Who Are You When the Work Stops?

I’ve been coming to the EconoMe Conference for the past few years. And there is always a session, discussion or connection that kinda catches me off guard.

Ya know? You walk in to a talk or session expecting to talk about those nerdy money stuff like withdrawal rates, savings percentages, and index fund allocations. Sure all those are fun, but then someone says something that has nothing to do with the f’n spreadsheets, and it hits you HARD! Maybe harder than any piece of financial data ever could.

That’s what happened when Kim Hunter-Borst walked out on the main stage in Cincinnati.

EconoMe is the only large-scale conference built specifically for the FIRE (Financial Independence/Retire Early) movement, and the crowd is a of money and personal finance nerds. These are people who have done the math and totally know their numbers. They know the 4% rule, or the updated 4.7% rule! lol. These peeps know their FI target and exactly which funds they hold. But Kim wasn’t there to talk about any of that bull shit. She was there to talk about what happens after. Right?! What happens After Financial independence. And I mean the really after part. It kinda seem not many peeps blog or posts about that!

So, nine months before she stood on that stage, Kim walked out of her office for the very last time after 35 years in the workforce. Now, she did this, she said, without a plan for what would come next. And for someone who had built a very successful career on solving some of the most complex problems imaginable, that was kinda like a massive deal.

The Curious Kid Who Became a Corporate Problem-Solver

Let’s back up a little. Kim’s story starts the way a lot of great FI stories do, right? She’ is someone who was really, genuinely good at their job. She started in the health insurance industry in 1990 at 21 years old. (BTW, 1990 is one of best and most iconic years for metal releases of All time!)

Okay, back to Kim and her story. If you’ve ever tried to understand how health insurance actually works, you know it’s one of the most layered, convoluted systems on the planet. ugh… I f’n hate dealing with health insurance. Well, Kim loved it. That curious kid who grew up wanting to understand how everything connected had found her professional home. Over the next three decades, the problems also to continued to get bigger. She even found herself in Washington, D.C., working on policy and industry-level issues. She traveled the the Philippines, working on f’n global issues! CRUSHING IT! Eventually she was leading strategic initiatives and managing teams all over the world! She was thriving, right?! Or so she thought.

When it did come time to think about retirement, she did what any us self-respecting FI-adjacent problem-solver would do lol. She got into it. She listened to podcasts and read books. Then, mapped out a legit financial coaching business. After getting certified she launched and starting getting clients faster than she expected. One-on-one sessions turned into group sessions. Corporate colleagues started reaching out. She was speaking. She was posting on TikTok and Instagram (at 58, she pointed out, which the crowd absolutely loved). Her calendar was getting totally packed.

Keep in mind, she was doing all of this while still working her full-time job and raising her family!

The Tuesday Night Question That Changed Everything

Here’s where the story takes a turn. She was talking with the great and wise Kevin Sebesta, one of those people known for just cutting right through the noise to get to the heart of something. She was telling him about her daughter, who had graduated during the pandemic, gone right from school to directly to working from home. She was also busting ass, getting promoted, was doing great at her company, and then called one day and asked, “Is this it? Is this all there is?”

Wow! Right? that can get deep. Kevin’s response was awesome and effortless. He said, “Ask her what she likes to do on a random Tuesday night. And once she figures that out, tell her to start doing more of that now.”

Kim laughed telling this story. She said she thought, wait, could it really be that simple? And then she also thought to herself what do I like to do on a random Tuesday night? Ya know what, she didn’t really know. And believe it or not many people don’t!

Thirty-five years of solving problems for everyone else, and she had never actually asked herself that question. And that’s when the true work began. Not the actual work of reaching FI, but the work of figuring out who she actually was without the job title attached. What was Kim’s identity?

What Vicki Robin Got Right (And What Kim Had to Figure Out for Herself)

Kim went back to a book that many of us in this community treat like required reading. Vicki Robin’s “Your Money or Your Life.”

The book gives readers some tools to gain control of their money and finally begin to make a life, rather than just make a living. The famous central idea is that we trade our time for money to buy stuff. Simple. Clear. Most of us have heard that part a hundred times.

But Kim continued to explain there’s a much deeper layer in the book that she had skimmed over the first time. Vicki Robin talks about what work actually fulfills, and she breaks it down into two categories. Either work is solving a financial need, you need income or you need security, or it’s solving a personal need. That something. That thing inside you that drives you, that pushes you to keep doing things. That fire that lights you right the fuck up!

