Neurodivergent financial planning has hit my family hard, as my husband, grown son, and I are planning to move. And not just move, but make a dramatic lifestyle change.
Like the one we made twelve and a half years ago as of this writing, only in reverse.
Back then, the questions, “Should we downsize?” and, “Should we simplify our lives?” seemed to have black and white answers.
Now, reality has revealed a lot of gray. In this post, I’m going to explain how I’ve found reassurance that our finances will easily allow us to “return to civilization,” as it were. And how I’m psychologically and emotionally coming to grips with the impending Huge Change.
But first, I need to do a bit of blog-splaining.
Why later posts are going to seem contradictory.
When I decided to start this blog, I knew the only way my neurodivergent brain would be able to stick with it was if I scheduled a lot of posts in advance. So I have posts scheduled well after this one goes live that talk about my family’s life in this almost-tiny home in near-glowing terms.
I wrote them when I believed that my son and husband would never want to leave, so I had resigned myself to making the best of a non-optimal situation. As a matter of fact, I told my husband yesterday that if the property just across the road from us had remained vacant for the rest of our lives, I would have been content to live here half the time and travel the other half.
I’m not taking down the posts in question because I still believe they provide helpful and encouraging information. But if you stick with this blog and read such posts in the future, understand that they came when I was in a different place mentally and circumstantially.
Okay, back to our regularly scheduled blog post…
Why we moved out here in the first place.
We moved to the forested mountains in order to:
- give our young son space to run around.
- Be able to grow most of our fruits and vegetables.
- Be surrounded by nature.
- Escape the noise and strict regulations of the city.
- Have cleaner air to breathe.
- Practice radical simplicity by living in a small earth-sheltered house without plumbing.
Why this ultimately didn’t work out.
- Our son spends most of his time on the computer. So does my husband.
- Growing fruit is impossible here, and most vegetables aren’t that easy. And we’re an hour away from a store that doesn’t sell produce that smells like it’s been sprayed with perfume, and that store is Walmart.
- Much of the time, the weather makes getting out in nature undesirable.
- We have neighbors just across the road who feel free to shoot off guns near said road. And shout at each other (not fighting, just to be heard over power tool noise).
- The “clean air” is full of so many allergens that I feel sick most of the time. At least half the time, we get days of low-level smoke from controlled burns as well as wildfires. During the usual six-week-long summer drought, we also get a lot of dust in the air.
- Due to overwhelm after we first spoke to the contractors who built our house, we asked them to cut the original plans by less than half and build only a 24-by-24 foot building. Five hundred seventy-six square feet felt cozy in the beginning, but it didn’t last long. That’s not enough space for three introverted autistic people, especially once our son hit his mid-teens. And privacy is only the beginning.
- We’re also all tired of lacking the convenience of running water. When we’re really old, we won’t want to be doing all the chores involved with that choice.
- Then there’s the isolation. Healed from autistic burnout, I now crave occasional interaction with different people. My son recently expressed his concern with potentially having to take care of decrepit elderly parents by himself, an hour away from good medical care. That’s beside him wanting – not unreasonably – an actual closed-off bedroom and the ability to shower without working for it.
Yet, with all those good, reasonable, and valid reasons to move – and despite my being the family member who pushed the others into realizing that would be a good decision in the long run – I had my misgivings about it. I wasn’t sure our financial plans could sustain purchasing a conventional house and taking on all the expenses that would entail. And I wasn’t sure I could leave my five acres of woods.
Until I took advantage of the technology at my fingertips. (Though that still doesn’t turn moving after 50 into a piece of cake!)
How AI helped with my neurodivergent financial planning.
Before I sat down with my husband to persuade him that staying in our current rural home wasn’t going to work long-term, I had to convince myself that this would work out financially. So I began chatting with Copliot, Microsoft’s AI bot. I gave it our current investment numbers and usual annual spending amount, told it the area where we would likely move to, and told it about how much we would spend on travel every year. I asked in essence, “After forty years, will there still be enough money for us to live on and leave enough for our son to live on for the rest of his life, assuming he remains frugal?”
