Letter to Batch 36 of the Early Retirement Masterclass

 

Dear Students of Batch 36,

It's been a great honour and privilege to conduct a 5-Day Early Retirement Workshop for you.

The markets are still experiencing a roller coaster ride after the conclusion of the US elections, and we are seeing some evaporation of previous gains as markets begin to digest what a Trump presidency might mean in 2025. In Singapore, banks advanced, and REITs retreated as there was this belief that Trump tariffs would generate inflation for the US economy. Interest rates continue to trend down, giving Singapore investors an extended bargaining period to collect high-yielding counters for a longer period.

The current yield of this portfolio is 7.35%. Once again, as the batch size remains small, we have created a very focused portfolio of 12 stocks, not counting Bank of China, as we welcome our first Singapore Depository Receipt (SDR) into the ERM portfolio. In future batches, we will gradually increase our exposure to high dividend-yielding SDRs, which will see at least one high dividend counter coming from Thailand in March 2025.

Also, for this batch of students, students employed ChatGPT on SUTL Enterprises, and an AI-generated analyst report is also attached to the materials herein. ChatGPT is getting better and better with each iteration, and it is our wish that we can decouple our program from analyst reports one day.

Lastly, I hope Batch 36 will participate actively in the FB group.

Hope to see you then!

Christopher Ng Wai Chung

Are you part of the CDP Master Race ?

 

[ The concept of the CDP master race is inspired by the idea of the PC Master Race, gamers who game on their PC. It is not inspired by WW2 Germany. ]

For modern investors who are younger Millenials and Gen Z, there is no need to understand what the Central Depository or CDP is because modern brokerages that run on the custodian system are very competitive. Trading on an old-school broker usually costs $25 per trade, while online brokerages like Interactive brokers, if charged at all, can often execute for around $2. 

Despite cheaper trades available, I still prefer to park most of my net worth under CDP, and I imagine many older investors may also like it. 

Here are my reasons for doing so. 

a) Singapore Savings Bonds or SSBs

SSBs should still be the safest investment in Singapore. Based on what I know, the only way to buy them is that you will need a CDP account to do this. SSBs are the closest thing to investing in a risk-free rate, and this should be noticed if interest rates spike one day in the future.

b) Shareholder activism

Shareholders need to know what their companies are doing, and when you own shares in CDP, they are held under your name. You can join shareholder meetings and fight for scraps at the buffet table. Shareholder activism also means voting down ideas that you do not like. While this is nothing much for younger investors, it gives the retired elderly something to do - you can also meet other people.

c) Dividends on payable date

This is a massive deal for me. For a successful setup, dividends will arrive by 5.30pm in your local bank account on the payout date. The money will come even if you do not have a recognised degree, study in a neighbourhood school, or might lie in a hospital in a coma. For custodian accounts, they will show up the following day on your dashboard, and then you need to issue an instruction to pull the dividends into your bank account. 

This causes delays and is generally more active than people think passive investing should be.

d) Easier on your beneficiaries and gifting your children

When you pass on, knowing that the bulk of your funds are in CDP will make it easier for your trustee to handle the stocks. For my dad's case, I opened a joint CDP with my mum and then moved the stocks into this joint account at $10.70 per counter. When my kids reach 18, I intend to pass on some blue chip counters while I am still alive.

For folks with online brokers, do realise that chasing freebies will result in many brokerage accounts that can give your trustee a logistical headache trying to distribute your investments. I've not done such cases, but I suspect if it is an online brokerage, it may be better to sell everything and then distribute the cash to all beneficiaries. (Ensure your kids know how many investment accounts and which brokers you have.)

Bonus: Not so much about CDP but the Supplementary Retirement Scheme or SRS

By opening an SRS account with a bank, you can set aside sums up to $15,300 to invest in the local stock market and reduce your personal income taxes the following year. These can be huge savings for folks in the high-income bracket. Amounts saved in SRS can be invested into the local stock market until you are about 63 years old. You must require a traditional brokerage account to trade stocks by drawing sums locked in the SRS account. A correct setup will give you a conventional brokerage that uses funds in your bank account or SRS at the same time.

Of course, employing CDP with a conventional brokerage is only practical in some cases.

