We Reached FI But Didn’t Plan for This: Part 3 – Retiring from Productivity, Months 2-5 of Early Retirement

I had spent years preparing for early retirement. I modeled it. Stress-tested it. Spreadsheeted it within an inch of its life. I even built social connections outside of work so I wouldn’t wake up one morning retired and alone with my thoughts and too much free time. What I didn’t prepare for was the emotional whiplash, the identity shift, and the strange in-between space after pulling the trigger, but before fully arriving.

Mrs. FI Designer gently suggested I document this season, not as a victory lap, but as a record of what it actually feels like to “land the plane” into early retirement. If you’re on this path, I hope this helps you land a little softer.

A Quick Disclaimer
Before going further, I want to acknowledge the obvious: This entire post falls squarely into the category of first-world problems.

I’m not writing this to complain. I’m writing it because this phase, unexpectedly, was one of the hardest parts of the journey. And if sharing it helps even one person navigate it better, it’s worth putting into words

ACT 1 – THE TURBULENCE IS OVER… OR SO I THOUGHT

In Part 1, I walked through the year leading up to early retirement at age 47, the spreadsheets, the milestones, and the confidence that we were ready. What I didn’t see coming was how different it would feel once the plan became reality.

In Part 2, I described the first month or so after leaving my job and the emotional whiplash that accompanied my identity shift. That first month unfolded almost week by week. Each week brought its own events, transitions, and emotions.

A Three-Week Decompression?
We knew some deprogramming would be needed after stepping away from a structural engineering career that had shaped more than twenty years of my life. So we strategically planned what seemed like the perfect reset: a three-week National Park family road trip to south Florida beginning about a month after my last day of work.

Our reasoning was this… Throughout my career I discovered something interesting about vacations. One week never seemed long enough. It took me three or four days just to stop thinking about work, and by the last few days I was already thinking about everything waiting for me when I returned.

But two-week vacations were different… For the first time, there was a stretch in the middle where work simply disappeared from my mind. I was completely present with my family. It almost felt like a glimpse of retirement. Of course, that’s a bit like saying the honeymoon is what marriage feels like.

So we convinced ourselves that if two weeks felt magical, then three weeks had to be even better. It would also be our longest family road trip yet, a test run for our dream of taking a multi-month National Park adventure while the kids were still young enough to want to travel with us.

The trip served as a demarcation between the turbulence of leaving work and the romanticized life of early retirement. A life where I could be present. A life where I could be attentive. A life where I could be the dad I wanted to be… And where unicorns pass gas that smells like lavender and sprouts rainbows.

When we returned home, the panic from leaving work had mostly subsided. I assumed the hard part was over… It wasn’t.

If the emotions during the first month of early retirement were like breaking waves, the months that followed were something else entirely. They were ocean swells.

ACT 2 – THE NEW NORMAL

Family Time
I had not been the kind of father I wanted to be during my career. Early retirement, I hoped, would give me the opportunity to reshape my relationship with my twelve-year-old son and eight-year-old daughter, and strengthen the bond with my wife. That became the primary focus of my early retirement.

Initially, after stepping away from work, I intentionally said no to solo trips with friends or attending financial independent events such as EconoMe Conference or CampFI. We weren’t home-bodies. We were leaving space for family travel. We averaged about a week of family travel every other month. Looking back, that felt like the right decision.

Saying YES to Field Trips
What I also said YES to were opportunities to join my children for field trips and experiences. Previously, missing these activities broke my heart more than anything else when I was working full time. Our kids were part of a homeschool co-op which afforded them many experiences outside of the classroom. I joined them on nine different outings in the spring of 2026 that ranged from a guided tour through the State Capitol Building, an outdoor bird class, to a hands-on Jiu Jitsu demonstration.

In addition to field trips, I was able to attend more of my son’s Boy Scout activities. On top of weekend campouts, I joined them on a 20-mile hike and served as an adult leader for the week-long summer camp. Although these were possible during my career, they would have meant giving up other personal travel plans due to PTO constraints.

Where Did the Extra Time Go?
I was surprised to see how little progress I had made on the projects that I thought I would accomplish after I left my job. Things I failed to execute included finishing a patio rebuild, producing consistent blog content, and planning for our future “epic to us” family national park road trip.

