u/LivingLifeFIRE

TL;DR - Left corporate life for freedom, ended up as a full-time house manager, family caregiver and philosopher.

In the corporate world, you dont really own your time. But now that I achieved FIRE, I have realized the best part is not having total control over my days, it's being completely free to let my loved ones take control of it when they need me.

Generally, as a couple we divide the house work, my part takes around an hour of solid work. After that, I wake up kid and get her school ready. Honestly, she does not really need my help with this anymore, but it just makes me happy to do it. The morning routine finishes when I drop my kid off at the school nearby.

I go for a walk right after the drop-off. Lately, I have been noticing a group of older women chanting at a temple. Watching them completely content in their routine makes me wonder, now that Im out of the corporate race, what is next for me ... With my days wide open, a deeper, existential perspective has started sinking in. Iam an atheist, so it certainly is not religious, just a quiet sense of spirituality that used to come in phases but now feels here to stay. I guess I can blame all the Alan Watts audio I listened to pre-FIRE (for early prep you can say).

Days pass by like this. In the afternoon, while my wife is busy with her social circle, I usually end up sitting in front of my laptop and browsing for a while. Lately, I have simplified my FIRE Excel sheet. It is a Google Sheet where I track a rolling 12 months of expenses based on the last 4 years of data. I also keep a manual ledger of all my mutual funds with their purchase dates so I can calculate the exact XIRR on my own. I don't want to depend on apps or platforms, so I built it myself. The sheet gives me a clear view of our Retirement Equity, Retirement Debt, Inheritance funds, and the FIRE multiple for retirement as X.

I have shared this updated summary sheet with my wife now. With a quick glance, she can see exactly what X multiple we are at based on our actual rolling expenses and an automated age calculation (targeting 90 years to finish line). I dont need any external platforms to calculate my returns anymore. It was a big pain to type in every single mutual fund at the start, but Google Sheets and the formulas are amazing (Thanks to Gemini).

So the days pass with a bit of browsing. When my wife comes home, I talk to her while she handles most of the cooking. Later, we both pick up our child from school, and then I sit down to look over the school studies.

I do feel lonely sometimes, lack of friends for sure. Looking back, my corporate colleagues were just people to talk to, not real friends. Even though iam free now and want to reconnect with old friends, they are all busy with work and life. Trying to reach out almost feels selfish. Going back to work is not an option (by choice), so I need to find a workable way to fix this on my own. That nescafe ad probably was made for people like me - here is the ad if you dont know what iam talking about https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BiRjF1a2JH4

Everything was going the new normal way, until some unexpected health issues hit the immediate and extended family. One needing surgery and other was diagnosed with an advanced terminal illness, with only few months to live. They have their health insurances in place, however this is when i had to break news that corporate insurance was not an option now. Life i tell you - Man plans and god laughs (Der mentsh trakht un got lakht)

Past few days iam first hand house manager (wife is taking care of her parents), and it made me realize something. It really doesn't cost much for two people to live, even in a Tier 1 city. Since I am the one managing home, I see that as any couple gets older, we do not need a crazy amount of money just to eat, sleep, and live even in Tier 1(Provided a good health cover is in place). Lifestyle expenses are a different story, but our current life is comfortable. A chinese proverb, Lao Tzu said "He who knows that enough is enough will always have enough".

In just 6 months of this forced FIRE, life has taken some completely unexpected turns. I am just happy that I was able to be there for my family. If I were still trapped in the corporate rat race, I would be missing out on supporting them, especially supporting my wife right now.

I am still figuring out my daily routine, and I will optimize it as the months go by. As for our savings, the corpus is mostly stagnant or growing very slowly because the markets are slow. But because of how the funds are bucketed, we are still at a healthy 35+X for our core retirement corpus, with completely separate money kept aside for our kid's education and inheritance.

These recent events have made me realize I need to review our health insurance policies. I plan to look into getting an additional critical illness policy soon (although current ones are more than sufficient).

When you are designing a financial plan, you can easily type a finish line (say 90 years) into a cell on excel. But these last few weeks have taught me that while Excel can help you plan for the numbers, it can't predict how life will squeeze those numbers or what truly matters when it happens. 

At present, it's the time and freedom that is helping me to stand by the people I love, when they need me the most. I have let them take control of the most precious thing FIRE has given, my time.

How it all started: https://www.reddit.com/r/FIRE_Ind/comments/1qztbsd/finally_fired/