We’re into our third year of financial freedom now, aged 45, and I’m finding my thoughts increasingly drawn towards returning back to full time work.

Why is this, I wonder? Our lives are, by most standards, pretty amazing. We don’t need to work for money. We can head off in our motorhome whenever we wish. We can just take it easy here in the UK, and do as we want, when we want.

So what’s missing? Why this urge to head back to work? Am I going slightly mad?

Quick Background

Ju and I were both employed by a multi-national utility company back in 2011, me as a project manager, and Ju managed a team marketing utilities to businesses. Apologies for the cliché: we were well-off, but unfulfilled. Over the past three years we’d been aggressively paying down our mortgage. Once that was cleared, we saved enough to fund a year’s travel, and handed our notices in (more reasons for this below).

Two year’s later, having fine-tuned our frugality skills to stretch the money over a second year, we came home with just an emergency fund left. Renting a house and working as freelancers, we used the income to fund a renovation on an old butcher’s shop with an attached two-bed house, while we consumed as many personal finance blogs and books as we could get our hands on. A plan we developed to get to the point of being financially-free came together far more quickly than we expected it to, and by 2015 we’d hit tipping point – with enough investment income coming in to fund our still-frugal lives. There’s a free eBook mini-guide which covers this lot in more detail.

Since then we’ve spent another 18 months on the road, returning to the UK in summer 2017 after topping out at Norway’s Northcape up in the Arctic, and bottoming out at the oasis town of Icht, on the northern edge of the Sahara in Morocco. I’d been offered a contract in Nottingham, which I took up and completed in four months last autumn. Since then we’ve completed some freelance video production work, filming in Glasgow, Torquay and Ireland before doing post-production back at home, and we’ve helped out with DIY here and there for friends and family. We’re not exactly up to our necks in it.

Why I Quit Work in the First Place

I’ve long tried to self-analyse and understand why I wanted to quit my career in the first place, after all it was very good to me over the years. There were periods of high stress (the manager who used to scream, go bright red and throw things across the room comes to mind), but on the whole it was safe, comfortable and rewarded me well, in terms of skills and money at least.

To recap quickly: after completing a degree, I spent six months as a labourer to fund a five month round the world trip. I’d already lined up a funded PhD when I returned, based in Grenoble in the France Alps. For personal reasons, I only lasted for three months or so before heading back home and finding myself working as a technical writer. My career then carried me along through various IT-related jobs in four companies until I was project managing million-pound efforts in corporate data centres. It wasn’t as high-powered as I might be making it sound, but as part of a big company with head offices in Germany, business travel was increasingly becoming the norm. At one point I had a manager in Germany, who was a great guy, but I hardly ever met him 1-2-1 in nearly two years.

Coming from a working class background, none of this came naturally to me, and I constantly struggled with confidence, regardless of whatever ability I had. This was probably the single biggest reason for me quitting in the end – my own lack of confidence to tackle what I saw as inefficient, and generally poor management above me. I could bang on about pointless projects, commuting, red tape, performance reviews, weak and sometime hilarious HR policies, whatever, but in the final reckoning I suspect my own lack of confidence was my downfall/saviour*.

The final straw came when someone several pay grades higher than me, who’d managed to spectacularly bungle a year’s effort failing to set up a large project, instructed me to start spending millions in a “just get it spent, dammit” style order. I sat there and nodded, subdued, but angry. A lot of money was about to be blown to satisfy board-level executives that we were doing ‘something’. They’d see nothing for their investment, but for a series of fancy PowerPoint packs designed specifically to hide the fact nothing of value was being given back to the company. I wasn’t about to have my name on those slides.

A few weeks later (we were giving up a lot, and I anguished over the choice), I resigned.

Why Not Just Change Career?

An obvious and valid challenge at this point would be this: why not just find another career? Something I would find fulfilling? Something I felt more passion for? Why try and exit the work arena completely?

Because I’ve never quite known what it is I’m passionate about. That’s why I ended up doing a degree in Physics – I didn’t know what else to do. I fell into the job as a technical writer, as it’s the first job I applied for. I bounced about in IT as did fairly well as I was pretty good at it. Did I enjoy it? Yes, sometimes, but less and less as I climbed the corporate ladder.

Put simply – I had no idea what I’m passionate about. I still don’t.

What About Contracting?

