About a decade ago, Andy Hill was looking for a change.
Hill, now 44, was feeling burnt out at his job in corporate events marketing. While the frequent travel and weekend events were fun while Hill was in his 20s, the gig had begun to lose its luster after he got married and started a family.
In 2016, Hill started a side gig hosting the “Marriage Kids and Money” podcast, where he and his guests discussed their journeys and stories around family finances. It was around this time that he became interested in FIRE, which is short for “financial independence, retire early.”
The strategy generally involves saving a high percentage of your income in service of aggressively investing. Save enough, and you can either buy income-producing investments, such as real estate, or begin withdrawing from your stock portfolio to replace income from a 9-to-5 job.
Hill was all in.
“I was very interested in FIRE, like traditional FIRE, hard-charging, get me out of here,” Hill tells CNBC Make It, referring to an early model of FIRE that prioritized slashing expenses to maximize savings and retire quickly. “I want to save as much as possible, and I don’t care what happens now. That did not work well for my life.”
Hill and his wife were saving upwards of 50% of their dual income, often cutting out many of life’s niceties to do it. They shopped at lower-cost grocery stores and sold anything around the house they determined they didn’t need. If family, friends or colleagues invited them to events that didn’t align with a strict budget, they said, “no thanks.”
In many ways, it worked — the couple wiped out $50,000 in debt and built a portfolio worth $500,000. But when Hill suggested saving even more in order to retire as quickly as he could, money discussions started turning into money fights, he says.
“We did the ‘super saver’ thing for a while, and that led us into marriage counseling,” Hill says.
Talking in counseling gave Hill and his wife a new approach to managing their marriage — one built on compromise, communication and empathizing with each other’s feelings.
They also took on a new approach to money, what he and some other financial pros call “Coast FIRE”: Once you save enough such that your portfolio can grow to where you want it in retirement, you take your foot off the gas, savings-wise, and “coast.”
It’s a philosophy he shares in his new book, “Own Your Time: 10 Financial Steps to Put Your Family First and Escape the Corporate Grind.” For couples in particular, he says, taking this approach allows you spend more money — or time — pursuing the things you value in life together.
“[It’s about] starting from that position of dreaming personally and then sharing those dreams with your spouse, asking them to do the same, so that you can come together for some cool family goals that work for both of you,” Hill says.
Finding middle ground
Hill discovered that his aggressive FIRE strategy meant sacrificing on both ends. Not only was the pressure to cut back on spending limiting what the family could do, but his hope to bank as much money as possible meant that work was taking him away from the people he loved.
“I was traveling during my children’s birthdays, working with supervisors that graded my performance on how late I could stay at the office and overall, I was giving a lot more time to work than to my health or my family,” he says.
Still, abandoning the strategy seemingly threw a wrench into Hill’s hopes of leaving his job for good — his plan was to save enough to invest in rental properties for passive income, he says.
Hill’s wife suggested that he take the money he’d been saving for rental property and use it to turn his side hustle — something he enjoyed much more than his day job — into a full-fledged business.
“It was this epiphany moment,” he says. Rather than waiting for the early retirement finish line, he could use some of his savings to buy time and space to pursue his passion.
Hill kept his podcast and added financial coaching and speaking engagements, going into business for himself full time in 2020. When he left his job, he was making about $180,000 a year working 40 to 50 hours a week. These days, he pays himself about $100,000, but works about 20 to 25 hours a week.
As for his savings rate, “We found a middle ground,” Hill says. “We said, ‘Well, we can continue to save and invest, but maybe let’s dial it back by like a cool 20, 25% and then dial some of that back into our lifestyle.'”
Unlocking time freedom
Hill says his shift to a Coast FIRE lifestyle allowed him and his wife to focus on time freedom. If you can build enough of a retirement nest egg, the thinking goes, you can let it grow on the back burner and use money you would have been socking away to enrich your life, either in the form of spending more or finding a different approach to work.
“Do we want to inflate our lifestyle and just have more fun, or do we both want to work less?” Hill says. “Wouldn’t it be cool to work 20 to 25 hours a week until we’re in our 60s and then just enjoy more time now?”
Hill and his wife have both taken the latter approach. The couple had about $500,000 saved by age 40, and have since pumped their net worth up to over $1 million. They’ve used their financial flexibility to scale back at work. While Hill built his business, his wife realized that she was tired of working for clients at all hours at her marketing agency.
“She said, ‘I’ve always wanted to work with my hands. I’ve always wanted to do something where when the work day was done, I was done,'” Hill says.
So she went back to school to become an esthetician. Now she works part-time at a dermatologist’s office and goes back to her own life when the office closes.
The goal, Hill says, is to find the balance between saving for the future and living a fulfilling life now. The two spend Mondays sipping coffee after sending the kids to school and exercising together. Hill cooks family dinner twice a week. They’ve taken dance classes together and are learning pickleball.
“With that extra 20 to 25 hours that we’re not working, we can take care of our health,” Hill says. “We can invest time in our marriage so that we’re actually having conversations with each other and not being surprised by arguments. We can be more present parents and be there for the important moments for our kids.”
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