Kim Edwards (CGS’98, Questrom’00), Retired At 39, Speaks On Self-reliant Retirement Planning
October 13, 2023
Kim Edwards (CGS’98, Questrom’00) visited Questrom on Thursday, October 12th for the 2023 ‘Questrom Women Mean Business’ Speaker Series, to tell us how she achieved F.I.R.E. (Financially Independent, Retired Early) at age 39. Fast forward 6 years, and she’s still enjoying retired life through travel and trying new hobbies. She just got back from France and is excited for the down time so she can focus on healthy habits and wellness. In delivering her story to the Questrom community, Kim hopes she got at least one point across, for women especially to feel empowered, be self-reliant, and have their own financial game plan.
Having withdrawn from the workforce before the Covid-19, Kim never experienced the remote or hybrid work schedules that we refer to as “the new normal.” Before she retired, she worked in ecommerce and loved it. It was a new space that gave her the runway to flex her skills in both analytics and innovation. But of course, it wasn’t a walk in the park. Kim worked long hours, in stressful office dynamics, and made considerable sacrifices in her personal life during her career and was eager to find a better way to live her life.
Her first post-MBA job was based in Arkansas. She loved the work, but was miserable personally. That caused Kim to open her laptop and start calculating how long she would need to live this lifestyle. Earning a good salary in a low cost of area location, she realized she could retire in her early 40s. Several years later, Kim’s experience working for big retail companies like Amazon, Walmart, and Wayfair, drew the interest of a younger colleague who made a habit of picking Kim’s brain for insights that he used to invest in stocks. Kim realized she had the knowledge and thought, “why am I not doing this too?” She connected the dots and started envisioning a future for herself where she was the sole driver of her stock portfolio.
Then, on a one-week trip to Hilton Head, where she immersed herself in corporate earnings calls between stints relaxing on the beach, her entire outlook on life changed. Even her commute to work started to fade out of memory. After researching, planning, and producing several iterations of an excel sheet, she made the deliberate and confident decision to retire at 39 years old.
In the first 6 months of her newly retired life, it was awkward. From the time she was a competitive figure skater in childhood (which had her up at 3:45AM every morning) she had never really pumped the brakes. And while she didn’t miss workplace politics, or long nights dealing with fires, she missed the interpersonal aspects of her career, like leading and team building.
Another mental and emotional shift Kim has made in retirement is accepting that she doesn’t have the drive to reach expert level in anything again. She explains, “I’ll never put concerted effort into any one thing ever again.” Instead, she’s thrilled to be widening the breadth of her experiences as she spends most of her time traveling to new places and trying new things like salsa dancing and cooking classes. She also spends her time mentoring folks pre- and post-retirement. She says there are plenty of retirement conversations around finance and investing, but “no one talks about the emotional aspect.”
Otherwise, she’s settled in and made friends on her block, mostly retired and of average retirement age. She doesn’t touch her portfolio on a day-to-day basis but spends a healthy amount of time listening to earnings calls and keeping up to date with industry trends. Kim found a way to use her brain in all the ways that she loved to when she was working full time, using both her innovative and analytical skills.
Kim is vocal about the fact that retiring before 40 is not likely for the majority of Americans. Her life choices made it possible. For example, Kim never had the desire to have children, an expensive undertaking. Whether you make a choice to retire early or on a more traditional timeline, she says the point is to have a goal: set a reachable, and data-driven plan for yourself, and that is where the advantage will emerge.
To connect visit Kim Edwards’s LinkedIn profile.