Let me interrupt the regular schedule on this blog for a very special congratulations to my friend Purple from A Purple Life on her last day of work!
This impressive lady has accumulated over 500K in networth in just about 9 years and took the courageous move of quitting her job and declaring herself FIREd at the sweet age of 30 years old!
In honor of this special day, many of her friends and I have come together to help her celebrate. I’m writing a quick recap of why she is awesome and including plenty of links to some of her posts which might be helpful and interesting for anyone on the journey to financial independence.
You have questions, she has answers!
Before I begin, and before you write an angry comment about “how can this plan even work /be achieved /has a definition of retired you don’t like”, let me reassure you that Purple has probably written extensively to answer some questions that may be bouncing around in your mind.
For example lots of her contingency plans show up here:
- Why I’m Comfortable Retiring With $500,000
- This particular post ,which I love, even has a diagram to show how she made her decision to go ahead with her quit date despite how weird 2020 turned out.
She has many posts that detail her expenses, savings & investment strategy, such as:
- How I Lived On $17,896 In 2019
- How I Spent $1,400/Month In Seattle: Q2 Budget Check-In 2020
- How I Saved $68,000 In 2019
- Why I Own 100% US Stocks
She even details out how she’ll deal with many technicalities of embarking on nomad life:
- How Do I Get My Mail As A Global Nomad? A Traveling Mailbox Review
- What’s My Health Insurance Plan As A Nomad And Early Retiree?
With these questions out of the way, I can get into why I admire Purple so darn much!
The Personal Finance Murderbot
If you are wondering what a murderbot is, you have not read the Murderbot diaries and you should stop reading this and immediately read that excellent Sci FI novella series.
Now if you are wondering why I’m calling my dear friend a Murderbot, let me enlighten you. The main character in those stories is a self-aware android who is a real badass. Despite its no bullshit attitude, Murderbot just can’t help but get attached to and protect the humans it meets along the way, even though many humans had been really shitty to it in the past.
There is a lot more depth in that character but that quick summary should be enough to let you know a bit about Purple.
She is a badass who calls it like it is :
- What If Everyone Stopped Being Fake At Work
- FIRE Is For Wimps
- Microaggressions And Giving Up On My Favorite Company
Ends up helping those close to her and many others along the way:
- What Happened When I Shared My Salary With My Coworkers?
- How To Teach A Curious Friend About Financial Independence
- How To Negotiate With A Spendy Partner Or Family Member
- How To Thrive While Working From Home
- How To Slay Interviews Like A Job Hopping Fiend
- How To Cut Out Net Negative Experiences And Live Your Best Life
- How To Sell Old Or Broken Electronics To Subsidize Your Next Purchase
- How To Negotiate With A Spendy Partner Or Family Member
Besides, Purple has referred to herself as a robot as seen here:
“It’s entirely possible that I’m an out of touch robot, but I would imagine, if people stopped putting on a mask at work, we would save a lot of time and energy by not trying to pretend we care about: your weekend, the weather, your upcoming vacation etc. “
Yet she got that wrong here, she’s not out of touch! She’s actually more attuned to the important stuff that has a true and real impact. She clearly knows that though 😉 as we can see her response to a friend (who has since deleted his twitter account – doh!).
Experimenting and honesty as a way of life
What I like most about following Purple’s journey is that she is not afraid to experiment (while diligently tracking her results) and sharing what she learns with total honesty.
That honesty and those experiments can bring on some funny and insightful moments:
- Dumbass Stuff I’ve Done To Save Money
- Lessons Learned From 100 Alcohol Free Days
- How It Felt To Get Rid Of Everything I Own
- An Intro To The Magic Of Sous Vide Cooking
- Testing My Early Retirement Schedule
- That Time I Laughed In A Financial Advisor’s Face
And sometime some more grim ones:
Yet the result is very beautiful. It’s a true representation of real life: a coexistence of happiness, grief, wonder, pain and, sometimes, just plain old dull moments (not that her blog gets dull of course but as an advocate for the Slug Life, I know Purple will catch my drift here) .
Conclusion
Huge congrats to Purple and if you are not following her journey yet, what are you waiting for!? She’s promised to keep up her weekly posting schedule at least for the first year after quitting her job. I’m super excited to get to see her thoughts throughout this change and hope you will follow along!
A huge thank you Ms Mod for coming up with this idea, and you totally knocked this out of the park. I limited myself to 5 Purple blog posts. I think you linked nearly her whole blog 🙂 LOVE IT!!!