Upon further inspection, and attempting to give myself some grace, it looked like the following activities were consuming most of my extra “free” time.

• Getting an extra hour of sleep each night
• Weight training an extra day each week
• Training for a standup paddle board race
• Participating in more activities with the kids
• Increased travel with the family

None of these things were something I wanted to cut out. So I figured I just needed to be okay with saying “the deck will get done when it gets done!” regardless of what the neighbors might think.

Rebranding to Sabbatical
As mentioned in the previous post, I think rebranding my early retirement to a sabbatical has made more sense to me than calling this a retirement. Sabbatical carried much less weight. It required less explanation. It was flexible. It also gave me permission to change my mind.

I’m also beginning to realize there is a strong possibility that I will have the itch to design again. I continued active participation in a professional society, leading a small research team for an industry design code, and I was enjoying that work even more with the additional mental bandwidth.

The unpaid research was certainly consuming a chunk of time, but it consisted of a series of sprints, not a long drawn out job that I felt chained to. My wife was really supportive of this time. What I was doing did resemble work, but I was doing it on my own terms, and it was lighting me up.

A Pull to go Back to Work
To my surprise, in month four I received an unsolicited phone call from a past employer. They heard the news that I stepped away from my last job and said there was a role for me if I was interested and ready to come back. The conversation insinuated that the position could be full or part-time, depending on what I was open to.

The phone call was one of the reasons that led me to rebrand this as a sabbatical and not early retirement. A sabbatical felt like I had the permission to go back to work and not feel like I was a failure in early retirement.

However, one thing holding me back from returning to engineering was the feeling that we would be squandering this opportunity that we had worked so hard to achieve. My deepest failure felt like ending the sabbatical before we had the opportunity to do something truly amazing. Our family goal was to do an “epic to us” multi-month national park trip.

The open invitation from my previous employer was freeing. It reminded me that retirement wasn’t a one-way door. It encouraged me that our worst-case-scenario truly was the everyday that I had just left.
That reduced my anxiety enormously.

Guarding My Freedom
My son’s involvement in Boy Scouts created an unexpected dilemma. I found myself not wanting the other adult leaders to know I had stepped away from work. Not because I thought they wouldn’t understand. Not because I thought it would be awkward. But because I could already see the giant bullseye forming on my back for more leadership roles.

I realized I was doing this in other parts of my life too. I avoided telling people I had stepped away from work because I didn’t want to signal that I suddenly had limitless availability to volunteer or provide my services. Our dream of taking multi-month National Park trips would require the freedom to leave. We didn’t need more responsibilities anchoring us down.

Freedom isn’t just having fewer obligations. Sometimes it’s protecting yourself from new ones.

ACT 3 – THE PRODUCTIVITY PROBLEM

Now It’s Go Time!
Stepping away from work felt like I could fully leverage my persistence, work ethic, and goal oriented nature. This time I would be working for the benefit of myself and my family, and not my employer. It felt like I was finally given the opportunity to see what I was truly capable of and I didn’t want to waste it.

In addition to focusing on experiences with the kids, I also poured myself into bodybuilding and training for a standup paddleboard race. I continued to wake up hours before my family, just as I had done during my career, to go to the gym and for sunrise paddles to improve my race times. It made me feel alive. It made me feel in control. It made me feel like I was making the most of my freedom.

Failing In the Goal of Perfection
The goal I was seeking was perfection, and I could tell it was causing me pain. It was a goal that I would always fall short on. I continued to create lists and choreographed my errands so I was always being efficient with my time. When I forgot to pick something up while going to the gym, as often occurred when I was tired, it felt excruciating to have to make another trip.

The Illusion of Productivity
But underneath all of this was something much deeper. I discussed my feelings of drive for perfectionism with a close friend that had lived a FI-adjacent life. What I mean by “FI-adjacent” is that a portion of his career was spent in a high-stress, high-paying environment. And on a few occasions, he stepped away from his career for a year or so for the sake of his well-being and personal growth. So you could say he had already experienced a lot of what I was going through.

He sent me this text message that shook me to the core:

I read those words several times. Part of me wanted to argue with every sentence. Another part quietly wondered if he was right.

