At 40 I Don't Want to Stop Working. I Want to Teach High-School Math for a Fraction of My Salary.

In January I published our whole plan to financial freedom. The first line was: at 40, I want to have a choice.

Nobody asked me the obvious follow-up. A choice to do what? Every plan I read is precise about the number and vague about what to do after FIRE, and mine looked exactly the same from the outside.

Here's my answer, and I've had it since I was about fifteen. I want to teach high-school maths and physics. Not as a hobby, not one afternoon a week. Properly, with a timetable and a staff room and a stack of tests to mark on Sunday evening. For a fraction of what I earn now.

The awkward part is that I like my current job. A lot. I'm not counting down to anything. Which makes the plan sound slightly unhinged when I say it out loud: we save between half and 60% of our household income so that one day I can go and do worse-paid work I'd choose.

That's the actual product. Not the portfolio. The permission.

Forty is an average, by the way. My wife and I average our ages when we talk about this, which means I'll be 36. It's the only place in our finances where I round in my own favour.

Almost nobody plans what to do after FIRE

The number is the easy half. Every FIRE plan I've read answers "how much"; almost none of them answer "what for", and the ones that do answer it with the word "travel", which is a holiday, not a life.

The 2026 numbers on this are quietly damning. In Jim Dahle's reader survey this July, 28% of White Coat Investor readers said they were financially independent, up from 22% the year before. Only 11% were actually retired. That leaves a large group of people who have won the game and are still at their desks, and when Dahle lists the reasons — for himself, in public — one of them is: worry that you do not have anything to retire to.

The target moves too, which is the tell. Northwestern Mutual's 2026 planning study puts the "magic number" Americans think they need at $1.46 million, up from $1.26 million a year earlier. Nothing in that survey ever pushes the number down. Somebody in the r/financialindependence community survey put it better than any of us: there's no finish line, everything is just a new start line.

That's what a plan with no destination does. It converts into more plan.

The research says something I didn't want it to say

I went looking for evidence that retiring without a purpose wrecks people, because that would have made this an easy article to write. It doesn't hold up.

The best-designed study on it, published in Psychological Science in 2021, follows 8,113 people and uses pension eligibility ages to get at cause rather than correlation. The naive correlation says retirement lowers your sense of purpose. The causal estimate says it raises it, by about a third of a standard deviation. A meta-analysis of 41 studies covering 557,111 people lands in the same place: retirement cuts the risk of depression by nearly 20%.

So the scary story is wrong, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise.

But read the sentence the authors put next to their own result. The gains were driven by people with lower socioeconomic status leaving jobs they disliked. That's the mechanism. Retirement is good for you roughly in proportion to how much your job was hurting you, which is a fantastic finding and a completely useless one for someone whose job isn't hurting him.

A European study using the SHARE panel splits it even more cleanly. People who retired for aspirational reasons got measurably better mental health. People who retired under negative circumstances got measurably worse. And whatever the direction, it faded: two years in, the effect was gone. Their own summary is that retirement improves mental health before it happens, more than after.

Then there's the finding that actually changed my mind. A meta-analysis of 151 studies on early retirement specifically, covering just over 700,000 people, found that almost nothing moves much afterwards. The effects are small across the board. The one exception, the only result large enough to take seriously, is social engagement, and it moves down.

Not meaning. People. The thing early retirement most reliably costs you is the sixty humans you used to see every week without having to organise anything.

A school, it turns out, is a building absolutely stuffed with those.

Why a classroom, and why maths

I've done a version of this before and it went well, which is either useful evidence or a trap.

Through university I made my living teaching German. Not tutoring on the side — it was the money I lived on. And separately, for a while, I tutored a couple of kids in maths and physics. That's where the actual hook is. There is a specific face a fifteen-year-old makes when they stop reciting the formula and start seeing what the formula is for, and I have never found anything at work that does what watching that does to me. Shipping a good feature is satisfying. It isn't that.

Czechia would also, frankly, take me. At lower-secondary level, 41.7% of physics teaching hours and 21.3% of maths hours are taught by someone without the qualification for that subject, according to a 2025 ministry survey that 99.7% of Czech schools answered. In the same set of ministry papers, the count of people who graduated from the physics teaching degree in 2024 is 32 — the ministry labels that figure as incomplete and indicative, and it is still 32. Schools said they needed around 1,950 physics teachers. My planned career move is, statistically speaking, not a bold one.

The pay cut is the part people find strange, so here is what it looks like without me telling you what I earn.

Data: OECD, Education at a Glance 2025, Table D3.2. Upper-secondary general teachers, actual salaries vs full-time, full-year tertiary-educated workers aged 25–64. Reference year 2024, Czechia 2023.

A Czech teacher earns about three quarters of what other Czech graduates earn. An American teacher earns about two thirds, the lowest relative teacher pay in the OECD, which is worth knowing before anyone tells me this is a uniquely Czech problem. A German upper-secondary teacher earns slightly more than other German graduates. That was the number that surprised me most in the whole research pile.