As traditional brokerages charge more for each trade, you may only wish to use stocks you intend to buy and hold. Bluechips like DBS and low beta REITs like Fraser's Centrepoint Trust and Netlink Trust rarely make sense in high turnover portfolios, so they naturally would make a great fit with CDP. I generally employ high dividends and low beta in my core dividend-paying portfolio in CDP.

Online brokers are better for high-turnover investments. My algorithm-driven trades are all done exclusively via IBKR.

Share this article, as CDP gets little praise on social media. I think all serious retail investors should have one account.

Curse of the Hummingbird

 

This article arose from a series of discussions in the SGFI telegram group. I thought I'd share some deeper thoughts on it, as it is relevant to self-improvement and investment.

The person who started the conversation spoke about the advantages of being a jackhammer. A jackhammer has a narrow focus on hobbies; all they can do is focus on one thing and happily lead their lives. The opposite of the jackhammer is a hummingbird—something that flits from flower to flower without ever discovering what they are meant to do. The original inventor of the concept believed that the world needed more hummingbirds because hummingbirds can bring a cross-pollination of ideas and create innovative breakthroughs.

You will find many more metaphors in business literature, such as the hedgehog and the fox. 

As far as my own analysis goes, folks with an S in the MBTI, like the dreaded anal ISTJ, are jackhammers and do pretty well in Singapore, especially the government. In contrast, folks with an N tend to be hummingbirds, as they have big ideas and can apply mental models across domains. I tested ESTJ in my teens and ran with it throughout my engineering career. Still, once I started to pick up investing, the S had no choice but to give way to a more N or intuitive approach towards problems as I began to see investing as a form of liberal art where analysis can come from multiple angles. I was influenced by an old book called Latticeworks by Robert Hagstrom in the early 2000s. 

Are there investing styles for jackhammers? Indeed, using broad index ETFs to construct a 60/40 - VT/BNDW portfolio can be very effective because it can compound between 6-8% over multiple decades. Then, it's just researching ways to reduce expenses and finding more ways to optimise your day job to accelerate wealth creation. Picking this up remains the best defence against financial advisors and paying high commissions to get your money to work for you in the markets,

Dividend investing could be slightly more sophisticated, so it can be suitable for jackhammers. Just target sustainable yields between 5-7%, then stubbornly build up a portfolio of local stocks in a CDP account to reap hundreds of paychecks yearly. It's more complex than 60/40, but the folks who do this are so loyal to this approach that influencers still get cheap eyeballs by provoking and disrespecting "dangerous" dividend investors.

The transition from jackhammer to hummingbirds starts when you become dissatisfied with the Sharpe ratios you are getting. This happens when you interrogate your data and find factors that outperform. Factor investing is very rewarding for hummingbirds because when you see a new factor that works, it is interesting to explain why. Like why do low Beta strategies work? Do people take stock bets based on excitement, so boring stocks are cheaper?  

Technical analysis and charts take hummingbirds slightly further. Some folks love reading tea leaves for different patterns to emerge. I enjoy coding to discover trending ETFs and buy them for better results - that's a very technical investing approach. I've finally moved all my Terra coins into ETH, and I'm developing a momentum-driven algorithm to see whether I can juice my cryptocurrency portfolio in Binance.

However, some strategies only appeal to extreme hummingbirds, and I dislike them. I don't like derivatives and zero-sum games, so sacrificing an upside to juice dividends using covered call strategies is just there to make some folks feel really smart. I'm sure they can make money, but I don't have the time for it. 

Maybe the solution is not to be dualistic about the jackhammer-hummingbird divide.

Based on our personal resources, conscientiousness and intelligence, we have a pool of attention to devote to various interests. 

The jackhammer will narrowly allocate his attention and get deep into a few areas.

The hummingbird will speak thinly and have a passing interest in many fields.

However, many approaches need to be broader and more profound. 

• One way to moderately go into two fields and synergistically use them at work. 
• Another is to supplement a broad interest in many things with one narrower focus on one area you are passionate about.

There are several principles to guide us when determining to pick up a new area of interest:

• If you decide to pick something, a hobby or a field like finance, the opportunity cost is not picking something else, like brewing hipster coffee or writing sonnets. 
• If you keep focusing on one thing, the payoff may achieve diminishing returns. If you have a 6-7% dividend portfolio, and some folks are raving about dividend growth as a better approach, they might be correct, but how much better? Dividend yields are more visible, and dividend growth requires projecting into the future.
• Some things have a J-curve. A project may generate negative returns and frustration but pay off later after you allocate more time and effort. A 1-month violin course is a bad idea. 
• The amount of resources a person can allocate is limited by wealth and talent. Life is not fair.