Deprogramming Productivity
The biggest struggle I was experiencing in the first five months after stepping away from work was the drive to feel productive. Highly driven people are disproportionately drawn to the FIRE community. We’re very good at reaching goals. We sometimes even live our lives through our goals. But that same wiring makes the downshift surprisingly hard in early retirement.

I can see it in myself. I’ve redirected that drive into bodybuilding and new racing goals, telling myself I love the process (and I think I do). But I’ve also been challenged on whether that’s just a more socially acceptable version of the same treadmill.

I’m afraid of feeling less driven, less disciplined, or less ambitious. It feels like if I let that part of me relax I could lose the edge that allowed our family to live the life we are now blessed with.

ACT 4 – RETIRING FROM PRODUCTIVITY

Falling Short on Family Connection
By month five I did not feel like I was making improvements in my family connections. Leveraging the same habits that I used to achieve Financial Independence, I started listening to The Good Dad Project Podcast (now called The Dad Edge Podcast). Their mission is to empower men to create legendary marriages, epic connections with their kids, and become leaders within their families.

The podcast was nearly a decade old when I dove in, and by that time the host’s kids were now much older than my own. His story was now unrelatable to me because the show appeared to follow the arc of his own family. So I found it easier to start listening to early episodes when the podcast was less polished and his children were similar ages to mine.

Reframe Family Time
Looking back I suspect that I was chasing metrics of what I believe makes a good dad, i.e. I attended nine activities or I was listening to a “good dad” podcast. But does that mean I’m a good dad? Well it didn’t hurt, but it wasn’t an automatic YES if I wasn’t being emotionally present.

Presence isn’t measured by attendance.

Early Retirement Does Not Look Like Instagram
One of the main reasons that our life did not feel like the typical narratives of “early retirement” told in the blogs and on podcasts was the fact that we had homeschooled kids. The FIRE content creators I consumed in the past spoke about their lives dropping the kids off at school or Dual Income No Kids (DINK). This wasn’t what our life looked like at all. And now that I’m no longer working from home, from a room designated as the “office”, I was now in my wife’s space when she was schooling the kids. My presence was now causing friction.

My wife and I agreed that when I stepped away from work I was welcome to play a larger role in homeschooling but it was not expected. Our general agreement was that I would continue to provide value to the family in my research for my professional society, in addition to financial management and other muses that could have the potential to generate income.

We love the fact that our kids are young and we have location independence through home schooling. This freedom was a big reason I chose to step away from work now, and would have done so even if we had not reached our Financial Independence number. We just need to be more accepting of the fact that retiring at 62 is wildly different than retiring at 47 with homeschool kids.

Search for Meaning
During this season I found myself reading less about investing and more about purpose. My favorite book was The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho because it told the story of a shepherd boy who travels from Spain to the Egyptian pyramids in search of a hidden treasure revealed to him in a recurring dream. His realization was that the greatest treasure is often found within the journey itself, deemed one’s Personal Legend. Ironically I wasn’t searching for treasure anymore, I was searching for permission to stop chasing it.

Next was Buddhism Without Beliefs by Stephen Batchelor because it stripped away traditional religious dogmas to present a secular, practical path grounded in original Buddhist teachings. He framed the Four Noble Truths and the Noble Eightfold Path as actionable guides, rather than religious doctrines, to overcome suffering in everyday life.

Last but not least was Outwitting the Devil by Napoleon Hill. Surprisingly this book was written shortly after Hill’s famous book, Think and Grow Rich (1937), but locked in a vault for over 70 years due to its controversial nature. Outwitting the Devil reveals how fear and purpose-free “drift” trap 98% of humanity. The book was just as applicable in today’s culture as it was in 1938. Ironically, I wasn’t searching for riches in my season of life. I was searching for contentment.

Presence Without Productivity
I spent twenty-three years optimizing my output. Now I’m trying to learn three completely different metrics. In relation to my drive for perfection, the inner work I am exploring is as follows.

• Presence without productivity
• Contribution without proving
• Identity without constant forward drive

When I left engineering, I thought I was retiring from work.

Maybe what I’m really retiring from is the belief that my worth is measured by my productivity.

I’m not there yet.

But for the first time in a long time… I think I’m finally beginning to understand.

Picture Credit: My early retirement gift of a coffee mug with scenery augmented by ChatGPT.