a decade ago I was the definition of
time poor I was on the fast track to a
VP role and a major mining company and I
thought my work was so important that I
could not afford to take even a single
day off so I didn’t 18 months I was
working my butt off sadly only in the
metaphorical sense in the literal sense
my butt was expanding
thanks to my neglect of everything not
related to work that all came to a halt
when I fell ill and not just a little
bit ill I was bedridden for five weeks
if you’ve ever had an experience of
being ill for longer than you thought of
you know like a common cold you think is
gonna be one week drags into two drags
into three some of the feelings are
experienced with things like
helplessness like I had no control over
my body like I could do nothing to get
myself out of bed like all that
motivation and get up and go that had
got me so far in my career was going to
be no use to me I also felt hopeless
like that bed was going to be my future
I was just going to be surrounded by
tissues from crying my eyes out for the
rest of my life and it got so bad that
in week four I stuffed myself full of
every drug they’d given me and got
myself on a plane and flew 4,000
kilometres home to my mummy so she could
look after me it turns out that it was a
virus that sent me to bed but it was my
poor health choices and my lack of
energy reserves that kept me there as a
result of that sickness I’ve lost half
of the hearing in my right ear and I now
have brown or gold crowns which I call
my mouth bling on my rear molars because
I split my teeth into grinding them in
my sleep from the stress having your
health irreversibly damaged when you’re
26 years old there’s no fun at all but
it was the wake-up call that I needed I
decided to take leave without pay
and went travelling to South America
with my partner and having now seen it I
can say there’s nothing quite like a
man-made marvel such as much you pitch
you to put the insignificance of your
work into perspective three months later
I had seen six countries and my eyes had
been opened to a world beyond work and
Beyond Australia and I thought about why
I had made work such a big part of my
life when there seemed so much more to
be discovered alas all good things must
come to an end I flew home and back to
work when I got back to work it was a
bit of a shock but I soon fell into my
old routine until three months later my
little sister Megan committed suicide
she was 24 years old and I thought she
Megan’s death brought that idle
pondering into sharp focus I became
consumed with questions about why we
work ourselves to death why we spend so
much of our time at work not enjoying it
and sacrificing so much my life to that
point was an example like a textbook I
had allowed myself to be worked to the
point of physical and mental collapse
for a company that would have replaced
me within a week if I’d gone under a bus
it seemed like a waste of my time and
like most people in personal crisis I
went looking for help and I started in
the self-help section of a book store
back when you used to like actually go
into a bookstore and that’s when I came
across Tim Ferriss 4-hour workweek and
it was a revelation particularly on the
topic of time it’s no surprise that time
poor is the catch cry of our era because
it’s our most precious non-renewable
resource we lament the lack of hours in
the day to do all that we could want to
do never mind that you and I have the
same 24 hours a day as Beyonce or Barack
Obama
it just never feels like we have enough
time and that’s over the microscale of a
single day over the macroscale of our
lifetimes we spend 40 plus of our best
years grinding away sometimes our teeth
at work and then finally we reach the
official retirement age and we get to
stop we’re finally at I’m rich instead
of time poor we can do whatever we want
with that time we could travel we could
volunteer we could spend time with our
families only now we’re old what we
wouldn’t give at that point to have some
of that time rich feeling when we were
young the thing is we made end-of-life
retirement up it’s not compulsory
retirement was invented in the 1880s in
Prussia in response to socialists
demanding more for the public and at the
time they sent the retirement age at 70
years old and that was the approximate
lifespan in that era so not everybody
got to retire they didn’t actually get
to have what we have now and when they
did retire they probably only got a few
years retirement became widespread in
the works guest times following the
Great Depression when it was seen as a
way to get all the members of the
workforce out of the way so that younger
people could come through because they
needed that money to raise their
families
times have changed lifespans have
increased and yet end-of-life retirement
remains and the retirement age is pretty
comparable around the mid 60’s for most
developed nations so now instead of
having a handful of years for a handful
of people to look forward to most of us
are looking at two decades of that time
rich feeling when we rolled in the book
first ask the question what if we could
take some of that end-of-life retirement
and bring it forward into our youth in
small chunks so we could have that time
rich feeling when we’re young and
healthy he called these small periods of
