Operation Enough! How to Retire Remarkably Early

Copyright © 2017 by Anita Dhake

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Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication data

Dhake, Anita.

Operation Enough! : How to Retire Remarkably Early / Anita Dhake

p.   cm. 

ISBN 978-0-9992336-0-3

1. Self Help 2. Happiness. 3. Financial Independence

LCN 2017912992

First Edition

ISBN 978-0-9992336-0-3 (paperback)

ISBN 978-0-9992336-1-0 (e-book)

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To you, my dear reader. Without you, this is nothing.

And my mom. Hi, Mom!

Contents

Preface

My Life Bucket List

Introduction

To debt freedom and dancing a jig

Now let’s retire

Chapter 1: What Exactly Is Enough?

Action Plan! Where Do You Want To Go?

Chapter 2: How Should I Spend My Money?

First, buy security. This is always first.

Spend money on what you repeatedly do

Buy the ability to say yes to adventure and friendship

Action Plan! How do you use money’s superpowers currently?

Chapter 3: How Do I Save?

Where are you?

Action Plan! Where are you?

Don’t buy stuff

How should you shop?

Case study: a television

Buy used

Sell what you don’t need

What makes your financial avatar smile?

How do you hold yourself accountable?

Do you advocate for yourself?

Action Plan! Plan your calendar

Chapter 4: How Should I Invest?

Do you know about compound interest? Are you using it correctly?

How will you know when you have enough?

Action Plan! Plot away

What about Real Property?

Chapter 5: How Should I Not Spend My Money?

Chapter 6: Still Skeptical?

List of lists

Acknowledgments

Books you should read

References

About the Author

Preface

Hello dear reader. Thanks for reading. I wrote this book to cross off item #6 on my Life Bucket List—write a book. I decided to write about retiring early—item #7—because I retired at thirty-three and people seem rather interested in that fact.

Maybe you are one of those people.

I also wrote this book to lay flowers at the feet of my spiritual masters—books, generally, and Your Money or Your Life, specifically. Books are powerful. A book can change your life if you’re ready to hear the message. If you’re ready to hear the message, I’ll show you what life can be when you have enough money to do what you want.

My Life Bucket List

See the world

Learn toswim

Learn to cook like Mom

Get in shape enough to hike the GrandCanyon

Hike the Grand Canyon

Write a book

Retireearly

Learn a foreign language

Feel at home in a foreign country (live abroad for at least sixmonths)

Fall recklessly inlove

Start abusiness

Start a nonprofit

Make a positive, lasting difference for fiftypeople

Solve a problem for the future

Be on TVonce

Be a writer

Get a six-pack (abs)

Maintain the six-pack abs for a year

Get an advanceddegree

See the northern lights

Be an extra on a television show or movie

Have a job I reallyenjoy

Go skiing

Go bungeejumping

Jump out of anairplane

Go hang gliding or paragliding. One of the glidings.

Work in a factory

Work as awaitress

Keep chickens so I can gather fresh eggs

Read a book a day for a year

Age gracefully

Go on a book tour

Take a vow of silence

Find a fossil

Be a teetotaler

Learn to sew

Learn woodworking

Go scuba diving

Live in New York City once, but leave before it makes me hard*

Live in Northern California once, but leave before it makes me soft*

Be generous

Learn to dance

Fall responsibly in love

Go on a long bike road trip

*Instructions from Wear Sunscreen: A Primer for Real Life by Mary Schmich

Introduction

I’m Anita. Hi. What can I tell you about myself? At the time of this typing, I have completed thirty-four laps around our glorious sun. I travel a lot (fifty-six countries so far) and read even more. I set grand goals for myself and give them delightful operational nicknames, cackling in delight if I achieve them.

This is the story of Operation Enough!—my quest to retire as soon as I possibly could, to cackle mercilessly at my alarm clock each morning. As you’ll see, it has worked quite well, I think. I cackle quite regularly.

Let me give you my credentials with a quick rundown of my financial life to date. I’ll be the first to admit that I was lucky. I grew up in the Midwestern United States to immigrant parents from India. The youngest of three daughters, I was fortunate enough to be born in the right generation in the cycle of wealth—a vantage point from which I could clearly see the value of money, but not the struggle to subsist or the eventual squander and entitlement.

I’m also lucky that I’m a fast reader and that my spot in the universe granted me easy access to libraries. When I was a teenager, I read the financial self-help book Your Money or Your Life: 9 Steps to Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Achieving Financial Independence by Vicki Robin and Joe Dominguez, which encapsulates the attitude toward money that made sense to me. Enough is enough. Choose living your life over accumulating money for accumulation’s sake. Inspired, I added retire early to my Life Bucket List.

At twenty, I graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with a degree in economics. I went to work for an insurance company in a suburb outside Chicago as a workers’ compensation claims-handler with a starting salary of $40,000 per year and perhaps $15,000 in student loans.

At this point, I went off the rails, drifting without any clear goals. I knew to avoid credit card debt and to put as much money as the government would allow into my 401(k) retirement account, but not much else. I saved whatever excess accumulated in a checking account and paid the minimum on my student loans.