In my line of business (or ex-line should I say), it’s fairly popular to use freelancers. When I was an employee, running a team of engineers, I’d often find myself being asked to loan some of them to one project or another. We had to get someone to take their place for a few months. Contractors could be brought in quickly, and let go of easily once the need for them was done.

When we came back from both stints of travel, I’ve gone back to work twice, both times as a contractor. I’ve found this suits me better, perhaps because it loosens the relationship between me and the company. There are no performance reviews for one thing (widely felt to be a bad joke, with everyone always graded as ‘average’). As a contractor, either I deliver and I get a contract extension, or I don’t I’m let go. So far, I’ve had extensions and I much prefer this way of getting real feedback on my usefulness.

Contracting has inherent risk and reward, but has generated a lot of money for us, turbo-boosting our financial freedom plans. It’s a sticking plaster, I suspect, when it comes to finding something to tick more than one of the above boxes. It’s mercenary stuff. I go, do the job, keep my mouth firmly closed, and leave when it’s finished. It creates money, not a warm sense of belonging.

Why Return to Work?

These are the reasons swimming around in my head:

1. To fit in more. I don’t work, while everyone in my peer group still does. I feel like a misfit while we’re here in the UK.
2. To keep my brain active. Even after a few months of not working, I find my mind easing off – in fact the brakes have slammed on. Remembering names and words is sometimes a struggle. The ability to logically think through an argument is drifting. This isn’t good, but I suspect subconcious fear is exaggerating this effect.
3. To engage with people. No matter how superficial the human contact can be at work, it’s still human contact. Being a ‘stare at my shoes’ IT introverted nerd, getting out talking to new people is a challenge. Without work as a framework I find it almost impossible.
4. Because we might not have enough. Although Ju’s giant spreadsheet tells us our finances are very healthy, it still bothers me that our funds might not survive occasional hurricanes in the coming decades. Additional income would alleviate this risk.
5. For self-respect. While we’re away travelling I have no issue with this. But when we’re stationary in the UK, society expects someone my age to be working. I expect myself to be working, weird as it might sound. I feel judged even if in fact people aren’t judging me, and my self-respect slips as a result.
6. To fill the time. There’s a LOT OF TIME to fill when you’re not working, not commuting and have no kids to look after. Yes, there are a gazillion things to do – read, exercise, write blog posts, help friends and family, eat out, learn languages, cook, you name it. But (a) there still a LOT OF TIME to fill even after you’ve done all of ’em and (b) it takes courage and discipline to do some of these things consistently when no-one is watching. I have limited quantities of both.

What Kind of Work?

So, what kind of work would I do? My fall-back position is to seek out more corporate IT contract work. That’s a bit of a cop-out, and I know I should really be aiming higher.

I’ve had a few suggestions about going into charity work, but for whatever reason I’m not yet finding myself drawn towards this – maybe it’s something I’ll look at later in life.

We’ve also looked at workaway type schemes, where we could contribute our skills to a project abroad in return for somewhere to stay in our motorhome. This latter option doesn’t generate any money, but would help us save our income and would hopefully give us a sense of contributing something useful, ticking many of the boxes above.

Will Anyone Employ Me?

There is something of an arrogance about all of this, I accept. I’ve dropped out. Why should the working world let me back in?

In our first two years on the road I was convinced it would be a huge issue trying to get back into the UK workforce. Within three weeks of settling in, I had a contract. A few weeks later, Ju had a job too. Why? Who knows – probably a combination of things: contacts, in-demand skills, industry knowledge, flexibility, drive (we were/maybe still are seriously driven individuals), reputation, decades of experience and training?

Yes, I think someone would employ me. I deliberately built up non-technical skills over the years, which would age out more slowly – writing, team leading, project management, consulting. These will, of course, still rust, and the longer I’m ‘out’, the more I’d need to work at getting back ‘in’.

I might be better suited to setting up something of my own, some small business I can dedicate my time and efforts to? Again I’ve thought about this long and hard, but have never worked out quite what I’d do. I guess I’d just need to pick something and give it a go.

So, What’s Next?

We’ve already a plan for the next few months, including three months of travelling, so the question about whether to go back to work full time will remain hypothetical, until at least the summer. I’ll continue to think about it, of course, to try and nail down exactly what steps to take come August.

Cheers, Jason

*this very much depends on your point of view…