After Wall Street crashed, many chased the FIRE movement dream of ‘financial independence, retire early’. Today, some are rolling in cash – but it didn’t work for everyone…

For many of us, the idea of spending four decades of your life working full-time and putting in long hours is hardly an appealing way to live.

Not to mention having to wake up to an alarm clock and travel to work, or constantly being told off for having different ideas that clash with authority.

Dolly Parton’s 1980 hit 9 to 5 perfectly captured the exploitative nature of work with a line about letting ‘you dream just to watch ’em shatter, you’re just a step on the bossman’s ladder’.

And even if they aren’t been exploited, many are scared of being worked to death.

But in the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis, a movement emerged of people who planned to save aggressively, invest and retire in their forties.

They are part of the FIRE Movement – or Financial Independence, Retire Early. The theory is you can get by on income from investments (usually property) or earn money from a business you own but aren’t actively involved in.

Generally speaking, those planning to retire two decades earlier than usual are the type of people with a strong work ethic who are simply seeking some balance in life after working full-time since they were teenagers.

They include Millennials now in their thirties who want more time with their children while they are still young, and Gen X empty-nesters in their fifties who want to go travelling overseas while they are still fit enough. 

Dolly Parton’s 1980 hit 9 to 5 perfectly captured the exploitative nature of work 

Leonie Bint, 57, retired two years ago after working as a branch manager with the Macarthur Credit Union and doing the books for her husband’s business that specialised in repairing metal elevator door scratches and dents.

Her husband Kelvin, 56, is planning to retire in the next two months after 40 years of working, and hand his Sydney-focused business, In Form Stainless, to their 25-year-old son Brayden.

‘In the early days, he’d be doing 16-hour days, six, seven days a week,’ Leonie Bint says of her husband.

Kelvin, who is now working part-time two or three days a week as he transitions into retirement, says work at one point never stopped, with clients including the National Rugby League’s Shark Stadium in Cronulla.

‘We were working constantly: we were probably down to three-and-a-half, four hours a day of sleep,’ he tells me.

Kelvin, a welder and metal fabricator, also experienced the stress of employing 25 staff when the Global Financial Crisis saw customers abruptly stop spending money.

‘We got really big but then after the GFC, it sort of died off a lot so we ended up closing,’ Leonie recalls. 

The remarried Gen X empty-nester grandparents, with four adult children between them aged 25 to 33, have moved from the Camden area, in Sydney’s outer south-west, to the Camden Haven area, south of Port Macquarie on the NSW mid-north coast.

Leonie Bint, 57, (right) retired two years ago after working as a branch manager with the Macarthur Credit Union and doing the books for her husband Kelvin’s (left) business that specialised in repairing metal elevator door scratches and dents

The Dunbogan locals, now living a stone’s throw from the beach in a gated community, want to go travelling overseas while they are still fit and healthy.

They have a European trip planned for next month to Spain and Denmark, and another holiday in Asia towards the end of the year taking in Singapore, Thailand and Bali.

‘We’ve done quite a few overseas trips and on one of them, we were the youngest too,’ Leonie says.

‘We like cruising and stuff but we’re usually in the young crowd. Everyone’s older.

‘They all say: do it now [retire and travel] while you’re younger because physically you can’t when you’re older, and so I think that’s what we’ve just always had in our mind that we want to go and see the world. We want to do stuff and physically be able to do it.’

Kelvin says meeting new people on holiday is another thing he’s looking forward to.

‘When you’re on those cruises, you’re always meeting people and we’ve kept in contact with pretty much someone from every cruise,’ he says.

He’s also more inclined to try some more physically demanding pursuits, like cycling from Amsterdam to Bruges in the Netherlands. 

For trips around Australia, they have already converted Kelvin’s Hyundai Staria work van into a campervan with a bed to save on having to buy a motorhome or a caravan – and are already planning a trip to Broken Hill’s Mundi Mundi Bash in August.

‘If we get too old for that sort of thing, we’ve still not spent a fortune on a caravan,’ Kelvin says.

Rather than invest on the share market, they borrowed to buy eight investment properties in three states including houses at Logan, south of Brisbane; Moranbah, in north Queensland; Old Bar, on the NSW mid-north coast; Albury in southern NSW; an Airbnb house at Dunbogan; and a property in Adelaide.

‘At least with the houses, I still feel that the houses are pretty stable because we have a housing crisis,’ Leonie says.

‘As much as the house prices do go up and down, we’ve got enough equity that we feel secure enough in the choices that we’ve made.

‘If you’d gone down the path and put all our money into the share market, I think we’d be feeling a little bit more anxious now. That would be a concern.

‘I’m glad we bought property a few years ago and had the time to sit on it so now, they’ve all got enough equity in it that, we can sell one and still manage.’ 

They are living off rental income from their investment properties before they can access their superannuation and aren’t worried about bank savings rates falling should the Reserve Bank keep cutting interest rates.

‘If you put money in the bank, it just disappears,’ Kelvin says. 

Travis Elliott, the 37-year-old managing director of QLD Roller Shutters, is planning to completely retire by his late forties so he can go on more holidays to places like Japan and Italy with his wife Selina, their daughter, 10, and seven-year-old son.

‘We’ve sacrificed a lot, to be fair to get where we are,’ he tells me.

‘By the time I aim to retire, another say eight years, my daughter’s going to be 16, 17, 18, kind of thing, by the time I’m partially retired.

‘I can get the most out of really good holidays with them. We enjoy skiing – that’s been off the cards up until pretty much the last couple of years.

‘That’s my plan – I’d love to be able to get away and still afford to enjoy a couple of good trips a year with my family and just spend more time with my wife.’

Travis is planning to continue to own his business, which locally manufactures garage doors and roller shutters for windows, but gradually let someone else do the day-to-day running.

