Let me get the awkward part out of the way first: I bought this website for its links.

The New York Times linked here. Get Rich Slowly, Big Think, Budgets Are Sexy — the whole FIRE blogosphere, back when it was on fire, linked to the guy who wrote this site. Not to a calculator farm. To a voice. A man who retired at thirty-six, lost $750,000 in the housing bubble, and wrote about all of it in the first person.

That man isn't me. He wrote this site years before I showed up. His essays are still here, preserved and clearly labeled, because they're the reason this domain matters and because rewriting someone else's life as your own is the kind of thing this community can smell from three tabs away.

So who am I? I've spent twenty-five-plus years at the intersection of financial services and technology. In 1999 I was a financial advisor with RBC Insurance in Toronto, got frustrated with the referral options available to independent advisors, and built one of the first online lead-generation platforms for financial services in Canada. The industry standard back then was to generate one lead and sell it to ten different salespeople — which just pisses everyone off, including the person who asked for help. So I multiplied the price by ten, sold it once, and called and qualified every lead myself. Not exactly genius. Common sense, plus a suspicion that if it worked for everyone else first, I'd do fine too. I did. These days I run AdvisorWorld.com Inc.

And here's the part that makes me an odd owner for a site called Early Retirement Dude: I think retirement is a terrible goal.

Working is the journey. Retirement — the rocking-chair, gold-watch, wait-out-the-clock version — is death by another name. What kind of idiot spends thirty years grinding toward the day he stops doing things?

But financial independence? That I believe in completely, because I'm living it. Cash flow that doesn't depend on showing up. Learn what I want to learn. Build what I want to build. Practice guitar when I want to practice. Learn tennis when I want to tennis.

And when I say guitar, I don't mean noodling on the couch. I got my first guitar at eleven, joined my first band at fourteen in a town of five hundred people, and took a jazz degree at Humber College — then put the instrument away for years while I built businesses and a family. Financial independence is what took it back out of the case. I built a recording studio, made two albums, and the Galen Weston Band ended up opening twenty dates for the Gipsy Kings — including a sold-out night at the Beacon Theatre in New York — then playing clubs in Paris, Berlin, and London, a fifteen-show tour of China, and Cuba. We headlined a jazz festival where David Sanborn joined the band — playing my songs, and one of his we covered. The Toronto Star ran a profile with my favorite headline I'll ever get: "Galen Weston is a jazz artist — no, not that Galen Weston." None of it made me famous. All of it made me glad I never retired.

That's what FI actually buys. Not a rocking chair — a second act. Not the absence of work — the absence of have to. For the last few months I've been building more than I have in years, because AI made building fun again, not because anyone's making me. Look at my calendar and try to find the work. There is none. I'm having fun.

So that's the deal with this site now. The original Dude's archive stays, as he wrote it. The new writing is mine, under my own name, from the FI-first side of the fence: the math, the tools, the honest trade-offs — and a standing argument that the "RE" in FIRE is the part you should question hardest.

If you're here to stop working forever, the archive has a man who did it and told the truth about it. If you're here to stop having to work — stick around. That's the part I know.

— Galen Weston
Operator, earlyretirementdude.com (AdvisorWorld.com Inc.)