Chunks of Time, Slices of Life: Reviewing Your Past for Peak Experiences

Yesterday, we walked through an exercise for looking at your lifetime of work earnings so far.

The goal was to understand that number and to see how much of it you have kept (saved, invested, or essentially your net worth).

One thing I meant to include was how much Joe Dominguez, co-author of Your Money or Your Life, had when he Left his job on Wall Street in 1969.

According to a Google Gemini search, he retired with somewhere around $100,000. He lived from the proceeds of that invested amount until he passed away in the 1990s.

Pete Adeney, of Mr. Money Mustache blog fame, stated that he retired with about a $600,000 net worth. I believe he left his employment in 2005.

In 2010 and later, he was sharing that his family of three spent about $25,000 per year. He felt that was a somewhat outrageous amount to spend each year.

Hmm. I suppose it’s all in your perspective.

Adeney and Dominquez were both around 30 years old when they left their corporate jobs.

In the mid-2010s, financial educator Wade Moss proposed that you could retire happily on $500,000. I bring that up because Moss is talking about traditional retirement ages, versus someone who has 30–35 years before they are eligible for Social Security.

Dominguez’s $100,000 would have been the equivalent of about $550,000 in 2005 and $600,000 in 2010.

In a sense, they both started at the same place when they reached their crossover points and became FIRE.

In 2026, that number would now be about $900,000.

By the way, yesterday I stated that my net worth was about 52% of my lifetime earnings.

However, with inflation from 2020 to 2026, my net worth is only 42% of the inflated number.

Ouch. That is inflation for you.

Which is why you can’t keep the bulk of your savings in cash.

You must find a way to invest it to earn more than the amount of inflation, and to generate cash flow to live on.

But today’s article is a follow-up to yesterday’s.

Today, I want to share an exercise that I did about two years ago.

It was inspired, likely, by Barbara Sher’s exercise to review your childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood and come up with three things that really moved you in each period.

What I did was look at my past life in five-year increments.

My goal was to develop a list of at least five peak experiences from each five-year chunk of my life so far.

You can do the same.

Perhaps you want to start at three years old and go to eight years old, and then nine to thirteen, etc.

That would have made more sense for me, but I essentially started at birth and worked my way out.

Those first five years of my life are mostly unconscious until about three years old.

And even then, there are only a few standout memories from that time until I reached five years old. That’s when memories really started to kick in.

What did I discover that surprised me?

First, holy wowtastic, life flies by when you look at it this way. There is plenty of time, but it’s precious.

Second, probably everything I still love and value was revealed in the earliest years of my life, just in smaller-scale form.

I was moved by Beauty and already searching for a Beloved.

That trip to Colorado and horseback riding through the Garden of the Gods inspired a longing for beautiful places.

And, I was already into pretty girls at a very early age. Oh, behave, little Austin Powers!

Music made me groove.

I loved to get the pretty girls in the neighborhood to come to my room and watch me sing along to songs on my little record player.

Adventures. That’s what I wanted.

I loved the old reruns of TV shows like Johnny Quest, the live-action Batman, and such.

I talked a kid into hiking a mile away from our houses to see a “river” (a drainage ditch) on the other side of the neighborhood. We were five or six then.

My anti-authoritarian streak was showing up pretty early, too.

I tried to talk some friends into forming a gang and skipping school. That was either first grade or second grade.

Watch out, folks. We have a bad boy in training here.

But ..

That was all about wanting more freedom and wanting to not being kept down by “the man.”

I loved visiting my grandparents for two weeks or so each summer. That was always an adventure and a bit of a spa-like artist’s retreat.

And I started earning money pretty early, too. I think I was either 11 or had just turned 12 when I got a paper route.

I like spending cash, I cannot lie.

I love the time Freedom of FIRE.

Yeah, not much has changed.

I still love and value those things, and the joy and happiness they bring into my life, in some form or another.

Relationships were huge, too.

First loves, marriage, my kids, friends. All very important in the journey.

The conventional and material successes are there, too, like graduations, first house, etc.

But they kind of ring hollow compared to the pure joy and play of experiences and relationships.

That’s it. I

it’s a simple exercise and will likely take you about 15-30 minutes.

I encourage you to do this exercise. I bet you will be surprised by what comes up for you.

It’s fodder for the type of future you want to create from here on out.