PassionSaving.com

What I Like and Don’t Like About the Retire Early Home Page

The first thing that I like about the Retire Early Home Page site (RetireEarlyHomePage.com) is that it is this web site that put our movement on the map.

I describe myself on the home page of the PassionSaving.com site as the “founder” of the Financial Freedom Community. It was my posts on the Passion Saving approach to money management that caused the Motley Fool board (our first discussion board) to take off and generate a level of excitement that pulled in hundreds of fine posters and made that board in its day the most exciting on Planet Internet. All of the boards that have come since were essentially spin-offs of the Motley Fool board.

The Retire Early Home Page

That said, it was John Greaney, the owner of the RetireEarlyHomePage.com site, who was first on the scene. Greaney’s site went up in 1996. I don’t recall precisely when it was that I discovered the site, but I know that it was a good bit before the day he started the Motley Fool board (that was in May 1999). My guess is that it was sometime in 1998 when I discovered his site.

RetireEarlyHomePage.com is an extremely popular site today. Between 30,000 and 40,000 aspiring early retirees per month visit either the site or the discussion board associated with it. The general media rarely devotes much in-depth attention to the topic of early retirement. So many visitors to the Retire Early Home Page are learning for the first time about the life-altering ideas that those of us in the Financial Freedom Community have been exploring on a daily basis for some six years now (this article was written in January 2006). The Retire Early Home Page is a high-impact web site.

It wasn’t always so. The ideas explored at the site were always big ideas. But there was a time when the site did not touch the lives of 30,000 to 40,000 aspiring early retirees each month. When I discovered the site sometime in 1998, I entered the term “retire early” into a search engine and then went looking through pages and pages and pages of results before I got to a site that said something new on the topic, something that mattered. I was a reader of the Retire Early Home Page before being a reader of the Retire Early Home Page was cool!

I remember my reaction on finding the site. The first thing I did was to print out every article, hole-punch the pages, and create a new binder to add to my bookshelves of 30 to 40 binders dealing with financial freedom topics. Then I excitedly told my wife about this cool new site I had found that was devoted solely to examination of the topics that we had been talking about on those two-hour Saturday-afternoon walks we had been taking together for several years at that point.

One of the hardest things about putting together a plan to win your financial freedom early in life is that it can be a lonely endeavor. It was a more serious problem six or seven years ago than it is today. You rarely heard people talking about early retirement on television or in the newspapers, and in all likelihood your friends didn’t think it a realistic goal. All human beings have a need for verification from others that goals they are pursuing are realistic. When we fail to obtain that, it makes it hard to continue overcoming the obstacles that inevitably must be overcome in bringing a plan for early retirement to fruition. Discovering the Retire Early Home Page confirmed for me that my financial freedom goals were reasonable goals to pursue. That meant a lot to me at the time.

My sense is that it still means a lot for a lot of people today. I think it would be fair to describe John Greaney as the most abusive poster in the history of the internet. He has done great harm to a number of Financial Freedom Community boards with his vicious smears of fellow community members. Even today, though, there are a good number of community members who support him. Why? I think a big reason is that many community members felt emotions when discovering the Retire Early Home Page similar to the emotions I felt when discovering the Retire Early Home Page.

Anger Is Not a Sound Long-Term Investing Strategy

Greaney was not the founder of our community. He is the least community-minded guy who ever posted to a Financial Freedom Community board. But Greaney did start the first web site that focused on the topic of early retirement and that achieved enough success to permit large numbers of community members to find out about us. And he did start the Motley Fool board, the board that is the granddaddy board of our movement. Greaney, despite all his faults, played a big role in bringing lots of people into our movement and introducing lots of people to the Retire Early concept.

The Retire Early Home Page put our movement on the map. We all owe a debt to John Greaney for that, and we always will.

The second thing that I like the Retire Early Home Page site (RetireEarlyHomePage.com) is that it focuses on the topic of safe withdrawal rates.