respite mini retirements my trip to
South America had a new name it wasn’t a
holiday it was a mini retirement and I
was thrilled by the idea of making them
a regular part of my life
so I said about redesigning my lifestyle
and my work I promptly quit my job and
in five years I took five mini
retirements totaling 22 months off in
between those periods of mini retirement
I would do consulting gigs in the mining
industry and I would also tinker with my
startup which later became my business
now the question that might be rising in
your minds right now and it’s a logical
one is how does someone in their late
20s afford to take more than a third of
their time off work how do they forward
a roof to sleep under or a car to drive
how they afford to eat it’s a really
important question in the book Ferriss
talks about a muse an online business
that can be used to fund your mini
retirement so that you can be off
sipping cocktails on the beach while
money is pouring in from the sky from
the web but that’s just one way to make
many retirements a part of your life
there’s another alternative and it’s
called fire what does fire stand for
financially independent retiring early
it’s a term coined in the mid 90s by
Vicki Robin and Joe Dominguez and it’s a
very simple which is not to say easy
concept basically you stop spending so
much on stuff you take the money you
would have spent on stuff and you save
it and once you’ve saved it you then buy
assets with it assets are things that
pay you things like property shares
bonds index funds and you keep going
like that through your working life and
eventually you reach a point at which
the income from your assets is enough to
sustain your lifestyle at that point you
don’t have to work anymore because you
don’t need a wage to survive working
becomes a choice
let’s use an example I’ll talk about
Fred Fred’s a software engineer he
graduates from University and gets his
first job and he does not make the
mistake that most of us make which is
going out and spending every cent he
then earned because he was so excited to
finally have an income instead he keeps
living like a student you know baked
beans on toast that kind of thing and he
keeps going like that and he manages to
save 60% of his income think about for
that for a minute
living on a 40% of your wage he keeps
that up for 10 years he takes the money
and puts it into an investment property
and into some index funds and then at 30
years old suddenly the income from his
assets is enough to meet his living
costs which are about half of those of
his peers because he hasn’t gotten into
the habit of spending so much money at
30 he can choose to stop working he can
retire Fred’s a real person
his name’s actually Pete adonai and it
goes by the moniker mister money
mustache and he’s one of a slew of
vloggers out there who’ve been through
this experience they’ve had the chance
to reach fire and now they teach other
people how to do it lucky for me I came
to fire and my beginning of that journey
much earlier I started when I was 10
years old my mum taught me the
importance of saving and taught me about
the power of compounding and as a result
I saved half of every dollar that I ever
got from that age whether it was from
pocket money or birthday money or the
profit from my first business which I
started at that point when I was 14 I
was old enough to get a job I got to and
I kept saving and then at 19 years old I
was in the second year of my degree in
chemical engineering and I had a pretty
impressive bank balance and I was going
to buy a car with that bank balance and
it wasn’t going to be a crappy old bomb
like my friends were driving it was
going to be gorgeous is at least going
to have air conditioning and power
steering and I was very excited about
the fact so I showed my mom I said mom
look what I’ve saved I’m going out to
buy this car my mum said one sentence
that changed my life said Lacey that
my mind was blown I planted a seed which
took root and within a couple of weeks
we were out apartment shopping and a few
months later I was the proud owner of
the ugliest brownest crappiest Tania
Palmer you have ever seen but at 19
years old that was pretty exciting a
couple of years later I graduated from
university I flew 4,000 kilometres away
to the wild west of Australia to join
the mining industry and because I did a
bit like Pete Adonai
I didn’t extend my living to the income
that I had I was able to save quite a
bit of money and so I bought another
property when I arrived couple years
later I bought another property then my
employer introduced a share scheme and
so I started learning about shares and I
got interested in that so I started
trading in shares as well I kept going
with property and shares and so by the
time I was 26 and I had that experience
of the health breakdown I was actually
well on my way to financial independence
and that’s a point that I reached when I
was 31 years old which was fabulous
timing because that’s when I had my
first child and I had the luxury of
being able to stay at home with her and
not have to think about how I was going
to earn an income because my assets were
paying my living costs after about 18
months at home I finally got some sleep
as you do and I started thinking about
