Create opportunities for luck. My pathway to quitting my professional career at 31 years old.

A tough decision I sweated over for years. I'll outline my thought process which ultimately led to this decision, not easy.

Maybe I’m searching for confirmation bias, but everybody should be familiar with the 5 Regrets of Dying study. This study was undertaken by a palliative care nurse based on her experiences of working with 100’s of terminally ill patients. The nurse identified the five most common regrets expressed before dying, the number one being: “I wish I had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me”.

In the past, I’ve always been someone who cares what people think, but the further the distance, and the longer the time I spend away from Australia, the less fucks I seem to give. I think this is a typical mindset that can be transferable to many Western countries with similar values to Australia, such as Canada, the US, and Western Europe.

I often come across older people who say they wish they traveled more in their younger years, rather than adhering to what society expected them to do.

I was lucky, working a great job in a great company that looked after their employees, I could see exactly how life pans out for me by looking around at colleagues higher up in the food chain.

I enjoyed my job and fully understood I was in a position extremely appealing to 99% of the population. But, it scared the shit out of me. I could picture myself, within the blink of an eye, all of a sudden I’m in my 40s, wife and kids, a big fat mortgage (Australian dream), with my healthiest years behind me.

With that thought always present in the back of my mind, over the next few years, I set a few motions to potentially break my ties with the rat race and live a life completely on my own terms, with no alarm clock.

Those were, saving money intensely, even though I was earning a good mining salary, I had never been a big spender, the most money I had ever spent on myself was a beaten-up old Toyota Hiace van, which set me back a whole $3000 AUD, and that was so I could sleep in the back of it when I went away on surf trips, instead of buying expensive camping gear.

The second and arguably most important was creating opportunities for luck in the share market.

When I say creating opportunities for luck, I don’t mean investing in slow-grinding ETFs, blue chip stocks, or a Ponzi scheme (crypto, will write a post on this) I mean risking it for the biscuit in sectors where I can form a calculated conviction, so I am able to stomach volatility. I was in my mid-20s with a decent salary, and no debt or dependents, so for me, this meant if I lost money, it wasn’t a huge deal. Once I was introduced to cycle investing, the idea seemed incredibly simple for my small brain, uneducated in finance.

Example of a highly cyclical sector. The price of uranium adjusted for inflation over ~50 years. I first started moving money into uranium stocks in 2016, thanks to my mentor and good friend Trader Ferg.

Invest in sectors that are at all-time lows and have a potential catalyst in the future, now the catch here is how long that catalyst takes to play out. But for me, at the time I was introduced to cycle investing, I was primarily focused on my professional career, and that was doing a silly amount of time in the Goldfields of Western Australia, getting experience under my belt, and working as a Geologist.

Instead of buying a new car or saving for a mortgage deposit on a house, I was throwing money into this dark corner of the share market. This dark corner, at the time, was the uranium sector.

Over the next few years, I mentioned the cycle investing thesis numerous times to friends, family, and work colleagues, but fair enough, who’s going to listen to a Geologist, early in his working career, completely uneducated in finance.

Sure enough, many years went by where I was losing money on this trade, but, I was still chipping a large portion of my salary in, that was until, COVID-induced money printing coupled with the launch of SPUT physical uranium vehicle, suddenly sparked great interest in this tiny sector. Within months, my dismal-looking portfolio was suddenly up 5x of my original investment.

With newfound paper wealth, it started to look like I could achieve my dream of completely quitting the rat race, leaving Australia for an unknown period of time, and heading over to Latin America indefinitely, without damaging my wealth.

I had goals I wanted to achieve as a Geologist first, so it wasn’t until I achieved those that I had the confidence to pull the pin, I also wanted to time my exit so it was towards the end of a tax year, so in the new tax year ahead I could earn any income in the lowest taxable bracket, whether that be from offloading shares or trading options (which I hadn’t taken the time to learn, but it was the first assignment on the list).

Underground Geologist - Great job.

Learning basic options trading was a pivotable moment for me. I was freshly coming off a demanding job, which had me running around 12-14 hours per day in an underground mine, so I wanted to keep my mind busy with all this newfound time I had on my hands.

Realising how powerful this tool could be, I put it to work by combining my interest in cyclical sectors with one stock in particular I thought was seriously undervalued. I traded weekly options on this stock which seemed to fast-track my learning and got me familiar with the whole options process quicker.

Luckily, it turned out this stock was actually incredibly undervalued, so I had a ~6-month period where I made a consistent income, opening up a range of fun activities for me in Latin America. For a free guide on how to do exactly this, refer to my post “Lifestyle of freedom - free guide to basic options trading for income”.

Scene from a 4-day solo hike through the Peruvian Andes, completely funded by options trading.

In summary, I’ll lay it out like this. If you’re a young professional, look at your peers higher up in the hierarchy, do you like what you see? Ask yourself is this what you aspire to? 99% of people do. If you’re in the 1%, like me, set some goals, live cheaply, take calculated risks in the market than you may otherwise might later in life, and remember there are “options” out there to help you escape it all and live a life completely on your own terms. The further you move away from the thought and expectations of the 99%, in my experience, the less you actually give a fuck what people think.

Aspire to live a life true to yourself, and don’t take it all too seriously, remember at the end of the day, we’re just an evolved monkey species spinning around on a rock.

Thanks for reading.

Jordan.

Please share this post if you think it is of value to anyone with a similar mindset to me.

Disclaimer: I am not a qualified financial advisor, merely documenting my journey, please do your own research and seek the appropriate financial help from a registered financial provider if you are to go down this path.