we had created for ourselves and we needed a change now more than ever.

SUCK-ville! Houston traffic is not fun.

Recessions, Industry Downturns, and Tracking Our Spending

The final reasons we were looking towards a Fully Funded Lifestyle Change were that we didn’t want to end up like so many people that we saw being affected by economic downturns. We experienced our first industry downturn and round of layoffs at the very beginning of our career, and it was eye opening seeing people being laid off and stressing about money, house payments, car payments, school loan payments and more. Of course, we were also experiencing a recession and being aware of how it was affecting our family members, neighbors, and friends kept us from inflating our spending and debt in accordance with our new salaries.

Money in, money out!!

This made paying down my $64k in school loans and ~$16k in credit card debt high priority, so we were throwing a lot of money towards both of those early on. While we had some early creep into our lifestyle, when we got diligent about tracking our spending, we were able to notice many “financial leaks.” By stopping the outflow of cash from those financial leaks, we were able to accomplish a few things that helped achieve our Lifestyle Change goal. The first was that our overall yearly spending was lowered to a number that could be supported by most of the jobs that we found were available. The second was that we had more money available each month to put towards our brokerage accounts to bridge that gap from whenever we transitioned from our high paying jobs to lower paying jobs with a better lifestyle.

So many tide pools, so little time. Unless we had MORE free time!

It’s Happening!

We were able to baby-step towards FFLC when Mrs. SSC left the oil industry. Man, what a difference that made for our lifestyle. It was a huge increase in happiness and amount of time with family. That came with a 6 figure pay cut, but it was fine because we had been working towards that all along. Our new plan is more true to our original version of the FFLC concept in that Mrs. SSC will continue to work and pursue a career that she is passionate about and I will be able to be a stay at home parent and spend more time with the kids. Plus, with our new schedules Mrs. SSC will have more time to spend with the family as well. We think it will be a great change to our lifestyle.

That’s how we came up with our Fully Funded Lifestyle Change concept and what the driving factors for it were. It wasn’t trying to dodge the retirement police, but more of us trying to dodge early retirement. It was realizing that by taking lower paying jobs in lower cost of living areas, we could have a lot better lifestyle for our family and we could achieve that a lot easier and sooner than achieving “full FI” and ER status. Keeping our eyes focused on what was a priority for our family really helped with that. When Mrs. SSC got the offer for this new job, it was a no-brainer to take it because it fit what we’ve been looking for this whole time.

Let us know what you think about our Fully funded Lifestyle Change concept. I’d love to hear about it!