For the longest time, I didn’t know what to call what I was doing.
I had left my corporate job and wasn’t going back. My rental income and dividends were covering my expenses and by every definition, I had “retired.”
But every time someone asked — at a family dinner, at a school reunion, over kopi with an old colleague — I felt a small knot in my stomach when I said the word.
Retired. It sounded like I was done and that was the furthest thing from the truth.
The word that didn’t fit
In Singapore, retirement carries a very specific image. It’s the uncle fishing at Bedok Reservoir. It’s the auntie doing morning taiji at the void deck. It’s someone who has stepped back from life, not stepped into a new version of it.
I am 50-something, building a blog, researching REITs, caring for my elderly parents, learning new things every single week. I am more mentally active than I had been in my last five years in the corporate world.
“Retired” didn’t just feel wrong. It felt like a lie.
The moment it clicked
I was scrolling through an article late one night — one of those rabbit holes you fall into after the house goes quiet — when a single line stopped me cold.
The writer wasn’t even talking about money. But she said something about how we graduate from one season of life into the next, and that a graduation is never an ending — it’s a commencement.
I read it twice. Then I closed the tab and just sat with it.
That one word — graduated — reframed everything for me. You completed one phase and earned the right to choose what comes next. The hard work paid off, and this is not stepping back — it’s stepping forward into something you built deliberately.
It sounds small. But sometimes the right word at the right moment changes how you see everything.
What I call it now
I call it financial freedom. Sometimes I call it my fifty freedom — the freedom I built for myself by my fifties, through decades of quiet, consistent choices that most people around me didn’t notice or understand. I’ve just stopped doing things I don’t choose to do.
There’s a difference. And that difference matters enormously for how you show up every day.
When you think of yourself as retired, you rest. When you think of yourself as free, you build.
Why this matters more than you think
The language we use about money and time shapes how we behave.
If you’re working toward FIRE and you keep calling the goal “retirement,” you may be unconsciously programming yourself to slow down, step back, and disengage — when what you actually want is the freedom to engage fully with the things that matter to you.
So let me ask you this: what are you actually working toward?
Not the financial number. Not the date. The life.
What does your version of freedom look like on a Tuesday morning? What would you build, or learn, or do, if you never had to be somewhere at 8am again?
That answer — that is what you’re really saving for. And it deserves a better word than retirement.
Your turn
I’d love to know: do you call it retirement, financial independence, freedom, or something else entirely? Drop it in the comments — I’m genuinely curious how other women in their 40s and 50s are thinking about this.
And if you’re still figuring out what your version of freedom looks like, start with my Start Here Page — that’s exactly what it’s for.