All preparations are for a better life

When you prepare for early retirement, most people will focus on financial matters. However, personal finance is the least of your problems. You have more personal behavior changes that you have to prepare for.

For many ordinary people like us, we study hard in school hoping that we will find a good paying job when we become an adult. Once we find a good paying job, we work hard in our prime to support our family and accumulate some savings for the future.

Soon we reach middle-age whether we have prepared for it or not. What should we do now?

Should we continue to work hard to earn more money just for the sake of making money, just like those well-known billionaires who still hunger for money as we read in the newspapers?

Should we retire from active money pursuit once we have reached our financial goals in life?

As practitioners of life cultivation, we advocate caution and we plan ahead so that we will live a life that is active, free, happy, and healthy at old-age. We believe that this is what most people pursue throughout their lives.

Life is like a growing tree. You and I keep on watering it in the hope that it can continue to take root deep into the ground and grow upward to a brighter place.

Folk Saying

Before retiring, perhaps we should realistically consider how we should live our life now to prepare for middle-age and old-age in the future. We will consider the following subject-matters before our retirement.

01 Personal conduct

As practitioners of life cultivation, we believe that at middle-age, we should conduct ourselves in certain ways so that we will continue to have an active and healthy life in our old-age.

01 Half gentleman half villain

If we want to live better in this world, we should be flexible in what we say to whom and what we do.

When facing villains, we naturally do not need to be polite. When facing a gentleman, of course we must treat him with the courtesy of a gentleman. We have no need to entertain everyone.

When friends come, bring good wine. When enemies come, bring shotguns.

FolkSaying

Think about your personal experience. Do you think this is true and practical?

02 Half smart half muddled

As practitioners of life cultivation, we adopt a strategy of half-savvy and half-confused in our family-relationships.

What do we mean?

When we deal with major issues, we cannot be confused, but need to be shrewd and cautious. When it comes to trivial matters, we should not worry too much about it, and we should just be agreeable with everything the other person proposes.

For example, when it comes to buying a house or a car, we should be smart. When it comes to having dinners or the ways to squeeze the toothpaste, we should just be agreeable.

We should only take care of the things that should be taken care of, and ignore the things that should not be taken care of. This is the most appropriate wisdom in life.

Facing complex family relationships and a world full of contradictions, this is the attitude we adopt so that we will live better.

03 Less entanglement

In this life, we typically meet thousands of passers-by. However, the passers-by we meet may not be true friends. The vast majority will remain strangers and meaningless.

We must treat those who love us sincerely. As for those passers-by who have no meaning, then we only need to adhere to the principle of “breaking away from each other”.

Cut off unnecessary relationships, abandon things that have nothing to do with you, and leave people who have no feelings.

02 Doing things

When we are middle-aged, should we do things the way we were doing when we were young?

As you age, do you consciously plan to do things differently to deal with middle-age and old-age? You should.

As practitioners of life cultivation, we are conscious that as we age, our health, our ability, our goal has changed, and consequently, we should plan to change the ways we do things.

01 Seek more stability and less risk

When we are young, we can afford to take risks.

A young woman married a man from the same high school when she graduated, and then she found out she had made a mistake, and she divorced him the next year. She can afford it because she is young, and she can start all over again without much loss. It will be more difficult for her to do it when she is fifty years old.

When we are young, we can give our life a try. We can dream that our bicycles will become motorcycles, and if we work hard, the poor will become rich.

Are Ideas like this still applicable in our middle and old age?

We have a friend who studied at Harvard University pursuing a Ph. D. degree in Music and he started a choir and was the conductor. Later we learned that he had previously obtained a Ph. D. degree in Physics. We were curious about the change and asked him why.

He said he studied physics for the sake of his parents. He studied music for his love of music. He switched immediately. He did not wait until he was middle-age to make the change from physics to music.

Thus, if you want to pursue your dream, do it while you are young. You do not have the privilege to take risks while you are middle-age or older.

If you want to change your career, do it while you are young. If you want to change your employer, do it while you are young. If you want to start your own business based on your interest and passion, do it while you are young.

Do change while you are young.

After middle age, what we need to do should be seeking stability. Keep the word stability at the forefront of everything. If you can make progress in stability, you must not go astray. Otherwise, the more you take risks, the more you will suffer consequences, or even lose everything.

02 Talk less and do more

As practitioners of life cultivation, our hearts are always focused on doing things, not on talking.

Talking is not a good thing, but the beginning of trouble. Only by maintaining the attitude of silence is gold can we truly live.

Keep your heart in one place. Guide your mouth as a bottle.