A high percentage of the articles appearing at the Retire Early Home Page deal in one way or another with the safe withdrawal rate topic. On first impression, that seems odd. Aspiring early retirees need to learn how to advance in their careers so that they can earn enough to retire early. Aspiring early retirees need to learn how to manage their money effectively. Aspiring early retirees need to learn how to prepare and maintain and reformulate budgets. Aspiring early retirees need to learn alternate ways of finding purpose in their lives after they stop doing so by earning a paycheck that puts food on the table. So what is it with all the safe withdrawal rate jizz-jazz that resides at RetireEarlyHomePage.com?

It’s not jizz-jazz. Safe withdrawal rates matter.

The reason why the outside world has not yet caught on to the importance of the safe withdrawal rate topic is that most people in the outside world are not seeking financial freedom early in life. Aspiring early retirees worry about things that most middle-class workers do not worry about too much. Because we are planning to hand in resignations from corporate jobs and then depend on earnings from our investments to cover our costs of living, we focus on the ability of our investments to generate income streams. Safe withdrawal rate analysis is really income-stream analysis.

Exploring investment questions by focusing on the income streams generated by investments is a powerfully effective way of doing so. Aspiring early retirees are not odd to place so much focus on the safe withdrawal rate topic. We have discovered something of great power because of our unusual financial goals, goals which require us to look at questions that many outside the Financial Freedom Community never feel a need to examine in any depth.

John Greaney Is Aces in the Eyes of Many One of the things that excited me about the Retire Early Home Page when I first discovered it was its focus on safe withdrawal rates. I had been studying the safe withdrawal rate question for several years at that time. I knew as soon as I looked at the safe withdrawal rate analysis set forth at the site that Greaney had gotten the number wrong (the safe withdrawal rate study published at the Retire Early Home Page site fails to include an adjustment for changes in valuation levels), but I didn’t see that analytical error as being of primary importance at the time. The most important thing was that the Retire Early Home Page was bringing the concept of safe withdrawal rate analysis to the attention of a lot of people. That was (and is) a good thing.

The third thing that I like about the Retire Early Home Page site (RetireEarlyHomePage.com) is that it has brought hundreds of fine community members into our movement.

Most of what I learned about early retirement from John Greaney I learned in the first few days after printing out copies of all the articles at the Retire Early Home Page. He has occasionally made valuable on-topic contributions to our boards. But he generally saves his best stuff for publication at the site. He only adds a new article to the site once every two months. Most of what he has to say about the topic of early retirement he said at his web site when he first set it up.

That doesn’t mean that the Retire Early Home Page stopped providing me benefits a few days after I printed out the articles from the site and devoured the insights contained in them. I have continued reaping benefits from the site ever since. How so? I benefit from the insights provided by the hundreds of posters who discovered our movement through the Retire Early Home Page and then became valuable posters at one of the various Financial Freedom Community discussion boards.

I learned about real estate investing from FoolMeOnce. I learned about the flaws of the Federal Reserve’s stock valuation model from BenSolar. I learned about living overseas as a means of attaining Retire Early goals sooner from Wanderer. I learned about the struggles of moderate-income workers from Ariechert. I learned about the political battles one can get caught up in serving on the board of a charitable organization from Arrete. I learned about how to set up a storage business as a means of earning an income in early retirement from GolfWayMore. And on and on and on and on.

The greatest benefit of the Retire Early Home Page to our movement has not been the information contained at the site. It has been the ability of the site to attract new posters into our community. John Greaney does not get primary credit for the contributions of these other posters, of course. But he does get partial credit, in my eyes. He built the infrastructure that attracted a good number of effective posters to our community, and those posters attracted other posters. The end result has been a whole heap of Retire Early insights informing the writings of Rob Bennett (and the writings of hundreds of other Financial Freedom Community members too, of course).

The fourth thing that I like about the Retire Early Home Page is that it speaks in a special way to a particular branch of our movement, a branch in which early retirement is sought largely as a means of escaping life responsibilities that are perceived as a distraction from hedonistic pursuits.

Early Retirement Can Be a Terrible  Mistake There are all sorts of reasons why people seek early retirement. I sometimes half-jokingly refer to myself as “the anti-Greaney” because my motivations for seeking financial freedom early in life are so different from John Greaney’s motivations for doing so. I wanted to escape corporate employment to spend the remaining years of my life doing truly meaningful work. Greaney describes his quest as a quest to partake in “sloth and debauchery.” We have some things in common–we both have limited patience for pointless staff meetings. But there are more issues on which John Greaney and I are in disagreement than there are issues on which we are in agreement. Our thinking proceeds from fundamentally different premises as to how to achieve some measure of happiness in our time spent walking through this Valley of Tears.

