Many of my friends have been asking lately why I pursue financial independence at all. It is years upon years of planning that must mean I am sacrificing my lifestyle today, right? Well here’s my take — and it ties in well with something you are probably using to read this article now: Wi-Fi.

The question itself (“Why FI?”) has an eerie phonetic resemblance to Wi-Fi. I find that to be more than fitting because there are parallels between the two, so I’ll use Wi-Fi to answer my “Why FI?”.

Why FI is like Wi-Fi

Wi-Fi is ubiquitous in the modern world, with connectivity available most of the places you go. If you find yourself trying to conserve on cellular data or traveling internationally desperately trying to avoid a major roaming bill (guilty), then Wi-Fi will act as a safety net to keep you connected to everything on the internet, and stay in communication with friends and family. Achieving financial independence is similar, with a sufficient nest egg allowing you to ‘connect’ (pay) into experiences or opportunities at your choosing.

Having an intimate knowledge of your financial situation is like having access to Wi-Fi abroad. It is comfortable, convenient, and reassuring to trivially gut check whether expense is lifestyle creep, outside the realm of reality, or acceptable.

Sticking with the Wi-Fi analogy, some plans offer data speeds of 5 Mbps, others 50 Mbps, and these days will go beyond 500 Mbps. The data speed is like your safe withdrawal that your nest egg can support. These higher data rates can support higher quality video streaming or faster access to information. Knowing your safe withdrawal and being comfortable with whether your expenses are acceptable for your situation is like knowing which video quality works best at home versus at work. With FI, you are the orchestrator of your plan and can design around a withdrawal rate that allows you to buy the quality and quantity of experiences you desire.

Wi-Fi also has built in encryption security protocols to protect data and user information. You never know when someone will try to attack your connection to try and steal your information (This would be a great segue to a VPN advert, no?). Being FI is your own security network, protecting you from unexpected expenses like medical bills, car or house repairs, or a last minute excursion with friends. It shields you from the fear of being laid off or fired from your job. A well designed financial plan can also protect you in down markets where your assets are nose diving for a crash landing.

And while Wi-Fi allows you the opportunity to opt-in to any within budget experiences with peace of mind and a gung-ho attitude, you don’t need to be connected all the time. You can turn Wi-Fi off if you find the rates are slower than you’d like or the experiences aren’t fulfilling enough.

The FI equivalent is going working in your own capacity. With financial freedom, you get to set the terms of employment with how many days you would like to work and for what type of organization. You can stay fully connected with Wi-Fi and never use cellular again, but the option is there if you’d like some extra funding, social exposure, structure, et cetera. You name it!

To recap thus far, FI gives some pretty great perks.

• Flexibility to opt-in to experiences (Wi-Fi accessibility abroad)
• Variability in quality / quantity of experiences with a custom nest egg (Different Wi-Fi rates across plans)
• Security from data hackers (Protection from unexpected expenses)
• Flexibility to opt-out of working (Using Wi-Fi versus cellular data)

But even with all of these fancy pants perks in mind, I’ll let you in on a secret. None of these require you to actually be financially independent. Crazy right? Let’s walk through them.

The Power of the Path Itself

1. The peace of mind to opt-in to any experience you want

The real power of knowing which experiences you can truthfully opt-in to without seriously derailing your future self lies in budgeting! The best way to understand whether that painting class date night or trip abroad is worth while to pursue is to place it in the context of your budget.

I personally despise having rigid spend limits for different categories, but that is a topic I will go into another day. Budgeting for me is merely annotating my expenses at the end of the month. In doing this review, I have a clear idea of which categories may have spiked. Maybe I have been going out to eat more than usual because of celebrations, or traveling more by car as the weather gets nicer. Either way, having a clear understanding of my budget allows me to contextualize how much a given purchase will increase my lifestyle cost. And your cost of living is directly at odds with time to FI.

Being able to project how much an increased spending of $100 or $1000 a month will impact your FI target and raise your necessary safe withdrawal amount goes a long way for guiding the mental trade-off of opting-in or out of a costly experience.

Maybe flights out to Norway for a friend’s destination wedding aren’t feasible this year, but ordering a congratulatory gift is. It depends on two things: what you’re willing to spend, and what you earn. These two numbers can give you your savings rate, which is one of the best predictors of how long to FI.

An intuition on how an expense would pare against your income and expenses (aka overall savings rate) can give you clear peace of mind to understand what experiences are worth opting into.

2) Nest Egg Size / Quality of FI

For most people, this one is a trade-off of their time. The longer your trajectory to FI, the more you benefit from compound interest. And with sufficient time, compound interest is king. It can raise you to regular withdrawal amounts beyond what your current working income could even support.

The downside of choosing a FI path that is filled with more quality (read: expensive) and higher quantity experiences is that you are tying greater chains around yourself. These chains bound you to working longer and prevent you from realizing the other perks mentioned in this list in the fullest. And even many others, like free time and hobbies!

For this, it is ideal to find a strong balance in the satisfaction you derive from experiences. It is almost worth trying to metricizing how much happiness you get for the money you spend. There is a spectrum that ranges between spending all of your income on experiences and objects, and spending only for the bare essentials. Where you choose to fall on the spectrum, like a Wi-Fi plan, is largely your choice.

The type of FI you choose also plays a role here, as on your FIRE trajectory, you may opt for barista FI or coast FI. Both of these allow you to live a very different life (lower stress work environment, more socially and morally agreeable career path) without fully achieving FI. The journey in itself is powerful.

3) Security from surprise expenses

There will be hard times where life will throw everything and the kitchen sink at you. And maybe even a bathroom sink before things normalize. There will be surprise car expenses, medical bills, or family emergencies lurking around every corner when you least anticipate them.

