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There were also a fair few very negative comments which I’ve since written off as ill-conceived or the result of jealousy. Perhaps the most interesting and challenging ones were the more neutral ones: neither supportive nor attacking, saying good for us, but we only did it because we were lucky in some way. This sense that our early retirement was a result of luck was, if I’m honest, an irritation! <\/p>\n\n\n\n
We’d been working towards financial independence, albeit without always knowing the end result, for a decade. We’d forced ourselves to track our spending and to learn about personal finance. We’d worked to understand our own behaviors around money. We’d talked about it as a couple, aligning our life and financial goals. We’d overcome fear to start deliberately investing in residential and commercial property, solar panels and stock funds. To us, it wasn’t luck: we earned it. At least that’s what I used to think.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The deeper I think about it, and the more reading I do, the more I realise luck was definitely involved in our story, only perhaps not the kind of luck some might expect (no lottery win, no inheritance, no viral YouTube video, we didn’t invent anything etc). Yes, we earned above-average incomes, particularly in the later years of our careers, although we’d both argue there was far less luck involved in that than some might think. To us it was the end result of years of hard work, risk taking and determination, but we’ll leave that argument for another time. Sure, we have no kids either but (a) lots of financial independence bloggers do have kids<\/a> and (b) it’s not luck we don’t have ’em, it’s called contraception folks :-). Yep, we’re white-skinned and happen to be brought up in one of the richest nations on Earth, but so were many thousands of people around us and few folks are looking at retiring so early (many don’t want to, but I imagine some would). So, where did the luck come in? Let’s have a look.<\/p>\n\n\n\n OK, before I run through my thinking on this one, have a play with the ONS tool<\/a> embedded below. It colour-codes areas of the UK to show the average ratio of house price to income in England and Wales. For example, if it shows your area as light green, then the average house costs between 5 and 8 times the average income where you live. You can also play with the timeline, so you can see how this ratio has changed since 1997 (clue: houses are now much less affordable now than they used to be).<\/p>\n\n\n\nStroke of Luck 1: Where We Live<\/h2>\n\n\n\n