The 6 stages of Financial Independence
- Steve Martin
- May 29, 2015
- 2 min read
The Financial Independence Hub
I’ve been doing lots of reading lately about a new stage of life between MidLife and traditional Retirement. You can read the details in Marc Freedman’s The Big Shift, which confirmed what I’ve been slowly piecing together since my career change this time last yer.
The Financial Independence Hub organizes blogs in six categories that are quite similar to the Ages & Stages that MoneySense has long espoused, both in its articles and in its Special Interest Publication, Guide to Retiring Wealthy. You can find these six blog categories in the horizontal grey band that appears below the horizontal blue band at the top of the Hub’s home page.
Ages & Stages: The Life Cycle approach to Investing
It’s a valuable way to look at what I call “the life cycle approach to investing,” which is roughly how I structured my financial novel, Findependence Day. (That was written in 2008 so I hadn’t filched the concepts from MoneySense, although it subsequently consolidated my thinking.)
When I look at the six stages, I realize that I’m only half way through my own life journey. Yes, I turned 62 in April, which a generation ago might have been viewed as “practically dead,” as my daughter may have quipped on occasion.
The first stage is what I call Debt & Frugality: you graduate from college perhaps with some student loans and credit-card debt. To pay it off, you need to practice what I call “guerrilla frugality.” Then you fall in love, marry and consider children, which brings you to Stage 2: Family Formation & Housing. As I’ve long said, “marriage, mortgage and kids” all go together.
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