Because SGFI groups have so many INTJs, it's normal to think that it's a curse to be a hummingbird, as INTJ's significant weakness is the inability to stick to a hobby. At the same time, everyone else can settle with something profound that they are passionate about, so many will die and leave a lot of half-pursued interests for their beneficiaries to plough through (how come your recently deceased uncle got a bongo drum next to a Raspberry Pi?). 

Thoughts of shallow engagements and half-complete hobbies might be a sign of high intelligence and giftedness.

Maybe to be blessed, you need to be an imbecile.

Make Investing Great Again !

 

Let's discuss the US elections objectively when things calm down. This time around, I was less keen to see a Republican victory because I thought that Trump would acquiesce to Putin and bring tremendous suffering to Ukrainian civilians. Still, after reading some analysis, I don't know if Biden's vacillation and giving Ukrainians just enough to hold back the Russians is now a good idea. According to the Economist, the latest projection is that 2025 may see fighting cease at least once, which might be suitable for preserving lives. There will be some unhappiness that Putin will get to keep 20% of Ukraine, but there's a chance Ukraine is free to join the EU. 

So this now makes me ambivalent or even rather happy with a Trump victory!

Let's first look at how investors can tilt their portfolios. This central idea is that tariffs and deporting immigrants will exacerbate inflation in the US, so interest rates may be kept higher for much longer. This would be bullish for local banks but bearish for REITs. However, to what extent can Trump implement these policies? There are still some old-school fiscal conservatives amongst the American leadership, so I don't think an all-in strategy for local banks is a good idea. There has to be a mix between banks and REITs, and I prefer REITs right now, as REITs are the less popular investment choice. My pick is to go with the REITs with the lowest betas, in case the investor might be wrong. 

Hopefully, by year-end, I can pick up some high-dividend SDRs to diversify my dividends further from my usual CDP holdings. However, I'd like to know whether these SDRs will pay dividends on the payout date. I'm still quite old school and prefer to have my more static holdings under CDP because the money arrives in the bank account even if you are in a coma in a hospital. Only some enjoy waiting for the dividends to be credited into your custodian broker account, which requires a manual step to withdraw the funds. You feel less rich this way.

At the international stage, my trend-following algorithm is performing as projected by backtests, racking close to 20% gains in about 16 months. Trending ETFs are mainly US equities, gold, and crypto, but the algorithm miscalculated and was whiplashed by China tech, although losses are minimal. 

I won't talk solely about investing in the Trump era—given how unpredictable US politics will be, I'm likely to be wrong anyway.

By now, we have a clearer idea of why Trump won. 

The first reason is that despite no recession, Americans feel poor thanks to inflation. Flat-footed economists call this a vibecession. Like in Singapore, families are dealing with larger mortgage payments and lower amounts for discretionary spending. Almost everyone is out of the country, so you can feel richer in JB or even Kyoto, Japan. I spent more than $100 on movie tickets here this week. 

The second reason is a massive backlash against the woke ideology that Kamala stands for. You can feel it here in Singapore. Almost every middle-aged guy here is unhappy with identity politics in Marvel movies and computer games. Games like Concord and Dragon Age: Veilguard angered not just white male gamers in the US. I have gamers here ranting and raving about it. 

Elon Musk knew something when he gave a speech referring to "incremental political science majors" as the target of all this hatred. This resonated with my engineer identity during my working days when any work that had to be referred to the legal department would somehow delay my project or end up doubling the workload - after a vicious dressing down from an effete but legally trained bureaucrat soy boy. You want to punch that guy's face in, but you can't, so you build up a dividends portfolio instead and then find out how this bastard was trained. 

(Marvel should do my origin story.)

So, I'm very familiar with the kind of blue-collar anger in the US. You do the hard work, maybe build up a small business. Then these tenured social science humanities types start to label you a bigot from their ivory towers, then even want your video game character to do 10 push-ups when you misgender someone. 

Yes, logically, these assholes are all different people. Still, to some blue-collar conservative workers, they are all one person -  the humanities goth-blue-haired land whale feminist Marxist scum who want to defund the police - represented by a Democrat president elect.

Wouldn't you want to vote for Trump, too?

Following the new politics is now giving us older gamers a massive pay-off.