Heck, I am a relatively healthy 24 year old as I write this. But already this year I have had an emergency dental visit from an ice climbing injury, an urgent care visit for a skiing injury, an missed an international flight to a wedding so I had to rebook a last minute flight. There is absolutely more than what I remembered off the top of my head, but that is not my point. There will always be something. Some crazy expense that leaves you scratching your head about how things went the way they did. Even though an ideal budget consistent from month to month, it will never be. Not in the long run. Shit happens.

One of the most rewarding parts of being on the FI path is how small all of those unexpected emergencies feel. With an emergency savings built up, even the unlikely coincidence of a medical bill, a car repair, or last-minute travel are things I yawn at. The emergency savings I built on the pathway to FI has given me a small but powerful shield to absorb the mental and financial toll these pop-up expenses induce. The surprise is still there, but with a buffer to protect you from diverting your paycheck income, it really does feel like they don’t matter.

Even without being fully FI, the safety net you get from savings towards FI is easily worth its dollar value in gold. It is great peace of mind today, and an assurance of even greater peace of mind for the future.

This also allows for greater risk in life, which can yield great reward as well. There are career opportunities that might not pay as well, or the company may fail before IPO. There are travel opportunities that will give you once in a lifetime memories with loved ones. Having a financial safety net from being on the path to FI is life changing in the freedom it provides.

4) Early retirement opportunities

While much of the media glitz and glamour of FIRE is centralized on the early retirement portion, there are people who love their day job. It is possible to have a career you find fulfilling, derive a purpose, or gain social value from. Simply working towards FI does not mean you have to give up your career. But it means you do not have to have the same career if you don’t want to. It opens doors.

If you hit Coast FI early in your 30s, you can switch to part-time work. If you are in lean FI territory, you can always take a sabbatical or quit to geo-arbitrage in a low cost of living country like Portugal or Thailand. You might find a lower paying job in line with barista FI that aligns much better with your morals at the cost of your paycheck. A layoff that once sounded like the end of the world is now a very promising trip to the Nairobi desert. All of these options exist. These are opened doors that you never had access to without the FI path.

And again, notice how most of these suggestions do not require you to have fully reached FI. In fact, some techniques like geo-arbitrage can accelerate FI without working any harder. The beauty is that your investments will keep compounding if left untouched, working for you. In exchange for investing your earnings, you are paid out dividends of flexibility.

The Challenges. Are they worthwhile?

There are so many upsides to FI that I could go on for much longer. I love talking about personal finance, and will go on about more of these benefits in future posts. But it would be misleading at best to not share the downsides of FI. And they are real.

FI will require some honest sacrifices to keep lifestyle creep in check. You may earn $150,000+ a year and still develop habits of saying “no” where others would say “yes”. Expensive AirBnB vacations in remote mountain locations? No thanks, I will camp. Car was totaled in an accident? I suppose I’ll look for a used one and pay in cash instead of leasing a new Porsche.

These are not required per se, and if these examples do fit into the picture you paint for your life, then more power to you! I use these examples because they are the types of “sacrifices” I make out of habit to continue shaving years off of my working career.

In truth, none of these choices feel like sacrifices to me, rather strategic optimizations to get the most happiness out of my money. I enjoy a good night camping under the stars over a 8 bedroom guest house. And I do not mind driving around an older model car when it works just fine. In truth, I’d love to have no car at all, but I would have to sacrifice my other hobbies to live that way.

It is, however, easy for people not living the same way to see you skipping out on a Michelin star dinner or first class flight as a waste. Which segues well to the second challenge I would like to point out; very few other people will be able to rack their brains around what you are doing. You will seem like the crazy person. Even those around you who seem to understand and agree with 90% of what you say will come up with a hundred excuses about why the last 10% will not work for them.

The real answer is that even though others won’t plan out their life the same as you, remaining consistent is important. You will have to swim upstream against capitalist and consumerist societal norms, and that is simply part of the path. It can be hard to stay consistent when everyone around you is burning a hole in their pockets faster than they can fuel the fire, but know that that means it is working.

In some ways, I do still feel it is important to have these discussions with others and at least get the concept in their mind. There is always something to learn from someone, and by listening to others and sharing your lessons, you can change the lives of people around you for the better.

The last challenge I will point out is related to my game of life theory. That is to say that all of life (traditional, Western societal life, that is) is broken up into games. High school is really a game where the winner has the best grades and extracurricular involvements to set them up for a prestigious university with hefty tuition discounts.

Once you finish the high school game, you may move on to the university or apprenticeship game. Here the challenge is to find a decent paying job, and the “winners” often have reputable internships, high GPAs, and strong extracurriculars once again. You win the game by finding a full-time job at a company.

But the final, and longest game we play, is work. This one can run for 45 years if not carefully planned. And, again, if you enjoy your work then there is no worry. But interests change and planning around that is valuable when you are in the best compound interest years you have left in your life.

The final game ends when you have enough money saved up to retire. From there, it is like playing Minecraft on creative mode (with some more restrictions, I guess.) You are in control of your schedule, your location, your social circles. It ties back to all of the doors opening up.

To know you are playing the longest game of them all can make an accelerated timeline of 10 to 20 years still feel like the longest unwanted experience ever. But the course is worth while. Patience and trust in the small, boring work of saving and investing leads to the biggest reward. The end of the games.

Personally, I acknowledge these trade offs. I challenge myself to embrace them and learn from the discomfort they bring. Ultimately, my freedom from work, my time for passions and family, and my financial security are things that I do not wish to gamble on. By building them in now, I take out the luck of winning the lottery or a large windfall. I create my own luck by gradually opening doors.