The Bingo Bobbins 5 Year Plan

My plan for early retirement

Why should you job stack? Some people do it in the hopes of snorting cocaine off a hookers ass on their 100 ft yacht one day. And that’s fine, you do you homie. But, consumption-maxxing is not the only reason one might have to stack multiple jobs. For those that are content to live the simple life, I offer instead the prospect of early retirement. This is my current “5 year plan” for being “Financially Independent, Retired Early.”

When I say retired, I just mean able to live off of passive income and not be required to work for money. It’s true that many people actually report feeling less satisfied once they retire, because they no longer have a direction in their life, and they don't really know what to do with themselves. I don't foresee having this problem. I actually have a lot of things that I would like to do, but they don't necessarily pay well. Like writing. I'm actually a very self-directed person. To me, being financially independent is more about having the freedom to pursue things that I find interesting, rather than what might be most lucrative.

So with that out of the way, let's look at where I am now. The first thing I regret to inform you is, for the past year or so, I have been slacking on my stacking. Part of this was the fact that the job market has been pretty shitty, but mostly it was having a newborn and being more focused on that then on hyper-optimizing my income. Basically, the start-up I was working for as my J2 went tits up right as my daughter was born. In fact, I was actually still on paternity leave when I got the word that we were all being laid off. You could imagine if it had been my only job, that could have been quite stressful! This is why job stacking is key to success in the modern economy, by the way.

But for awhile I had only one job. This job is my ol' reliable, I've worked there now for over 4 years. It was the first legitimate contract I got when I first started my "consulting" business back in 2021. The workload has always been extremely low, it's basically the perfect job for stacking. I consider it my back-pocket UBI while I pursue other work. So, for about six months I did basically nothing in my fake email remote work job, while spending time with my new baby and helping out around the house. Then, finally, I got a new J2 as a government contractor, but this job was uniquely terrible. I bitched about this job a little bit in my Notes at the time, so I won't go into detail on here, but I ended up just rage quitting after about 2 months. Again, another advantage to job stacking is that you can just quit a job you don’t like without necessarily having to line something else up first.

So anyway, for the past three or four months, I have been working my one job while pursuing potential J2's. The fact that it took me, as a fairly experienced developer with lots of relevant work experience, almost 4 months to find a job is an indication of the current job market. Although I will say the LinkedIn spam has been picking back up just in the last week or two. Anyway, I did finally end up getting a J2 a few weeks ago, and so now that I am back in the stack life, I thought it was time to "update" my early retirement plan.

First, I'll review my budget from when I only had one job. It's contract work, and it pays $70 an hour - which isn't fantastic, but in terms of effort-to-compensation ratio it's pretty amazing. It ends up being $2800 a week, which I budget thusly:

Because this is corporate income, I don't have withholdings, so for the first paycheck of the month I just keep the entire thing in reserve to pay my taxes. This is 25% of my income, which is actually a little more than I need, because my effective tax rate usually ends up being around 20%. But, it's better to have a little padding than to come up short at the end of the year.

With the next two paychecks I pay $4500 on my mortgage, and put the remaining $1000 or so in my investment accounts (more on that later). My mortgage is not actually $4500 a month, it's only $2000 a month, but I am paying extra towards the principle so that I can pay it off faster and eventually live rent free. This is a key component of the early retirement strategy.