I look forward to hearing the screams of the blue-haired land whales that pollute the RPG space in Singapore if Elon Musk buys Hasbro and owns the D&D brand.

That will make me return to regular gaming because I know the exact kind of DM that spouts unnecessary anti-PAP slogans before a game. After all, somehow, to them, PAP is neo-liberals.

I will tell him: 

Opposition is for they/them. PAP is for you!

Hobbies Update : Thank you for reaching out guys!

 

This might be a rambling post, but I'd first like to thank the readers and old pals who connected with me over the past week; as an extrovert, the conversations kept me sane, and I could enjoy myself while my family was touring Taiwan. My social diary was so active I could not start watching the DanDaDan anime, and I could not even download a single game from Steam, so this affected my hobbies, but I generally prioritise personal connections over games.

But I want to talk about one more thing before I run down the hobbies that I have at the moment. Recently, there's been some insight into the fact that ageing occurs in bursts. We tend to age a lot when we reach 44 years old, 60 years old, and then another burst at 78 years old. The effect is that those who reach 44 will have problems with their metabolic rate and might not be able to purge caffeine as quickly as before. Another impact from other sources is that our neurons fire less frequently, so we will find that time passes faster. These insights are recent, and I would probably not go for a third degree if I knew that my mind would slow down when I graduate. But all this will affect the way I view my hobbies moving forward.

Ok, let's rundown what stays and what goes:

a) Reading

Reading is so powerful that it is the hobby most women find attractive on dating apps, but to be fair, most of the stuff I read is not friendly to women. I have read a lot about finance, business, and self-help; there is nothing for me every year at the Singapore Writer's Festival. But as I slow down, I am now more open to more profound and shorter self-reflective books. In fact, every December, I will have a moratorium on non-fiction books to mop up books on gaming history, Japanese fiction, and the latest Korean genre of healing literature. 

Reading healing fiction is weirdly practical because it addresses all the post-retirement identity issues that FIRE folks experience. 

I also have a new hobby, I'm now a book scavenger at the book drops in major regional libraries, and I'm always hunting for old books discarded by other Singaporeans. 

b) PC Gaming

I'm no longer a PC gamer. I will wake up to something like Baldur's Gate 3 that lets me experiment with weird D&D character builds, but otherwise, it will not play a role in my life anymore. But I love following the politics behind gaming, where gatekeepers are waging war against developers who are incorporating Woke and DEI values into franchises people love. I'm clearly on the side of the gatekeepers because I don't like getting lectured for having conservative values, so I sincerely enjoyed reading about the substantial business losses suffered by games like Concord and Dragon Age Veilguard.

I will be willing to get into games if I can convince my son to enjoy them with me. It's hard because he is 8, so the best he can do is assemble some simple Gunpla. I'm checking to see if I can get him into Warhammer 40k, paint some minis, and then roll some dice—anything is a lesser evil than brain rot from TikTok or YouTube. 

My peers have yet to successfully share a hobby with their kids, but I still want to try. 

c) Board, TCG and RPG gaming

Some old friends from my secondary school caught up with me, and we agreed to play the games we'd slowly collected over the past. However, we needed help finding folks to play with us. These are reasonably complicated games like Dune Boardgame, Legend of the 5 Rings LCG, and Battletech. If we can get a group of about 5, I promise to run D&D 2024 for them regularly. 

I was lucky because I doubted I could fit serious gaming into my life if I could not monetise it. But I game in my neighbourhood in Woodlands, so things might work out this time. 

Regardless of what game I play, I play the same way I play RPGs. I'm constantly on the attack and will recklessly charge someone if I know the rules. I don't believe in or engage in diplomacy. In L5R, I only play the Lion Clan. For Magic the Gathering, I only play black/red cards. In Battletech... I only know... DEATH FROM ABOVE!

I'm fun to play with because I tend to lose a lot. 

Thank goodness I don't invest like the way I game.

d) Trips to Johor

This isn't a hobby, but I might have more friends who can hit JB with me on a weekday to escape the cost of living in Singapore. Yesterday, I attempted to strike a fantastic chicken chop restaurant called It Roo near City Square. Then, I went to Aeon Tebrau to visit Tsutaya Bookstore before heading to a pasar malam at Tun Aminah. Now, I'm asking friends and relatives to devise a plan for Bukit Indah as we attempt a different crossing from Tuas.  

