Kaska Adoteye, 36, lives in Atlanta and recently left his job at Netflix as part of his pursuit of the FIRE movement, or Financial Independence, Retire Early. Business Insider verified his former employment, investment holdings, and medical status. The following has been edited for brevity and clarity.
When I was 19, I got a diagnosis that basically meant that my life expectancy was a lot lower than that of other people. It’s called a cerebral AVM. It’s a rare brain malformation that greatly increases my chance of brain hemorrhaging.
I might not have those golden years that a lot of people have. I was thinking through different ways of mitigating that. In graduate school, I got a book about financial planning, read it in one day, and thought, “I want to retire by 40. How do I make this happen?”
It’s been a wild ride. On one hand, I wanted to save and retire, but on the other hand, I could literally die tomorrow. I want to live life to the fullest.
When I started this in graduate school, I was spending too much. I thought, “I need to stop eating out as much.” I was living alone, so I moved in with roommates.
I got a Ph.D. in applied math. My dissertation was on biological population modeling. My job at Netflix was doing forecasting — building mathematical models around uncertain things.
Retiring early is a difficult financial problem because there are a lot of variables: the stock market, the real estate market, inflation, and global politics. But there is a lot of data out there that you can use to do projections.
When I got my first full-time job, I was lucky enough to be making a six-figure salary. I was like, “I’m going to live much better than I did in grad school, but I’m also not going to ball out in a way that many of my compatriots were.”
After school, I was still driving my super old Hyundai Elantra. Then, when I was 32, my plan was working better than I expected it would, so I thought, “Let me increase my standard of living a bit.” So I did get a nicer car, a BMW 2 Series.
There’s always something fancier — nicer cars, nicer vacations — so enjoying what you have is paramount. But when you do flip the switch and get something like a BMW, it’s like, “Oh, man. That’s crazy.”
The mental aspect
People don’t talk enough about the mental aspect of this. You need to keep yourself grounded and keep your expectations realistic. Learning to appreciate what you have is an underutilized but extraordinarily important skill.
For the last couple of years, I’ve been making a list of things I’d want to do to be productive when I’m retired. I would like to work on financial independence education. I could explore mentoring or tutoring opportunities, as well as short-term consulting. Maybe it’s a few hours a week or a few weeks a year, and then I’m back on the beach.
My fiancée runs a travel business, and we both want to see more of the world. I’d also love to see friends and family that I don’t get to see as often. I have a lot of books I want to read and TV shows to watch.
My ‘FU Number’
A thing I’ve heard a lot of people say is, “If I just made more money, I’d be able to retire or do this.” I don’t think that’s true. There are a lot of people who make a lot of money but don’t have a financial plan, so they aren’t able to save. There are people who make little money who are able to make a plan and get to their number.
We start to get into questions of, “How am I investing? What’s the expected return on those investments? How volatile are those investments? What are the things I need to look out for, like healthcare?” Then it’s building out an engine to run simulations on that. People in the FIRE community would know about running Monte Carlo simulations with variables in mind. I was always aiming for a 70% chance of ending up with enough to retire.
I also built in a buffer — extra money that is not accounted for in my retirement plan.
When I started at work, I told people my “FU number” was $2 million. I’m retiring with more than that, but that was the number I was gunning for.
There’s going to be appreciation. There’s going to be dividends. It’s not just $2 million sitting in cash that I’m pulling from. I would not recommend that.
All along, I never gave up because I would think about this moment: Being able to have this complete freedom and financial independence, I love this feeling for me, and I want this for everybody.
A few years ago, research came out that the risk for someone with a condition like mine is lower than they previously thought. So it seems it’s possible I might have those golden years. I did all this planning, and now I guess it’s “retire early and live longer.”
Do you have a story to share about your career? Contact this reporter at [email protected].
