Welcome to the Early Exit Club

Here's what to expect from my weekly newsletter.

This newsletter tracks my progress, finances, and milestones as I exit the full-time workforce to build a $20k/month business working for myself.

I wanted to write about my experience and needed a name for it.

So The Early Exit Club was born.

The plan

I’m taking money I planned to exercise on startup options and spending it on myself instead.

That cash is now my personal runway as I build three things:

1. Growth marketing consultancy (my short-term revenue)

2. Affiliate marketing business via my website (my medium-term revenue)

3. A community for early solopreneurs (my long-term revenue and life goal)

I spent my nights and weekends over the past 9 months building income streams and saving like crazy to support my wife and I during this transitionary period.

All subscribers to this newsletter are going to act as my board members (with non-voting shares 😉).

Twice a month I’ll send you updates on how my business is growing.

I won’t hide anything from you.

You’ll learn everything about where my income comes from, my costs each month, how much runway I have left, and how successful (or not!) my projects are.

Sound interesting? Here’s a short story on how I made this decision.

My early retirement journey

For the past 10 years of my career I’ve had one singular goal: early retirement.

I found the FIRE movement (financial independence retire early) soon after I started my first full time job.

The core principles of FIRE are simple:

• Reduce your spending

• Increase your income

• Stash money in investment accounts

• Retire when your savings hit ~25x your annual expenses.

So that’s what I did.

I pumped silly amounts of money into my 401ks, IRAs, and after-tax investment accounts every year.

My net worth grew as I continued to follow the path, but now almost 10 years into this journey I started to question myself.

Did I want to stay on the path I built for myself 10 years ago, or was it time for a change?

I had been operating on auto-pilot for years, never reevaluating this huge choice I made when I was way more junior in my career.

Earlier this year I read two books that changed my entire thinking around finances and retirement:

• Die With Zero: Getting All You Can from Your Money and Your Life

• The Pathless Path: Imagining a New Story for Work and Life

I’d recommend both books to anyone remotely intrigued by the choices I’m making here. I’ll attempt to summarize both but will skip over a lot of details:

Die With Zero

Die With Zero argues that any money we have in our bank account after death amounts to squandered life experiences. The author breaks out lives into three phases:

1. Youth: We’re healthy and have lots of time but no money

2. Working Years: We’re healthy and have money but no time

3. Retirement: We have money and time but not our health

With this framework in mind the author argues we should shift some spending from our retirement years to our younger years so we can enjoy more of our healthy years and maximize our life experiences.

This book helped me realize that I had saved more than enough and it was ok to dial it back in favor of choosing happiness in other areas of my life.

The Pathless Path

The Pathless Path is about the author’s journey from highly-paid yet unfulfilling full time work into a less common and more difficult path of self-employment.

This book gave me the courage to pursue my early retirement dreams, but in a different way.

My version of early retirement is this: doing whatever the hell I wanted.

I wanted more ownership over my time, my work week, and my life.

And I wanted the financial freedom of not being tied to a paycheck from my employer.

Those books helped me realize I had enough money saved up to take a chance on myself.

So I quit.

I left my full-time job last month at a very stable and well funded startup.

So what now?

Now I work for myself.

I’m learning how to balance my time between short, medium, and long-term projects (another topic for a future newsletter).

I’m tracking my monthly costs in a way I’ve never done before.

I’m buying health insurance through the Healthcare.gov marketplace.

I’m already consulting for some amazing startups with products that I truly believe in.

I’ve written and edited more blogs in the past two weeks than I have in the past 6 months.

I’m learning to code and already applying that knowledge to building new features on my website.

Most of all? I’m fucking excited.

I’m more motivated and driven now than I’ve ever been in my life.

I’m nervous, anxious, and scared too. But the possibilities in front of me are too exciting right now.

What to expect from this newsletter

Twice per month I’ll send detailed updates on how this journey is going.

Here’s what you can expect:

• How much money I made that month and where it came from

• How much money I spent that month

• Updates to my projects

• How much runway I have left

• Everything I learn along the way

Please consider subscribing to support me on this voyeuristic journey into self-employment.

My next email will include all the money details!

Cheers,

Nick

Website | Twitter | LinkedIn