Sometimes, we are defined by what we don't do for hobbies. I no longer care about watching shows. If Disney produces more woke series like The Acolyte, I will cancel my subscription. I no longer buy comics for the same reason. I also watch fewer movies because Marvel is rethinking how to do superhero shows.

Social Life Update : How to increase your happiness without using money.

It is time for another update as I reach my 50th-year milestone on Christmas Day. 

Today, I will talk about my social life, which has seen some tuning up recently. In 2024, as my energy and tolerance levels are dipping slowly, I've decided to create higher-quality engagements with a lower frequency. 

In other words, do more with less.

For many middle-aged folks, some social engagements add little value because the subject matter has stopped being attractive. Others may create a sense of negativity and unease, but we can get so used to them that we ignore them until they bring us down for days and permanently reduce our quality of life if we don't stop them. Lower energy levels mean disengaging from some lower-value-added activities and shifting the focus to more pleasant ones. 

This is the essence of decent ageing. A more tactical use of our time and attention, which we can default to our families.

The test is also quite simple: Does it feel better to engage in a new social activity? If it does not, then you should end the engagement as soon as possible. With time freed, try out engagements with friends you would not normally do without the spare time, and then test to see if the activities fit and feel better. 

Be open-minded to changes, and recycle your time somewhere else if you make the wrong move. 

One significant change is that I go to a Japanese Karaoke bar to sing for three hours nonstop once a month or so or when I get spare cash from government handouts. I will hog the entire karaoke because I tend to appear when there are no clients. Total damage is $44. I don't drink alcohol, just two bottles of Soda water. I am accompanied by friends who sing casually but generally prefer to be there to converse. I focus on my singing because I will qualify for Golden Age Talentime quite soon and don't want to get dragged into discussions about dividends, stocks, or legal matters.

Another change is that I've done some soul-searching about my D&D hobby, and I decided that my only motivation to run a game is if I'm paid to do so. For many years, the community has tolerated abusive Dungeon Masters who do it because it is a power trip—they get godlike powers over players who generally are doing better in life than they are. Still, players need to actually have a viable alternative. So, the professionalization of the Game Master is inevitable. We should pay good DMs at a reasonable rate. In support of that belief,  I've recently attended a delightful job interview to become a Professional Dungeon Master. Sadly, I did not get the job ( but it was probably the most enjoyable job interview I ever had), but I will look at this space aggressively as the skillset reinforces my work as a trainer and lecturer.  

Over the year, I have learned a few things about reducing social engagements and why it always works out for me. 

Because my media appearances always attract financially responsible people, the folks who invite me for dinner are generally okay, and I get to talk to people who have goals in life and are doing good things to improve their future. So, somehow, my social diaries always write themselves. 

Second, with the extra time, I've been spending some weeks trying to understand why some of my genuine fans / high-paying customers have yet to actually invest in the financial markets, even though they are loyal customers who sign up for every course I run. This bothers me a lot, but I have invested weeks to finally get at least two guys to have a small portfolio running. ( Two guys are occasional colleagues, so I guide them, but they also buddy each other. It's a sound system, but I gotta think about scaling this. )

The first reason is that people are human beings with shifting financial priorities; a student wants to get a house, so he can only start after he has moved into his new place. Another reason is that even though modern brokerages are easy to use, they tend to send many warning messages due to compliance requirements, which is very intimidating to beginners. You need the courage to tell IBKR not to display this message again. The third reason is that investors need to trade off diversified portfolios for trading fluency. To get someone into the markets, you have to start with 2-3 stocks that cost less than $2,000 to trade but to do this, the trainer must caveat that this is not a diversified mix of counters and is just a confidence-building exercise.  Finally, the odds of succeeding rests upon the student's digital literacy, so if you get someone above 60, make sure he's an engineer before you agree to help. 

Anyway, my family is out on a trip this upcoming week, but I'm stuck with lectures I need to conduct; we'll see if my social calendar fills out this week. Let's use random chance for blog readers -  I'm available Mondays from next Friday until next week. 

Some loyal readers have reached out to me in the past. Let me know if you are free.

Deeper thoughts about FATFIRE

 

This weekend, I will attempt to think deeply about FATFIRE, as I suspect that over the years, many millennials have reached their 40s and are well past their FIRE objectives. I am now trying to figure out what life goals to pursue next. As most of the folks who will play with early retirement are INTJ strategists, there is a range of other MBTI types like ENTJs ( which I am borderline ). 