the meaning of life and what I wanted to
do which is also what you do when you’re
at home with the toddler it turns out
and I was growing increasingly
frustrated with my friends who had been
making terrible financial decisions
getting into bad debt paying way too
much for things that they really wanted
like cars and not saving and not
investing and I look back on our school
system and realize that we are not
getting taught about money we’re not
even taught that fire is an option at
school I’d never even heard the term and
so my life became about teaching young
people the skills they need to become
financially independent so they can have
what I’ve had at that point I moved full
time into my startup money school and a
couple of years later I started a second
business make a kids club which tackles
the same problem from a slightly
different angle and that those two
businesses plus being a wife and a
mother and a handful of volunteer roles
are where I spend most of my time now
that doesn’t sound too much like
retirement does it
here’s where fire falls down sipping
cocktails on a beach gets boring
eventually you’ll have to take my word
for it
young people when they reach fire don’t
actually retire just read their blogs
these are not the kinds of people who
surround twiddling their thumbs or doing
nothing or watching endless reruns on TV
they’re out changing the world the
difference is that their work is not
motivated by money it’s motivated by
other rewards they aren’t retiring early
they are in fact time rich they get to
choose how they spend their time and
that’s the point of this exercise it’s
to be able to choose how you spend the
seconds minutes hours and days that will
make up your life you choose if you work
when where how on what and perhaps most
importantly with whom you work you get
to choose when you stop working and you
get to choose when you start again you
get to choose because you don’t need a
wage to support your lifestyle so if
you’re thinking this fire idea sounds
fabulous
don’t make early retirement your goal
make your goal time reach and if you’re
still not convinced here’s why we all
need you to be time rich humanity has
pressing problems overpopulation
pollution homelessness war food
production the list is endless if we
can’t solve those problems all of our
time will be meaningless
we need our brightest minds focused on
solving these problems not working out
how to get us to click an app so I
implore you save and invest catch fire
become time rich discover the joy of
work that is not motivated by money and
start solving those problems that
fascinate you we humanity need you –
thank you
[Music] [Applause]
time poor I was on the fast track to a
VP role and a major mining company and I
thought my work was so important that I
could not afford to take even a single
day off so I didn’t 18 months I was
working my butt off sadly only in the
metaphorical sense in the literal sense
my butt was expanding
thanks to my neglect of everything not
related to work that all came to a halt
when I fell ill and not just a little
bit ill I was bedridden for five weeks
if you’ve ever had an experience of
being ill for longer than you thought of
you know like a common cold you think is
gonna be one week drags into two drags
into three some of the feelings are
experienced with things like
helplessness like I had no control over
my body like I could do nothing to get
myself out of bed like all that
motivation and get up and go that had
got me so far in my career was going to
be no use to me I also felt hopeless
like that bed was going to be my future
I was just going to be surrounded by
tissues from crying my eyes out for the
rest of my life and it got so bad that
in week four I stuffed myself full of
every drug they’d given me and got
myself on a plane and flew 4,000
kilometres home to my mummy so she could
look after me it turns out that it was a
virus that sent me to bed but it was my
poor health choices and my lack of
energy reserves that kept me there as a
result of that sickness I’ve lost half
of the hearing in my right ear and I now
have brown or gold crowns which I call
my mouth bling on my rear molars because
I split my teeth into grinding them in
my sleep from the stress having your
health irreversibly damaged when you’re
26 years old there’s no fun at all but
it was the wake-up call that I needed I
decided to take leave without pay
and went travelling to South America
with my partner and having now seen it I
can say there’s nothing quite like a
man-made marvel such as much you pitch
you to put the insignificance of your
work into perspective three months later
I had seen six countries and my eyes had
been opened to a world beyond work and
Beyond Australia and I thought about why
I had made work such a big part of my
life when there seemed so much more to
be discovered alas all good things must
come to an end I flew home and back to
work when I got back to work it was a
bit of a shock but I soon fell into my
old routine until three months later my
little sister Megan committed suicide
she was 24 years old and I thought she
Megan’s death brought that idle
pondering into sharp focus I became
consumed with questions about why we
work ourselves to death why we spend so
much of our time at work not enjoying it
and sacrificing so much my life to that