My aim with PassionSaving.com is to provide material that will be useful for members of all branches of our movement. Inevitably, though, the focus here will be on the stuff that seems most important to me. You are not going to see too many articles at this site helping you on the road to “sloth and debauchery.” You are going to see a good number of articles aiming to help get you on the path to spending the remaining years of your life immersed in meaningful work experiences.

I wish that the Retire Early Home Page had not been the first big web site focusing on financial freedom topics. It embarrasses me when people look at that site and come away concluding that all aspiring early retirees are on a quest for “sloth and debauchery.” Still, there are a good number of community members who relate well to the John Greaney understanding of what early retirement is all about. Those people deserve a site of their own, and the Retire Early Home Page meets the need.

An argument can be made that the existence of the RetireEarlyHomePage.com site frees me from having to write too often about the “sloth and debauchery” aspects of the Retire Early experience. That’s probably a good thing for all concerned!

The first thing that I don’t like about the Retire Early Home page site (RetireEarlyHomePage.com) is that the fact that it put our movement on the map has given John Greaney an influence on our boards that has been greatly detrimental to them.

I have been an active participant in the Financial Freedom Community since its earliest days. I am here to say that John Greaney is in no way, shape, or form representative of our typical community member. Most community members are not on a quest for sloth and debauchery. Most community members do not feel contempt for their employers or for the idea of work in general. Most are repulsed by the abusive posting practices that Greaney and his supporters employ to block reasoned debate on scores of issues which Greaney does not want to see discussed at our boards.

The Financial Freedom Community is a wonderful community full of wonderful people sharing wonderful insights. There will always be a number of people who will take the wonderful idea of early retirement and transform it into something ugly. It’s been our great misfortune that the leader of the group most inclined to doing that was the first to set up a web site and thereby gained an influence in our movement that in other circumstances he never could have hoped to have gained for himself.

Those of us who want to see the movement grow and thrive in days to come need to make special efforts to let newcomers know that the Greaney segment of our community is not at all what the rest of us are about. We can’t do anything about the fact that some pursue early retirement for the wrong reasons. We do need to let fellow community members who are pursuing constructive goals know that they are not alone, that there are lots of us who are pursuing early retirement for perfectly healthy and constructive and life-affirming reasons.

The second thing that I don’t like about the Retire Early Home Page site (RetireEarlyHomePage.com) is that it focuses too much on the safe withdrawal rate topic.

Censorship on the Internet Safe withdrawal rates are important. But they are not the only thing that are important. I like it that the Retire Early Home Page highlights the safe withdrawal rate topic. I don’t like it that it ignores so many topics that are also important to the Retire Early experience.

I noted above that it was my posting on the Passion Saving approach to money management that brought the Motley Fool board to life in December of 1999. The Motley Fool board had achieved limited success even before I began posting on the Passion Saving concept. There is a lot of interest in the Retire Early topic, and I believe that any board with the words “Retire Early” in the title is likely to achieve a good bit of success so long as the site owner follows reasonable board moderation practices. Until I began posting regularly on the Passion Saving approach to money management, however, most posts at the Motley Fool board dealt with either the safe withdrawal rate topic or other technical aspects of the Retire Early experience.

Snoresville.

I like safe withdrawal rate discussions. I have participated in lots of them in recent years. But I think it is a terrible mistake to lead newcomers to our movement into thinking that the path to a successful early retirement is figuring out some sort of mathematical puzzle. Nothing could be further from the truth. Nothing could do more to turn off the sorts of people we most need to attract to our movement.

Any middle-class worker working in one of today’s industrialized economies can retire early. That’s my belief. The key thing that holds most people back is that they don’t think that it is possible and they thus don’t see much point in even exploring the option. The key thing we need to do to expand the reach of our movement is to show people why early financial freedom is a truly achievable goal for just about all middle-class workers. We need to show them how much they stand to gain by becoming one of us.

