YOU DON'T HAVE TO WAIT

Derek Hagen
6 minutes ago
3 min read

Hand-drawn line graph of experiences over time, flat with small bumps labeled "why wait," rising sharply after a dot marked retirement.

❝If your knees aren't green by the end of the day, you ought to seriously re-examine your life.❞ -Calvin, Calvin and Hobbes (Bill Watterson)

Experience windows exist now. You don't have to wait for retirement to use them.

Most people think of retirement as the moment life finally opens up. Some work jobs they hate because the paycheck is good enough to get them to the finish line. Some defer the experiences they actually want until they have more time.

It doesn't have to be that way.

LIFE TRANSITIONS CREATE OPPORTUNITIES

Money, time, and health rarely align. At most stages of life, something is missing. But every major life transition creates a brief moment where the resource balance shifts and a window opens.

Young adults have health and time working for them, and they've got the ability to have different experiences before they've got a mortgage, kids, and a demanding job.

The between-jobs window is an opportunity to travel or take on projects before starting a new job.

The empty nest window is when the schedule opens up.

The point is to see if we can spot these windows where we can live our lives before retirement.

Hand-drawn arrow banner reading "life" through young adult, between jobs, pre-kids, and empty nest, labeled opportunities for experiences.

MONEY CAN BUY TIME

If you're deficient in time but abundant in money, as is common in middle age, you can buy time back.

Hire the help. Delegate the task. Pay for the convenience. Take the trip now rather than someday.

The reframe here is to think less about how you can make that money last and more about how you can get that money to work for you because money's purpose is to fund the life you want. Using your money to reclaim time helps you do that.

Hand-drawn circle labeled money with an arrow pointing to a rectangle labeled time, captioned "do the thing."

Money Scripts® are subconscious beliefs we have about money that we learn these we are growing up in our family systems. A Money Script can be anything, but they tend to fall into four categories. Learn what categories your Money Scripts fall into.

FRONT-LOAD YOUR EXPERIENCES

Bill Perkins argues in Die With Zero that young people should consider borrowing against their future earning years to take advantage of their health and time now.

The logic is that an experience at 25 is fundamentally different from the same experience at 55. The body responds differently. The sense of wonder is different. The memory dividend, the value you get from looking back on an experience over decades, is higher when the experience happened earlier.

Hand-drawn bar chart of three paired time and health bars declining left to right across increasing age, with the tallest pair marked "take advantage of this."

Borrowing from your future self is a real concept, but it comes with real risks. It requires confidence that the income will actually arrive. It can build habits around credit that outlast the circumstances that justified them. This isn't permission to spend recklessly.

And before borrowing anything, it's worth asking what you're actually buying.

Sometimes a $500 trip delivers the same memory, the same connection, the same sense of adventure as a $5,000 vacation. Sometimes it doesn't. The experience is what you're buying, not the price tag. Knowing the difference matters, because borrowing to have an experience you couldn't otherwise have is one thing, and borrowing to have the expensive version of something you could have affordably is another.

Hand-drawn bar chart comparing a tall "option A" bar to a shorter "option B" bar, bracketed as same experience, less money.

YOU DON'T HAVE TO WAIT

This isn't an argument against saving or planning. It's an argument against using saving and planning as a substitute for living.

The permission most people are waiting for doesn't require retirement to arrive first. The windows exist now, at every transition, in every stage of life, if you're paying attention.

You get one life; live intentionally.

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