Getting an advanced degree was on my Life Bucket List, too, so at twenty-three, I started law school at the University of Chicago. I’m lucky when it comes to those standardized tests. After my first year, my school hosted on-campus interviewing. Law firms came and wooed us with promises of large salaries and glamorous lives. Big Law, they called it.

While chatting with a law school friend, I laid out a premise. If we made four times what the average person made, could we not retire four times earlier?

No, he responded.

Apparently this wasn’t as obvious to him.

But the seed from my teenage years started to sprout. I reread Your Money or Your Life. Ideas swirled.

If I started working in Chicago instead of New York or California, the places most of my classmates sought, I could keep my expenses low. Chicago was a big enough city to offer the Big Law starting salary ($160,000), but the numbers on life’s price tags were more reasonable.

Operation Enough! began to form.

Plan in hand, right before I started my last year of law school, I joined a large law firm in Chicago as a summer associate. After that stint ended, they extended an offer for me to start working full time upon graduation the following year. What luck!

Life was going according to plan, dear reader.

And then Lehman Brothers, a major player in the global economy, decided to collapse. Everyone started panicking. Fire and brimstone. The whole deal. Recession! At least that’s what the news told me. I shrugged and went on with my life.

A few months before graduation, my law firm reached out to me. They were still trying to put out the fire and move the brimstone and didn’t really have much work for new associates. They knew I would be bored coming into the office every day just to play FreeCell, so they offered me a third of my salary to go do whatever I wanted for a bit. Oh, they also offered to pay my minimum student loan payments for a year. And, of course, they would still pay for me to take the bar exam and loan me money for living expenses for the summer while I took the bar.

Giddy, I accepted. $77,000 and a year of freedom? Um, yeah! I told you I was lucky.

In June 2009 I graduated law school at the age of twenty-six with a badge on my resume that seemed to impress people and six figures of student loan debt. I threw some of my deferral money at my loans, but the rest I spent wandering the globe and cackling in delight.

Control. Autonomy. Sweet, sweet freedom.

To debt freedom and dancing a jig

Finally, in October 2010, I started my career as a corporate lawyer. At that point, I owed roughly $95,000 for that privilege. Oof.

I decided to think of paying off that debt as a game. A game I could win. A game I could kick the banks’ ass at. Some of my loans—$10,000 from my law firm and $5,000 from my sister—carried a 0% interest rate.

The rest came from banks. Banks who were positively drooling at the prospect of all the interest I agreed to pay them. I understood the fine print, though. If I wanted to pay them earlier, they had to accept. Giving the banks as little of my money as possible became the focus of my everything. I dubbed this new project Operation Get Rid of that Debt, Man.

I’m lucky that I’m really good at coming up with operation names.

Finally I put my long-simmering plan into action. In Chicago, I could afford a sunny two-bedroom, two-and-a-half-bathroom apartment for $1,500 per month. That’s less than half what I would have paid in Los Angeles or New York for more space. By getting a roommate, I cut that down to $750 per month and split all the utilities. The delightful roommate also came with a lot of furniture and a lasting friendship.

I rode public transportation, biked, or walked everywhere. The aforementioned apartment’s location was nothing short of ideal. Seventeen minutes via the blue line ($80/month) or twenty minutes biking (free) brought me to my office.

With shelter and commuting covered, I looked for other ways to save. My two older sisters with professional jobs and similar figures gifted me some of their old clothes. Their hand-me-downs populated most of my wardrobe, and the few pieces I bought that first year totaled maybe $100.

I brought my breakfast and lunch to work most days. I went out to eat and for drinks with my friends for my sanity, but never more than once or twice a week. When I worked late, my firm paid for my dinner and a cab home. The firm also offered a free gym with free personal trainers. Glamorous life, indeed. I put my favorite form of entertainment (traveling) on hiatus. No movies, music, or books made their way onto my credit cards.

I woke up chanting the number I had left to pay and went to bed counting down the days to the next payday. I prioritized paying off the loans with the highest interest rate and paying back my sister. Up to 85% of my net income went towards this operation. My bonus, my tax return, the quarter I found on the street—every extra cent went to maximizing that percentage.

You could have called me obsessed, and I’d just nod in agreement. I calculated and recalculated payoff dates and how much less interest the bank would receive from me. I celebrated each time I eliminated a loan.

In October 2011, I nearly emptied out my bank account and spent my emergency fund to pay off my last student loan. One year and two days after I started my legal career, I declared myself officially debt-free and danced a little jig. My stressful job became instantly more tolerable. I no longer feared the time when my law firm would realize that I was an imposter and fire me.

Now let’s retire

Life loosened a bit after that. I spent money on travel again. Occasionally, I purchased expensive coconut water. I lost my roommate to a new neighborhood and decided I could afford to live alone.

When I was within shouting distance of retiring, my law firm asked if I wanted to hang out in their Sydney office for a while.

What? Trade my wonderfully inexpensive Chicago for a city that would smack me with a daily dose of sticker shock? The rent alone would double my expenses. I checked.

Of course I quickly accepted. Because here’s the thing: money is an ally and a tool to help you live your life the way you want.