‘It’s not to sit around and do nothing, I couldn’t do that,’ he says.

‘If I continue to own the business, have it sort of run passively, I’d do one day a week.

Travis Elliott, the 37-year-old managing director of QLD Roller Shutters, is planning to retire by his late forties so he can go on more holidays with his wife Selina and their children

‘We’ve got a bit of a succession plan – we’ve got one of my guys who’s been working in the business a long time, very presentable, got a lot of knowledge. I’m looking in the next year or two transitioning where he does a lot more of that and sort of train him in what I do, the way I like to do things, as I step back a bit.

‘I want to be done and dusted, definitely before 50; I want to be able to utilise my retirement, I don’t want to be an old person and retired.’

The proprietor, who bought QLD Roller Shutters in 2019 as the previous owner battled cancer, has spend the past six years putting in 70-hour weeks and some 12-hour days, working every day except Sunday. 

He says his Sunshine Coast-based baby boomer father, now 68, had worked too hard in his business marketing career.

Gil Elliott, who is yet to retire permanently, agrees he is a workaholic and isn’t the type to sit around with a fishing line.

‘I won’t retire – I can’t see myself sitting around fishing at 70 or 80,’ he says. 

‘It’s probably a personality thing – Travis has probably seen what has happened and he’s taken a good lesson from that.

‘I believe that I will probably never retire completely but I said I want a situation where I can do what I want to, rather than what I have to.

Gil Elliott, who is yet to retire permanently, agrees he is a workaholic and isn’t the type to sit around with a fishing line

‘If I loved golf, I’d probably be playing off single figures now but my interest has been businesses. I love it when they work.’

Gil Elliott obtained a Master of Business Administration in his late fifties and tried briefly retiring at 60 in 2018, hoping there would be continuing income from his sales distribution business, G and S Marketing.

For almost four decades, it had sold consumer electronic goods from the likes of Sharp, De’Longhi, Kenwood and Nescafe’s Dolce Gusto coffee machines to major retailers, having started at Rockhampton in central Queensland before branching out across Australia and New Zealand.

But things turned sour when big electronics brands decided they no longer needed his company’s sales and marketing services – a decade after the Global Financial Crisis.

One client terminated their arrangement to distribute products across Australasia  after it had been in place for 37 years.

‘I was retired at 60 and I had my business sold and then unfortunately that fell over,’ he says.

‘That business was worth several million dollars so I decimated my super.’

For almost four decades, Gil Elliott (pictured in 1980) had sold consumer electronic goods from the likes of Sharp and De’Longhi to major retailers, having started at Rockhampton in central Queensland before branching out across Australia and New Zealand

Individual JB Hi-Fi and Harvey Norman stores started buying stock from the corporate head office, rather than through his sales company.

His business had previously received commission from selling direct to the stores at a wholesale level and organising in-store displays to boost sales but the business model collapsed overnight.

This forced Gil to sell his other personal assets, from properties to trusts, and start a new business instead of retiring.

‘Unfortunately, the business turned sour for me and I had to unfortunately divest myself of some of those properties and some of those funds out of super,’ he says.

His son has no plans to keep working into his sixties like his father.

Travis wants more of a balance from his mid-forties onwards, having worked as a fridge mechanic before selling electronic goods at JB Hi-Fi and going into real estate.

‘It’s funny because I’ve always, sort of, had this plan because I’ve seen Dad [and] how hard he’s worked,’ he says.

‘I didn’t want that to be similar to me: I could probably continue to work and have an extremely great lifestyle but I’d rather have a pretty headache-free, debt-free nice passive income coming in.’

Travis, who owns a house at Scarborough north of Brisbane, plans to derive income from the business, which also includes the ownership of industrial premises in the southern Brisbane suburbs of Sumner and Coopers Plains.

But retiring early is far from easy with Australians unable to access their superannuation until they turn 60, not to mention qualifying for the age pension at 67.

Someone retiring in their late thirties therefore has to have an income stream for three decades, in the absence of work.

Even a modest retirement for a single person would conservatively cost $32,897 a year and those Association of Superannuation Funds of Australia figures cater for those aged 65 to 84 who typically have less of an appetite for overseas holidays.

A comfortable retirement is costed at $51,814 annually, based on the idea of travelling abroad every seven years. 

Gil Elliott has since established Positive Income Strategies, giving people tips on how to retire early through investment properties.

‘It’s about helping people learn to budget, because they don’t teach that anywhere anymore, to save, and then from that eventually invest so they have some passive income,’ he says.

But he admits Donald Trump’s tariff wars could erode superannuation balances, forcing many people to delay their retirement during a cost-of-living crisis.

‘It may add a year or two to their quest of retiring,’ he says. 

Gil says retiring early requires very disciplined saving.

‘Most people don’t know how to save, they don’t know how to budget,’ he tells me.

‘Five-dollar coffees instead of 70 cent one and make your own; I look at my credit card and say, “Why have I got six bloody things apart from Netflix on my card every month?”‘

Leonie Bint, who left school at 15, says the idea of retiring early was in fact a childhood dream – and she was actively listening to podcasts on the FIRE movement to finetune their investment strategy.

‘My dad actually retired very early – in his forties; sold the house, moved to our weekend farm place, built a house and just worked whenever he wanted to so I guess maybe some of that rubbed off – “I don’t want to work forever”,’ she says.

‘He’s now passed too and I figure, if he’d actually worked up until retirement age, he would have only lived another five or six years before he died.

‘Enjoying more life now while we physically can is the most important thing to us.’ 

Kelvin says working forever to grow an even bigger business would have been pointless.

‘I could’ve gone the other way and built the business up and worked for more and more but we don’t really need it. How much do you need?’ 

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