I've reached this mindset now of professional de-ambition and that grind that we somehow keep on doing.
As soon as we start our career, we're like climbing, climbing, climbing to go where, right?
When do you stop?
When do you know it's enough?
And I have reached the point when it was just enough.
Because life is short, right?
My name is Florence Poirel.
I am 37 years old.
I quit my 390K job at Google last year.
And I'm now enjoying a mini retirement in Switzerland.
So I live in Talville, it is south of Zurich, alongside the Zurich Lake, with my partner Yann.
I'm actually surprised because I've always been someone very active, even at work.
So I thought I would get bored very easily.
But now it's been a year and a half and I still haven't found a time of boredom.
I started at 60K a year as a contractor for Google and I finished at about 390K in Zurich as a senior program manager.
I was always very career-driven, so that translated into working a lot of hours and trying to climb the ladder as efficiently as possible.
And I was promoted on average every two years.
My partner is 17 years older than I am.
Quickly, I realized that I could not just wait for retirement to enjoy my time with him.
This is really when I started exploring FIRE and how to optimize my finances to retire earlier.
That is the perks of living in Switzerland.
You're always close to a lake.
That's quality of life right there.
I grew up in a frugal family.
One example I love is my mom used to tell us to turn off the lights all the time and somehow it would pay for Disneyland.
So from the very beginning of my first income, I would easily save more than 50% of my income.
So by the time I actually left Google, my savings rate was very often 80, 85%.
And the mindset was not really this like frugality at all costs.
It's just second nature.
By January 2024, I had about 1.5 million saved slash invested.
And this is really what kicked off my mini retirement.
It is a very high paying job in a very expensive country and saying no from one day to the next to this kind of income, you know, can be daunting for sure.
By the time I left the company, it was actually very easy because in my mind I was a woman on fire.
Now I have an amount of money where I can sustain myself for quite a while.
Today we split our shared expenses.
I think it's much more fair to share proportional of what you bring in.
We split 65% for my partner and 35% for me.
We don't have joint accounts, so having separate finances to us is very important to keep that independence.
Our rent is $6,300 and my share is about $2,200.
It can sound pretty expensive but actually for Switzerland and for the location I would say it's pretty reasonable and we really enjoy the freedom that comes with renting.
Welcome to my home.
So this is a four bedroom, two bathroom apartment.
So this is our kitchen.
I really like how open it is.
It's very nice because then my partner and I can cook without bumping into each other.
We also have access to a small terrace balcony.
This is actually my favorite space.
It has a great view.
We can spend easily. two, three hours here in the morning enjoying coffee.
Here is the second and biggest terrace in the apartment.
We really enjoy it because it has such a nice view, which is lovely at sunset.
We spend maybe about $600 per month altogether in food expenses.
I'm vegan, so I eat a lot of beans and lentils and things like that.
And this is great because it's five francs for nearly one kilos of fava beans, which is a great price for Switzerland.
So it's fantastic.
And we mostly eat at home.
I pay 450 per month in health insurance and this is pretty average for the price of health insurance in Switzerland.
I mostly walk into town and walk around anywhere we go, which obviously saves a lot of money.
I don't use credit cards because I don't have to worry about a credit score in Europe and also I really don't like going into debt.
I intend to go back to some sort of employment very soon.
To me, FIRE means Financial Independence Relaxed Employment.
So I don't think I'm in the position yet to fully retire and not ever have an income back.
However, I am in something called Coast FIRE, meaning that I do not need to save much money anymore for retirement and all that.
I could go to a part-time job, something that is much more flexible, to sustain my lifestyle and still have a lot of freedom.
I have to say I'm not particularly antsy to go back to employment.
I thought I would be by now, but I really, really enjoy the daily life that we've created in this mini retirement.
We actually already extended it.
It was supposed to be just one year and I pushed it to a year and a half.
It's a tremendous experience.
I'm really happy I did it then and I did not wait longer to do it, because life is too short and life is beautiful, and it is too sad to spend most of that time spending it at work when we can spend it in beautiful nature with friends family, loved ones and doing things that make us truly happy.