point was an example like a textbook I
had allowed myself to be worked to the
point of physical and mental collapse
for a company that would have replaced
me within a week if I’d gone under a bus
it seemed like a waste of my time and
like most people in personal crisis I
went looking for help and I started in
the self-help section of a book store
back when you used to like actually go
into a bookstore and that’s when I came
across Tim Ferriss 4-hour workweek and
it was a revelation particularly on the
topic of time it’s no surprise that time
poor is the catch cry of our era because
it’s our most precious non-renewable
resource we lament the lack of hours in
the day to do all that we could want to
do never mind that you and I have the
same 24 hours a day as Beyonce or Barack
Obama
it just never feels like we have enough
time and that’s over the microscale of a
single day over the macroscale of our
lifetimes we spend 40 plus of our best
years grinding away sometimes our teeth
at work and then finally we reach the
official retirement age and we get to
stop we’re finally at I’m rich instead
of time poor we can do whatever we want
with that time we could travel we could
volunteer we could spend time with our
families only now we’re old what we
wouldn’t give at that point to have some
of that time rich feeling when we were
young the thing is we made end-of-life
retirement up it’s not compulsory
retirement was invented in the 1880s in
Prussia in response to socialists
demanding more for the public and at the
time they sent the retirement age at 70
years old and that was the approximate
lifespan in that era so not everybody
got to retire they didn’t actually get
to have what we have now and when they
did retire they probably only got a few
years retirement became widespread in
the works guest times following the
Great Depression when it was seen as a
way to get all the members of the
workforce out of the way so that younger
people could come through because they
needed that money to raise their
families
times have changed lifespans have
increased and yet end-of-life retirement
remains and the retirement age is pretty
comparable around the mid 60’s for most
developed nations so now instead of
having a handful of years for a handful
of people to look forward to most of us
are looking at two decades of that time
rich feeling when we rolled in the book
first ask the question what if we could
take some of that end-of-life retirement
and bring it forward into our youth in
small chunks so we could have that time
rich feeling when we’re young and
healthy he called these small periods of
respite mini retirements my trip to
South America had a new name it wasn’t a
holiday it was a mini retirement and I
was thrilled by the idea of making them
a regular part of my life
so I said about redesigning my lifestyle
and my work I promptly quit my job and
in five years I took five mini
retirements totaling 22 months off in
between those periods of mini retirement
I would do consulting gigs in the mining
industry and I would also tinker with my
startup which later became my business
now the question that might be rising in
your minds right now and it’s a logical
one is how does someone in their late
20s afford to take more than a third of
their time off work how do they forward
a roof to sleep under or a car to drive
how they afford to eat it’s a really
important question in the book Ferriss
talks about a muse an online business
that can be used to fund your mini
retirement so that you can be off
sipping cocktails on the beach while
money is pouring in from the sky from
the web but that’s just one way to make
many retirements a part of your life
there’s another alternative and it’s
called fire what does fire stand for
financially independent retiring early
it’s a term coined in the mid 90s by
Vicki Robin and Joe Dominguez and it’s a
very simple which is not to say easy
concept basically you stop spending so
much on stuff you take the money you
would have spent on stuff and you save
it and once you’ve saved it you then buy
assets with it assets are things that
pay you things like property shares
bonds index funds and you keep going
like that through your working life and
eventually you reach a point at which
the income from your assets is enough to
sustain your lifestyle at that point you
don’t have to work anymore because you
don’t need a wage to survive working
becomes a choice
let’s use an example I’ll talk about
Fred Fred’s a software engineer he
graduates from University and gets his
first job and he does not make the
mistake that most of us make which is
going out and spending every cent he
then earned because he was so excited to
finally have an income instead he keeps
living like a student you know baked
beans on toast that kind of thing and he
keeps going like that and he manages to
save 60% of his income think about for
that for a minute
living on a 40% of your wage he keeps
that up for 10 years he takes the money
and puts it into an investment property
and into some index funds and then at 30
years old suddenly the income from his
assets is enough to meet his living
costs which are about half of those of
his peers because he hasn’t gotten into
the habit of spending so much money at
30 he can choose to stop working he can
