Escape The Clock: Your Program Guide for Financial Freedom and Early Retirement - Softcover

Rodgers, Daniel C

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1966074107 ISBN 13: 9781966074106

Publisher: Manhattan Book Group, 2024

Synopsis

Have you ever felt trapped by the clock?
Wake up. Get ready. Get to work. Go through the motions, take care of business at home, go to bed. Rinse and repeat.
That was my life for twenty years. I had a good family, a good job, and my health. I also gave whatever scraps of time were left over to the people I loved most, running on fumes from a long day.
I spent that career as a program manager at Microsoft and Google, building step-by-step roadmaps so that large organizations could reach complicated goals. It took me longer than it should have to realize the same approach works on a household. So I built one. A twenty-year program to leave at 45.
I left at 43. The mortgage was paid off. Passive income covered nearly all of what my life costs.
This book is that program, written so you can run it on your own numbers instead of mine.
You will work out what your life actually costs, and what number would let you stop. You will set milestones with real dates on them, clear your debt, and widen the gap between what you earn and what you spend. You will learn how to invest on a long horizon and shift that strategy as your date gets closer, and how to reach your retirement money before the traditional age without wrecking the years that come after.
The last part of the book is about the thing most books in this space leave out. What you do once the clock is no longer yours. Purpose is harder to plan than money, and it takes just as much thought.
There are no shortcuts here and no judgment about how you spend. Just a structure, and the numbers that go into it.
If you are in your 30s, 40s, or 50s and you are willing to sit down with real figures, this will work.
Your time is the only thing you cannot earn more of. Here is how to get some of it back.

About this title

About the Author

Daniel C. Rodgers, WMCP® spent two decades as a program manager at Microsoft and Google, leading complex programs for some of the largest companies in the world. He left corporate work at forty-three, two years ahead of the twenty-year plan he had written for himself.

He started deep in debt after putting himself through school. He left with the mortgage paid off and passive income covering nearly all of his cost of living. The approach he used became Escape The Clock.

Since retiring he earned the Wealth Management Certified Professional designation and now hosts a weekly conversation with planners, retirees, and specialists about building a work-optional life. He also writes fiction.

He teaches financial literacy with Financial Beginnings and volunteers with Motley Zoo Animal Rescue. He lives in the Pacific Northwest.

From the Back Cover

You are trading your time for money. Nobody ever told you the exchange rate.

Wake up. Get ready. Get to work. Go through the motions, take care of business at home, go to bed. Rinse and repeat, for forty or fifty years, and hope the math holds at the end.

Daniel C. Rodgers spent two decades building programs at Microsoft and Google before he turned that same discipline on his own finances. He wrote a twenty-year plan to retire at 45. He finished it at 43, with the mortgage paid off and passive income covering nearly all of what his life costs.

Escape The Clock is that plan, rebuilt so you can run it on your own numbers.

Know what your life actually costs. Set a number and a date. Clear the debt, widen the gap, invest on a long horizon, and learn how to reach your money before the traditional age without wrecking the years that follow.

Then the part most books leave out: what you do once the clock is no longer yours.

No shortcuts. No judgment about how you spend. Just a structure, and the numbers that go into it.

Your time is the only thing you cannot earn more of.

From the Inside Flap

Escape The Clock is a step-by-step program for reaching financial independence and moving from full-time work into early retirement, then into the rest of your life.

Financial freedom sounds like something that happens to other people. It isn't. Large organizations turn impossible goals into achievable ones every day by breaking them into programs, and the same discipline works just as well on a household as it does on a product launch.

This book shows you how to build one. You'll gather the financial information you already have, figure out what your life actually costs, and turn it into a plan with real numbers and real dates attached. A plan you can tune as things change, track as you go, and share with the person you're building it with.

Inside, you'll assess where you stand today, project what you'll need later, and set milestones you can measure. From there the book moves into strategy: how to anticipate and manage financial risk, how to grow income, how to invest across a long horizon, and dozens of approaches to advancing a career and making the most of what life puts in front of you.

The final chapters cover the part most books skip. What you do with the time once you have it back.

Written by a program manager who spent two decades at Microsoft and Google, built a twenty-year plan to retire at 45, and finished it at 43.

Welcome to the clock breakers.

Edition details

• Publisher: Manhattan Book Group
• Publication date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1966074107
• ISBN 13: 9781966074106
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 440