Night Terrors of FI

I wake up in a cold sweat; standing over me is a dark figure. I can’t make out it’s face, or if it’s even human. It feels evil. It’s choking me somehow, cold hands around my throat. I can’t breathe. I know how to defend this-lock the hands, hip out, swing my legs around its neck and chest-execute a straight arm bar, standard jiu jitsu shit 5 year olds learn. That’s all great in theory, but completely pointless in this situation. In order to do an arm bar, I need to be able to move. My hands aren’t responding to me. Nothing is. All I can think of is I’m going to die! I’m literally petrified; so scared I can’t move. I can just barely move my fingers a centimeter. Nothing else. Hell, screw the armbar, I keep a fully loaded handgun within arms reach, and regularly drill opening the lock one handed in the dark and bringing it to bear. Once again, another useless idea-guns require you to have command over your limbs, a luxury I’ve seemed to lost after going to bed. Did this thing drug me?? I’m going to fucking die! Why won’t my hands listen to me?? I need to fight! I feel helpless, but still try to fight it with my mind. This dark unfathomable thing might kill me, but at least I’ll be thinking really nasty thoughts about it right before it does. This seems to go on for hours. Finally my eyes open; that weird feeling where you thought you were awake and seeing the world, but then you snap out of it and realize that reality wasn’t actually there until now. The only thing that transfers over to this actual reality is the sweat soaked sheets. I snap upright, panting hard, blinking rapidly. I move my fingers, my arms, my legs. Yup, can totally move. Close my eyes, retrieve my gun in a few seconds, open my eyes-yup, it’s still there ready to go. Fuck I hate night terrors.

Thankfully, I don’t get real night terrors that often anymore. More consistent sleep and less people trying to kill me seems to help. Sure, a couple of nights a week I have a more standard nightmare where someone is trying to kill me and nothing I do can stop them (Thanks PTSD!!),  but at least I can move in those and try to fight back. What this piece is about is some fun new thing that keeps me up in the middle of the night as of late. The uber first world problem of worrying about my FI stash being enough/stable/whatever to keep me from descending into some Oliver Twist level of poverty after I quit my job in six months.

To sum up the FI plan, I decided to take at least a year off from the working world in about six months. I’ve saved up enough to cover my expenses using a 3.5% SWR; I also have other fail safes built in. Some of these: my wife will continue to work part time, but her income could easily cover all of our family’s expenses, I get disability from the VA which covers more than half of my expenses. Even if those payments are significantly reduced, they’d still likely cover enough so I could go down to a 3% SWR or lower. I also fully acknowledge that I likely won’t stay retired completely. There’s other stuff out there that interests me, and much of it involves making money. I know me, and I’ll likely be working enough to cover my very low expenses within a few years.

Sounds great, right? What idiot would be stressed about that? I’ve got oodles of spreadsheets telling me this is going to work. I’ve got almost a decade of tracked expenses, and even conservative projections show that our expenses will plummet this year as our child care cost goes down by more than half. Yet still, at least once a week I wake up nearing a panic attack because I’m worried about all of the things. What if the market finally takes a dive and never ever recovers? Yes, I know the answer to that, and intellectually I’m not worried. Guns and shit. But emotionally, I’m a wreck at 5am. The golden albatross beckons in the middle of the night frequently. I’ll be leaving behind a pension worth about a million dollars. The spreadsheets tell me that this is inconsequential. By the time I can draw the pension, even with a down market it would be the difference between 3 and 4 million-I probably won’t actually need that extra mil. Still, that fucking pension wakes me up. I think who the hell am I to walk away from that? Everyone else at work says to stick out at least until I vest for that thing. Of course, most everyone else at work is in debt up to their eyeballs, but that doesn’t make me feel any better when my eyes spring open in my dark bedroom. 

I say all of this, because not many people in yonder FI space discuss this, yet it’s probably common. Maybe I’m the only one that’s been kept awake by the fear of leaving a well paying job, but I’m guessing I’m not. This FI community doesn’t say it, but it feels like many of the blogs and podcast espouse this idea that once you have 25X your expenses, you’re automatically completely content with leaving your job. Everything is fucking sunshine and butterflies. I know others have talked about being stressed after leaving, but what about before, even when you know you have enough and have already made the decision to bounce? This lead up to leaving is great-I can’t wait to leave this draining job and figure out what’s next, but let’s not paint this bullshit picture where numbers work on a spreadsheet and I never have irrational fears about shit going bananas. I do have all of the fears about all of the bananas, at least some of the time. 

Don’t get me wrong, I’m still leaving. All of the fears I have, though they seem insurmountable when they wake me, are quickly put down by the multiple contingencies I have and you know, math. I’ve learned that it’s best to not engage with my fears when they wake me. I’ve screwed up a few times; grabbing my phone at 4am to open google sheets and reassure myself with numbers. Even with no blue light, the numbers trigger the calculating side of my brain, and that thing just won’t shut off once it’s up. The best thing that’s helped is some random dude named Doug on a podcast-he talked about cortisol levels being effected in the middle of sleep cycles, which trigger irrational fears. Fears you know of have no basis, but still wake you up. This is definitely that. 

Though my FI related wakings are nothing compared to true night terrors, they still ain’t fun. I guess it’s the price you pay for some uncertainty; at the end of the day the biggest stash in the world won’t cover every super edge case scenario ( aliens, the end of money, some hollywood dickhole casting that guy from the sparkly teen vampire movies as batman…), but that’s really true of everything in life, regardless of money. Keeping my job won’t keep Eddie from buggering the dark knight, and neither will having a pension. Still, it sucks. Yeah, first world problem sucks, but losing sleep for any reason isn’t fun. If you’ve been there, you’re not alone. If you’re on the path to FI, don’t believe the hype-shit will be better, but not fucking perfect.