retire Fred’s a real person
his name’s actually Pete adonai and it
goes by the moniker mister money
mustache and he’s one of a slew of
vloggers out there who’ve been through
this experience they’ve had the chance
to reach fire and now they teach other
people how to do it lucky for me I came
to fire and my beginning of that journey
much earlier I started when I was 10
years old my mum taught me the
importance of saving and taught me about
the power of compounding and as a result
I saved half of every dollar that I ever
got from that age whether it was from
pocket money or birthday money or the
profit from my first business which I
started at that point when I was 14 I
was old enough to get a job I got to and
I kept saving and then at 19 years old I
was in the second year of my degree in
chemical engineering and I had a pretty
impressive bank balance and I was going
to buy a car with that bank balance and
it wasn’t going to be a crappy old bomb
like my friends were driving it was
going to be gorgeous is at least going
to have air conditioning and power
steering and I was very excited about
the fact so I showed my mom I said mom
look what I’ve saved I’m going out to
buy this car my mum said one sentence
that changed my life said Lacey that
my mind was blown I planted a seed which
took root and within a couple of weeks
we were out apartment shopping and a few
months later I was the proud owner of
the ugliest brownest crappiest Tania
Palmer you have ever seen but at 19
years old that was pretty exciting a
couple of years later I graduated from
university I flew 4,000 kilometres away
to the wild west of Australia to join
the mining industry and because I did a
bit like Pete Adonai
I didn’t extend my living to the income
that I had I was able to save quite a
bit of money and so I bought another
property when I arrived couple years
later I bought another property then my
employer introduced a share scheme and
so I started learning about shares and I
got interested in that so I started
trading in shares as well I kept going
with property and shares and so by the
time I was 26 and I had that experience
of the health breakdown I was actually
well on my way to financial independence
and that’s a point that I reached when I
was 31 years old which was fabulous
timing because that’s when I had my
first child and I had the luxury of
being able to stay at home with her and
not have to think about how I was going
to earn an income because my assets were
paying my living costs after about 18
months at home I finally got some sleep
as you do and I started thinking about
the meaning of life and what I wanted to
do which is also what you do when you’re
at home with the toddler it turns out
and I was growing increasingly
frustrated with my friends who had been
making terrible financial decisions
getting into bad debt paying way too
much for things that they really wanted
like cars and not saving and not
investing and I look back on our school
system and realize that we are not
getting taught about money we’re not
even taught that fire is an option at
school I’d never even heard the term and
so my life became about teaching young
people the skills they need to become
financially independent so they can have
what I’ve had at that point I moved full
time into my startup money school and a
couple of years later I started a second
business make a kids club which tackles
the same problem from a slightly
different angle and that those two
businesses plus being a wife and a
mother and a handful of volunteer roles
are where I spend most of my time now
that doesn’t sound too much like
retirement does it
here’s where fire falls down sipping
cocktails on a beach gets boring
eventually you’ll have to take my word
for it
young people when they reach fire don’t
actually retire just read their blogs
these are not the kinds of people who
surround twiddling their thumbs or doing
nothing or watching endless reruns on TV
they’re out changing the world the
difference is that their work is not
motivated by money it’s motivated by
other rewards they aren’t retiring early
they are in fact time rich they get to
choose how they spend their time and
that’s the point of this exercise it’s
to be able to choose how you spend the
seconds minutes hours and days that will
make up your life you choose if you work
when where how on what and perhaps most
importantly with whom you work you get
to choose when you stop working and you
get to choose when you start again you
get to choose because you don’t need a
wage to support your lifestyle so if
you’re thinking this fire idea sounds
fabulous
don’t make early retirement your goal
make your goal time reach and if you’re
still not convinced here’s why we all
need you to be time rich humanity has
pressing problems overpopulation
pollution homelessness war food
production the list is endless if we
can’t solve those problems all of our
time will be meaningless
we need our brightest minds focused on
solving these problems not working out
how to get us to click an app so I
implore you save and invest catch fire
become time rich discover the joy of
work that is not motivated by money and
start solving those problems that
fascinate you we humanity need you –
thank you
[Music] [Applause]
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