The aim is to go beyond a goal-shifting exercise like ENTJs are prone to. Also, I want to acknowledge that I enjoy non-toxic work and interacting with younger people and investors. 

As I've alluded to in my latest YouTube video, financial independence is resetting your working life and trading off leisure time for work to maximise personal satisfaction. The point at which the marginal tradeoff of an hour of leisure to an hour of work produces zero increase in life satisfaction differs from individual to individual. Additionally, I suspect extroverts have a much larger point of equilibrium where marginal work = marginal leisure. I'm at about 15 hours a week on average and have a capacity of perhaps up to 21 hours - but getting back to conventional employment is impractical for me these days. I wonder if INTJs have the energy to work 20+ hours a week if they never have to work. Hence, there is a tendency for more ENTJs to go after FATFIRE.

Okay, once we've established my mental model, which is familiar to many economics majors, let's discuss how FATFIRE can redefine a new financial metric more creatively than simply the safe withdrawal rate. 

a) Safe rate of withdrawal

The conventional approach is to declare a comfortable lifestyle for yourself. If this is $10,000 a month, then a safe 4% withdrawal rate can be attained at a net worth of $3,000,000. It's easy, elegant, and quite suitable for singles. Critics can argue that this was tested to last about 35 years, but in practice, you can just lower your expenditure when things become non-ideal later. 

You are still retiring with a lot.

b) Sustainable, safe rate of withdrawal

For folks uncomfortable with ratcheting up the drawdown based on inflation, my models suggest applying a safe withdrawal rate of about 2.6% every year based on the prevailing portfolio size at the year of retrieval. The caveat is that you need a balanced ETF asset mix for this to work. 

The advantage is you never have to worry about hitting zero, as portfolio losses will lead to lower withdrawals on a bad year. However, this number also maximises your utility over time as withdrawals increase faster than the inflation rate, and your portfolio tends to grow faster.

Therefore, a portfolio of $3,000,000 will generate $78,000 a year, but it can potentially grow faster than the rate of inflation. 

The disadvantage is that you will always have money, so this is best for folks with children who can pass on a nice lump sum that will sustain them in the future. 

I don't see any point in making your nieces and nephews multimillionaires after you die. 

c) Every family member can FIRE

Another way to stretch the goalposts for folks with families is to enable FIRE for every family member. For a single person to FIRE at $2,000 per month, you need $600,000. A four-person family would need $2,400,000.

The benchmark may be lower than other forms of FATFIRE, but some may question whether it is wise to gift FIRE to your kids before they can earn a single cent in the industry. There's a lot of hypocrisy here, as many parents think spending thousands on tuition is justified to delay their retirement goals. 

d) Work until every family member is a millionaire

Finally, I want to share my new financial goals. Given that I do some work and am pretty happy with my life, reinvesting substantial amounts into my real estate portfolios, a simple and relatively visceral goal is to ensure that everyone in the household can be a millionaire. 

The resulting lifestyle is manageable, and there are plenty of things to do and accomplishments for the next generation. 

It is slightly more ambitious than (c) and provides me time to create a balanced mix of work and play without resorting to crass materialism in Singapore society. 

e) Become my definition of wealthy

Finally, I want to state my definition of a rich person. 

A rich person can live with dividends arising from dividends earned in the previous year. 

To live, do that with $2000 a month. A rich person would need about $600,000 of dividends in the previous year. At 5% dividends, his portfolio needs to be $12,000,000.

I'm nowhere close, but some folks in the social media space are there. At this stage, it's safe to assume that someone is finally considered wealthy. There's no real need to pontificate about safe rates of withdrawal or career choices at this level. 

Maybe one day, I can philosophize about being rich.

To summarise, I've never thought very highly about FATFIRE or the folks who keep harping about them. As an ENTJ, I know it's some sad excuse to postpone retirement or create some kind of barrier to convince INTJs that what they aim for is inadequate. At its base, it's just the simple idea that retirement is meaningless if you get more life satisfaction by trading off some of your leisure time with work. 

Happiness always contains a bit of entering flow from deep, meaningful work or personal accomplishments; I totally get that. However, financial independence is the essential ingredient for even realising that such tradeoffs are possible by leaving a toxic workplace and creating a career that suits your inclinations and investment of time.