How long can you afford to say no?

A few days ago I caught myself thinking that working for a salary felt like a modern form of slavery. Yes, these are the things that go through my head while I'm walking down the street.

I soon realised that using the word slave was over the top. I can leave my job, find another one, move to another country, save, try to build something of my own. Someone who is actually enslaved has none of those options, and comparing the two is like complaining about your wifi in front of someone who has no running water. So I dropped the word, but not the question: if you can't afford to stop working, how free are you really?

Is earning more the same as being freer?

For years I thought it was. I thought that if I studied, got a good job, worked my way up and earned more, I would be freer. I'd say I've had three different income levels in my life. I'm not convinced my freedom grew at the same rate as my income.

When I lived in Valencia, my salary was on the tight side. It covered the month and not much else. If someone had asked me back then how long I could say no, the answer would have been uncomfortable: a couple of months, and with a knot in my stomach from day one. That wasn't being able to stop, it was an emergency buffer. I could change jobs, sure. But I couldn't stop. Choosing between two doors is not the same as being able to stand still in the corridor for a while.

With that bank account, anything that happened at the office was automatically bearable. Not because I was especially patient, but because the fixed costs turned up on time every month, whether the month had gone well or badly.

Then I moved to Madrid and went self-employed. That meant a considerable jump in income and the satisfaction of knowing I could stop for more months, even though it made me anxious to wonder whether I'd find something as good as what I had.

And I could stretch it to almost a year if I cut my variable spending, which means cancelling dinners, trips, hobbies and everything that makes a month feel like a life rather than a spreadsheet. Freedom in budget mode.

Then I started working for foreign companies and I was earning more again. A lot more. Today, if the money stopped tomorrow, I could keep my life running for two years. And that's without touching anything: same spending, not one luxury cut. If I tightened up, a lot longer.

On top of that is what I've paid into my pension, which would add several more years. But I don't count that money: it's locked away until the State decides I can touch it.

That should be the happy ending of this post. It isn't. I still don't feel I have the freedom to stop working, and I'll explain why.

The money I can't spend

That two-year cushion isn't sitting in a current account waiting for me to take a sabbatical. Most of it is long-term investing in ETFs, funds that track a whole index and are bought like a single share. Another part is in options contracts, a form of active trading on the stock market that I've been learning to do for just under a year.

All of it has a purpose already assigned in my head: it's my retirement plan. I have a number, and the day that money reaches that number, working will become genuinely optional. Let me explain why. When I get there, the plan isn't to spend it, it's to withdraw 4% a year. Assuming the portfolio returns 8% on average, I'd be living off what it produces without emptying the account. I didn't make the number up, I did the maths backwards: I worked out how much I need each month to live, and from there the amount I need for that 4% to pay me what I want each year.

Getting there will take years. Probably ten if nothing goes wrong and if I don't find a way to shorten that timeline, which is exactly my plan.

So yes, technically I could stop working for two years. But that money isn't sitting still, it's working every month. If I use it to live on, I don't just lose what I take out: I lose everything that money would have generated between now and my retirement. And since the number I want to reach stays the same, the bill isn't paid in money, it's paid in the years I can't retire. Every sabbatical year now could cost me several extra years of work at the end. It's a loan I make to myself at a terrible rate of interest.

In case it needs saying: this is what I do with my money, it isn't financial advice. No average return comes signed by anyone, and I'm still learning too, some of it by getting things wrong.

What I'm missing isn't a cushion

It's something else: income that doesn't depend on my time.

Across all three stages, one thing never changed: everything that lands in my account comes out of my own hours. Employed or self-employed, here or abroad, the deal is the same: I put in time and money comes out. The only thing that changed is the price per hour, and that doesn't break the deal, it just renegotiates it.

So I stopped measuring my freedom in money and started measuring it in months of no. No to a job you no longer want. No to a client who isn't worth it. No to a relationship you can't afford to leave.

I don't want to stop working

To be clear: work isn't the enemy. It gave me the life I have, and if I stopped I'd be bored within two weeks and end up reorganising my wardrobe by colour.

What I want is to choose: to take a project because it excites me and not because the bills need paying, to stop for six months and come back without anything having collapsed. For work to stop coming with that silent contract of staying put until I'm sixty-seven or beyond.

Saving more doesn't get me there. Income that keeps coming in when I'm not sitting at my computer does. That's what I'm building in the background, while I keep putting hours into a job every month. My goal is no longer to reach the number: it's to shorten the timeline.

The question I'll leave you with

If your pay stopped tomorrow, how long could you keep your life going? A year? Three months? Until Friday? And then the part that stings: out of that time, how much could you actually spend without wrecking your retirement along the way?

That's what this blog is about: building options little by little, with a job, a family and a life you can't put on hold. I'm still a long way off and I have no magic formula. I'm working to bring that dependence down as far as I can.

There's one thing that eats those months of no faster than anything else. It isn't your boss. It smiles at you from an app, congratulates you on your instant approval and comes in easy monthly payments. That's the next post.

Steer your money, or it'll steer you.