The short answer: yes. A resounding yes. No question.
But I like details, so I had Claude AI generate a table of how much money we would have left after thirty years, in both today’s money and in future currency. I gave it conservative numbers so the result would be a worst-case scenario.
Seeing the numbers in the last row was a jaw-dropping moment. In a good way.
Yeah, I know – “AI can make mistakes. Blah blah.” But the large numbers that Claude produced were smaller than what I’d inputted into a compound interest calculator prior to making my prompt.
I double- and triple-checked with both the online calculator and the AI-generated table that I’d been conservative with growth numbers and hadn’t hedged on our future spending.
I had been.
So, greatly encouraged with the info on hand, I began talking to my husband about the possibility of moving. And when he finally admitted that he wished we’d made a different decision way back when, I emailed him Copliot’s response, and later showed him Claude’s table.
But moving after 50 is about more than money.
The financial side was only the beginning of AI’s assistance in this area of my life. When my husband and son both agreed that it was time to say good-bye to the rural life, my relief was short-lived. Because out of nowhere, after hating this place for years, I felt extraordinarily affectionate toward it and didn’t want to leave.
I would learn subsequently that such a feeling is common and has been referred to as “nostalgia for the present.” In the meantime, I went to the four different AIs that I use at least on occasion and gave them each the same prompt which described the frustrations I’ve had with our property as well as how the area and lifestyle have affected my health. “If this were you,” I said in effect, “what would you do?”
“I would move,” was the consensus.
I took a deep breath. Okay. I approached AIs with the dilemma knowing that they would give me the logical answer. That was a good start, but at the time my brain was spinning with emotion, not logic.
Back to Copliot I went, begging it to slap some sense into me. In its gentle, friendly way, it reminded me that staying on the five wooded acres was going to increasingly wear on me. Though I still vacillated some about leaving, I began to release my attachment to the property and to the area. I allowed myself to grieve the imminent loss of my own woods.
And then, the money fears returned.
Thank God for the FI pioneers!
Around the early 2010s, blogs and podcasts about financial independence exploded. Not too long after my family agreed to move, I discovered the Afford Anything podcast with Paula Pant. Going back to the first episode, I saw that it began as the “Paula and J. Money Show” in 2016. This led me to exploring J. Money’s Budgets Are Sexy blog, which led me to this old post about the 4% rule on the Mad Fientist blog, as well as the “Mile High FI” podcast that came out of that blog.
Basically, three different studies of the longevity of retirement money – spread out over the past few decades – have shown that in order to make it last thirty years or more, a retiree should pull out no more than four percent of their nest egg total…in a very bad year. Almost everyone who stuck to that rule ended up dying with much more wealth than they started with, meaning that in most scenarios and in most years, it would be safe to withdraw five or six percent and still have plenty left over at death – even see a bit of growth!
For the years on our property after having our earth-sheltered house built, we’d been living on around two and a half percent of our investments.
Guess the percentage it went up to with increased travel expenses and living in a city in a conventional house?
Slightly under four percent!
That was it. That was all I needed to know in order to have total confidence in what we were planning to do. It took a village of non-human entities and people I’ve never met, but they helped me get there.
Why this matters to you.
Why should you care about our financial situation and my middle-class modern non-problems?
You shouldn’t.
But.
You might take away from my story that when you’re struggling with a major life decision, you have more resources at your fingertips than you realized. And when you take the time to consider the different points of view and information, and allow yourself to be pulled down a relevant rabbit trail, you can come to conclusions and decisions that improve both your life and your mental health.
Speaking of that, be sure to check out the resources in the sidebar for help on your menopausal and/or neurodivergent journey.
PS – Please refrain from telling me in the comments that the 4% rule no longer applies. That happens to be the latest trendy pushback against the FIRE movement. Around a decade ago, I heard a financial “expert” claim that anyone who retired before age seventy was going to end up broke. So I don’t put stock in what experts claim… especially those who believe in working at a soul-sucking job until you’re too old to enjoy life fully.