The part I keep checking, because it's the part I want to be true

The time is a real part of the appeal and I don't want to be soft about it. Czech teachers get eight weeks of holiday by statute, not the four or five the rest of us get. A secondary teacher's direct teaching load is 21 hours a week inside a 40-hour contract.

Now the honest correction, because I looked it up hoping for better news. Czech school holidays run to roughly twelve weeks. The holiday entitlement is eight. That leaves about a month a year when the kids are off and the teacher is contractually working. And the 2024 TALIS survey has Czech teachers reporting 42.2 hours a week against a European average of 39. They spend more time on lesson preparation than almost anyone in the EU.

So "teachers get the same holidays as their kids" is wrong by about four weeks. What is true, and still enough for me, is that eight weeks is roughly double what I have now, and I get to take it in the same weeks my daughter is off school instead of negotiating for the leftovers. The holidays we're planning are not resorts. They're the kind we already take: a car, a rough plan, and something going wrong that we have to solve together. Those are the ones the kids remember, and they're cheaper, which is a coincidence I've stopped apologising for.

"So why not do it now?"

This is the question I can't dodge, and the one my wife asked first.

Part of the answer is boring. She's home with our daughter, we're a one-income household for a while, and this is not the year to cut my salary on purpose. I've got a couple more years of grinding in me.

The other part I'd defend properly. American data on new teachers, tracked by the Department of Education across five years, shows that 97% of beginners whose first-year salary was $40,000 or more were still teaching a year later, against 87% of those below it. By year five, 89% against 80%. A financial cushion is one of the better predictors of whether you survive in teaching at all. Walking in at 36 with a portfolio behind me isn't cowardice about the pay cut. It's the thing that makes the pay cut permanent instead of a six-month experiment I quietly retreat from.

And in Czechia specifically, waiting costs almost nothing.

Data: OECD, Education at a Glance 2025, Table D3.1. Statutory salaries, upper-secondary general, USD PPP, 2024.

A Czech teaching career pays about 31% more at the top of the scale than on day one. The OECD average is 62%. Czech teaching is unusually flat, which means you capture nearly the whole salary in your first year, so starting at 36 instead of 30 costs me six years of seniority that were barely worth anything anyway. I did not expect the data to hand me that one.

I should also kill the statistic everyone repeats here, because I nearly repeated it myself. "Half of new teachers quit within five years" is not true. The same US dataset says 17%. The job is hard in a different way. A meta-analysis of burnout and attrition found exhaustion to be the strongest predictor of wanting to quit, and that the link has been getting stronger over the years. And when Finnish researchers followed teachers across six years, half of them had thoughts of leaving, and those thoughts turned out to be remarkably persistent. They mostly don't go. But they think about it, and I should expect to.

The best argument against this whole article

It isn't the money and it isn't the burnout. It's that I might simply stop wanting this.

In 2013 three researchers ran a study across more than 19,000 people that I find genuinely uncomfortable. They asked people of a given age to predict how much their personality, values and preferences would change over the next ten years, then compared it against how much people ten years older reported having actually changed. People remember their own change accurately. They badly underestimate the change still coming. The authors called it the end of history illusion, and it showed up at every age they could measure, including people over fifty.

The detail that stuck with me: participants would pay 61% more to see their current favourite band play in ten years than slightly older participants would pay to see their once-favourite band play next week. $129 against $80. We are all quietly certain that this version of us is the final one.

The paper's last line is "History, it seems, is always ending today."

I've wanted this since I was fifteen, which is some evidence the illusion isn't doing all the work here. It is not proof. So the honest framing is that the destination is a hypothesis with a decade of runway, and I'm meant to keep testing it: a term of tutoring, a few guest lessons, an actual conversation with someone who does the job. If it fails the test, the money doesn't care. That's rather the point of the money.

What the destination actually buys me today

Here's the thing nobody tells you about naming a specific, unglamorous, worse-paid destination. It makes the saving easy.

We've skipped the obvious upgrades. No fancy cars; ours are safe, reliable and paid for. No all-inclusive resorts. We still go away, and our holidays tend to come back with a story about the thing that broke, which I'd argue is the better souvenir. None of it felt like sacrifice, because I wasn't giving up a car. I was buying a classroom.

A savings rate in the fifties is survivable when you can see what it's for. Without that it's deprivation with a spreadsheet attached, and deprivation with a spreadsheet attached is exactly how people arrive at 45 financially independent and quietly miserable at the same desk they were sitting at when they started.

My wife's version of this is different from mine, which I think is healthier than the alternative. She may well stay in her job, because she genuinely likes it. What we share is the part underneath: time with the kids while they still want it, and being able to go somewhere without asking anyone's permission.

So the number still matters. I run our scenarios in the tracker I build, I buy the same boring world ETF every month, and our savings rate is still doing more work than our returns. If you want the mechanics rather than the philosophy, our actual path to financial freedom is written up, and Coast FIRE is the version most people asking me about this are really looking for.

But if you have the number and no answer to what to do after FIRE, you don't have a plan. You have a savings account with anxiety attached.

Go find the thing you'd do for less money. Mine has a whiteboard in it.