When you reach financial independence, the financial need is handled, right? So what’s left? What’s that personal need? What is the thing that actually drives you when the paycheck is no longer the reason to show up? For someone who had spent three and a half decades identifying entirely with being the problem-solver, the fixer, the person everyone else came to with the hardest stuff, that was a genuinely difficult question to answer.

Kim eventually landed on learning and connection. She remembered that curious kid she was. The person who liked figuring out how things connected. The person who got energy from other people. It may sound kinda simple. But she said it took her a while to get there. Because when you’ve been looking at everything through a productivity lens of work it’s hard to see what’s actually underneath.

I think I, personally, connected with Kim in this because when I left work in 2024, I was working on creating my fire, drive, and spark that would keep me going after I wasn’t receiving a paycheck. I found this in The Luger Foundation, where we provide financial assistance and resources to families with babies in the NICU and premature birth.

Slowing Down the Nervous System

One of the most honest moments in Kim’s entire talk was when she described what happened as she started to wind down at work in her final months. She cleared her calendar. She delegated meetings. New initiatives that came in got handed off or pushed out. And for the first time in 35 years, she walked around without running over a million things in her head.

I totally felt for Kim and understood when she realized something uncomfortable. What she had mistaken what she thought was thriving for what was actually just her nervous system coping with an crazy-level of chronic stress. She had been operating in that state for so long that it had started to just feel normal. Actually, more than normal. She had started to mistake this discomfort of stress for the feeling of being engaged, alive, and useful.

However, once Kim started to slow down and actually create more space in her life, she could finally tell the difference between being energized by something and being completely drained by it. Those two things, for Kim, had been blurred together for most of her adult life! Ohhh man 🙁

I think this can be something I think a lot of high-achievers face, including those in the FI community. We’re so overly trained to optimize, optimize, optimize, and to push it! We are expected to add more to the calendar because we can handle it. But then we lose the ability to accurately measure what’s actually filling us up versus what’s just keeping us f’n busy.

The Three-Question Framework

Kim didn’t stop at the realization. I like how she built something practical out of it. I love actionable takeaways from sessions at conferences lol. She has three questions she now runs every opportunity through before saying yes. Simple, but surprisingly can be hard to actually answer honestly.

The first one is: Is this right for my life right now? Not right in general, and not right for some future version of your life. Right now, in the specific season or time of life you’re actually in. Life changes, right? What’s right for you can shift. This question forces you to stay current with yourself.

The second: Does this feel true to the life I want, or does it belong to someone else’s life? This one can be trickier than it sounds, right? A lot of us say yes to things because they’re impressive, or expected, or because someone we respect thinks we’d be good at them. That’s not the same as those things actually belonging in YOUR life.

The third: Does this energize me or drain me? Not will it just drain me a little, not is it worth the drain, but being totally honest, does it GIVE me life or TAKE it?

She has tested this framework against real offers she received after retiring. Maybe a Board seat opportunity? Nope. Could she host women’s finance events? Yes. Speaking at EconoMe? Yes! And she said she was loving it. Maybe a FI retreat in Bali? Also yes, and here’s the thing, she wouldn’t have been able to go if she’d already filled her calendar with everything that sounded good on paper just making her busy!

That last part is important. By leaving space in your life, opportunities came that she may have missed if she’d immediately filled retirement with a jam-packed schedule of just impressive-sounding things! The freedom of financial independence isn’t just financial. It’s the freedom to say NO to the right things so the right things can actually find you.

The Part That Hit Me

I’ll be honest about what I was sitting with during Kim’s talk. So much of the energy in the FI community goes into the accumulation phase. The savings rate. The portfolio optimization. The tracking. The projections. All of it is important and worth the attention. But Kim’s talk was a reminder that building wealth is a means to an end, and very few of us spend as much time thinking about the end as we do about the means, right? So many discover FI, sprint to the their FI number, but then what? There was little to no planning on what is life after FI, or after retirement.

So, ask yourself. Who are you when work is optional? What do you want? Not what sounds good, not what your identity as a high performer tells you that you should want, but what actually lights you up on a random Tuesday night?

That is the work. And for a lot of people, it’s harder than anything on the accumulation side of the equation.

With a smile on her face Kim ended her talk at EconoMe stating that her FI journey was uniquely hers. And so is all of ours!

Horns up. \m/ \m/