Discussing safe withdrawal rates doesn’t do that.

By no stretch do I say that we should put the safe withdrawal rate topic on a back-burner. Our safe withdrawal rate findings of recent years are breakthrough stuff, and I very much hope that we will be exploring those findings in considerable depth in days and weeks and months and years to come.

I think that it is highly unfortunate, however, that our first web site suggests to newcomers that our core concerns are technical concerns. The Retire Early Home Page gives a false impression of what we are about with its excessive focus on safe withdrawal rates. Safe withdrawal rates really do matter. But a lot of the so-called soft-side topics matter more, in my estimation.

The third thing that I don’t like about the Retire Early Home Page site (RetireEarlyHomePage.com) is that it puts forward false claims about what the historical stock-return data says about safe withdrawal rates.

Not only does the Retire Early Home Page place too much focus on the safe withdrawal rate topic. The claims it makes about safe withdrawal rates are demonstrably false. The reasons why are explored at other sections of this site.

How the Retire Early Movement Got Its Start I am worried not only that hundreds of thousands of early retirees are going to suffer busted retirements because of the false safe withdrawal rate claims put forward at RetireEarlyHomePage.com. I worry too that the failure of those retirements will reflect poorly on our movement as a whole.

When stock prices go down, there will be many in the general media dismissing the Financial Freedom Movement as a Bull Market fad. I don’t think that is fair. I believe that there are numerous reasons why many middle-class workers have begun a quest for achieving financial freedom early in life, and I don’t believe that a downturn in stock prices is going to cause most of us to give up that quest.

The unrealistically bullish investing advice put forward at the Retire Early Home Page plays into the hands of those who do not want to see our movement grow, in my view. I can see how people could come away from an examination of the investing advice offered at RetireEarlyHomePage.com believing that a good many of us are not serious about our financial freedom quests. That bums me out.

The fourth thing that I don’t like about the Retire Early Home Page site (RetireEarlyHomePage.com) is that it is not a frequently updated site.

I rarely look at the Retire Early Home Page anymore. John Greaney rarely adds new material to it. When he does, it is usually a new look at some issue already addressed at his site at some earlier time. I have brought this up at our boards from time to time and the response I inevitably get from Greaney supporters is that Greaney has already explored all of the important Retire Early topics. It’s not so! Not even close!

My sense is that our movement is only now beginning to come to grips with how many topics need to be covered for us to understand what it takes to put together successful Retire Early plans. I can’t imagine us running out of fun things to talk about for years and years and years.

John Greaney has lost interest in the subject of early retirement. That’s my take. Because he has lost interest, the Retire Early Home Page is a dying site.

Most of our community members love on-topic debate. If you check the list of most-recommended posts at the Motley Fool board, you will see dozens that carry some version of the message “Why can’t we ever discuss on-topic stuff here?” There are hundreds of Retire Early topics that we have not yet discussed in even a cursory way, and there are thousands of aspiring early retirees who have demonstrated a keen interest in engaging in such discussions.

Planning an Early Retirement Is Fun for Those Who Are Responsible and Realistic The only reason why we don’t do so at a number of our boards today (the Early Retirement Forum, where Greaney rarely posts, is the exception) is that a good number show a misplaced deference to Greaney that causes them to feel that it is in some way “rude” to discuss Retire Early issues that Greaney has indicated he would like to see taken off the table.

It’s not rude!

Our community has been going though growing pains. The Retire Early Home Page helped bring us together as a community. We now need to get over whatever sentimental attachment some community members feel towards John Greaney for the role he played during our formative years and get about the business of taking our movement to new and even more exciting places. We owe it to ourselves to do so and we owe it to newcomers to our movement to do so.

The Retire Early Home Page served a good purpose in its day. But it’s gotten old and cold in recent years. Looking at it today gives me a “Been There, Done That” sort of feeling. Those of us who have been around for awhile will always look back at our discovery of the Retire Early Home Page site with some fondness. But we are too young and frisky a movement to be using up too much of our emotional energies looking backward. The Summer of 1999 is over and it’s not ever coming back.

The Retire Early Home Page will always be an important part of our past. I do not expect to see it become an important part of our future.