Buying Life Time with Savings Before Retirement

Quitting work and living off savings: buying back your life

He who pays you controls you. With this premise, a confessed saver recounts how years ago he left his stressful dedication to buy something that cannot be replaced with the money accumulated: his own time. The thesis is difficult for almost any salaried worker to accept: after covering minimum subsistence, the excess money serves no purpose. He concludes with a sharp definition: life is everything that happens outside the professional sphere.

He clarifies he is not retired. He has no debts or mortgages and maintains that he never received public benefits. His plan relies on not allowing banks to keep the savings with dubious products, nor the State through inflation.

Saving as an Inherited Trait, Not a Virtue

The starting point is almost biological. He argues that saving is not merit or discipline, but a condition one is born with: two brothers, raised identically, one saves and the other squanders without being able to prevent it. This goes back thousands of generations: we are descendants of survivors, and that instinct to save for tomorrow is passed down through inheritance. He accumulated enough, he says, to live a long period without depending on anyone.

Seneca, Buddha and the Birdcage Monkey

The narrative soon delves into philosophy. He quotes Seneca and his treatise on the brevity of life, which criticizes people for their lack of interest in living fulfilling lives, and Buddha, from whom he recalls that freedom is a state devoid of all desire. The most celebrated anecdote is Mozart's: a marquise tells him she would give half her life to play like him, and the composer replies that is exactly what he has had to give. To conclude, he describes modern life as a human zoo and argues that work has become routine and sect: repeating the same thing every day.

The Frontline: Personal Savings or Falling Income

Here, views diverge. Some admit to envying the situation but warn that without initial assets, the advice is a path to precariousness for young people. Others go further and reproach him for living off inheritances that he says he is liquidating. His defense is firm: he does not confuse freedom with poverty, but insists that freedom is worth more than a salary. The underlying question—how much money is needed—receives no numerical answer: only that a minimum must be secured.

From Leaving Business at 39 to a Funeral Home at Dawn

Not all accounts are theoretical. One person recounts that after 19 years running a business, with ten-hour shifts Monday through Saturday, he decided to close: the money stopped compensating for what it was costing him. In another account, a widower narrates the loss of his vvife after four years of illness, the exhaustion of savings, and the moment of placing the coffin in the crematorium; from this he drew a radical detachment from material possessions and the certainty that only people matter. A third testimony recounts exchanging a high-paying job, involving palpitations and emergency room visits, for a lower-paid position that restored his sleep.

When the Narrative Twists

Not all of this journey is philosophical musing. In several parts, the reasoning drifts toward theses on immigration, gender policy, and the education system that fall outside the scope of saving. There is a tendency to hold that schooling is prolonged to delay motherhood, or that certain groups act based on interests external to their own. These are assertions presented as opinion, without data to support them, and in the exchange itself, some rebuts them by demanding figures that never arrive. It is best read as such.

The technological future also emerges: statements by Bill Gates on automation, artificial intelligence, and robotics are cited to suggest that the labor market we know today is an artifact with an expiration date.

The ideology fits into one sentence: time is the only good that cannot be recovered. That it becomes a life plan depends on a figure that is never put on the table. How much is enough, and who would dare to set the number?