Folk Saying

03 Understand balance and seek appropriateness

As practitioners of life cultivation, we are always seeking balance. If we can avoid going to extremes, we will not go to extremes. Blind optimism will not work, nor will blind pessimism work. Only by changing at the right time can we be on the right path.

Our proper-life is an impartial, balanced and stable life. We firmly believe that all those who pursue balance will most likely have a happy life and a happy old-age in the future.

03 Life

As practitioners of life cultivation, how do we take life?

Life is a many-splendored thing?

Life is but a dream?

Life is just a show?

Life is like a chess game?

01 Save more money and spend less money

When I was young I thought that money was the most important thing in life; now that I am old I know that it is.

Oscar Wilde

Money may seem vulgar, but in fact, it is everyone’s passport to travel around the world. Therefore, we should save more money when we are young. When we get older we should save even more money. This is the confidence for us to live more confidently and freely in our old-age.

We live in a world where we are encouraged to spend. We must be our own boss in deciding how much to spend and how much to save.

Do you need a new phone every year? Do you need to buy a large size of drink when you need only a small size of drink to quench your taste?

02 Be considerate of your children and tolerant of your family

Since ancient times, people have had a tradition, which is to “raise children to provide for old age.”

However, many parents have raised unfilial children, which gives them a special headache.

The reason why children are rebellious and even unfilial is that their parents rely on their seniority and authority and do not know how to be considerate of their children. Only if the parents have a balanced bowl of water and respect every child and treat the children equally, will the children be respectful of the parents.

If we want to have a harmonious family at old-age, we must treat our children equally and fairly when they are young.

03 Be as calm as ever and wait for the flowers to bloom

Even if we regret our past life, we can never go back. No matter how great we are, we cannot completely predict our future life. In this case, we only need to live every day indifferently, and life will gradually become happy.

For everything we cannot get, we will let it go in time. For everything that does not belong to us, we must let go in time. When we clench our hands, we get nothing. When we open our hands, we will have the whole world.

So, just wait for the flowers to bloom, and good luck will come unexpectedly.

04 A brief summary

In order for us to retire from work early in life, we must do things in certain ways while we are young, so that we can achieve an active, free, happy and healthy life in our middle-age and old-age.

No matter what our family and financial background is, if we conduct our life in certain ways when we are young, we will reap a more pleasant life in our middle and old age.

If we conduct ourselves in certain ways, we will live a happier life. If we do things in certain ways, we will build better relationships. If we look at life with a different perspective, we may change the ways we will live in our middle and old age.

We reap what we sow. What we do now is just preparation for our future whether we are conscious of them or not. Let us examine the testimonial of a person who retires young below.

I retired at age fifty-vie. That was eleven years ago. Here are some of the things I noticed and learned.

Retirement is not like vacation. In retirement you have a different relationship with time. Vacations are usually time limited and you are aware of this while on vacation. The realization that you are not going back to work is something you can’t prepare for until you are retired.

You not only retired from something (work), you should have retired to something. You have to know what you want to do with yourself and your life. No one can tell you. You would be surprised at how many people do not know who they are or what they want to do.

Everyone has a bucket list of things they think they will do in retirement. When the time comes, you will decide some of those things on the list are unimportant. The rest you will complete in six months. After you have finished your bucket list you have to figure out what to do next.

Someone else mentioned loneliness because everyone else is working. That is true. You have to be comfortable with being alone if you retire before everyone else. Within a year you will lose touch with many of the people you worked with and saw and talked to every day. You should actively plan things to do with other people.

Retirement does not cost as much as you thought. Before you retire you should finally track your expenses and estimate future expenses.

Learn how to use a spreadsheet. Track EVERYTHING for three to four months. Note there are three types of expenses. a) daily expenses b) regular yearly expenses c) unexpected expenses. Plan for an emergency fund. Learn to live within your means and enjoy it

Your pace of life will slow down. Learn to accept it and relax a little.

Accept your new life. Do not regret your past life. Do not be embarrassed to tell others you are retired and that you are enjoying it (if you are). Others may not understand you.

Understand that there is both financial independence and retirement. If you are financially independent then you are totally in control of what you want to do each day. If you want to continue working in what you are passionate about and collect money, then that is up to you.

Enjoy.

(late addition) If you are really looking for something to do then consider volunteering. Volunteering can take many forms. There are a huge number of opportunities out there. Research says that doing something for others is a powerful way to increase your own happiness.

What do you learn from the testimonial of this person? Are you ready for your own retirement?

End of part five of the series of posts on early retirement. Read more on our website: https://mustang.press

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