Why I Quit the Fast Track to Early Retirement – (Ep. 24)

In this episode, Aaron shares a deeply personal story about walking away from what seemed like the “smart financial decision.” After landing a high-paying corporate job that promised early financial freedom, he quickly realized the hidden cost, long hours, constant travel, loneliness, and a marriage under strain. Despite the impressive paycheck, the life behind it …

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Episode Transcript

(00:00):
This is the No Pricks Allowed podcast with

(00:02):
Erin Buckner from Cactus.
Let us guide you through the prickly world
of finance. Are you ready for a change
to the approach of how financial advice is
given? Wanna ditch the financial confusion and embrace
your financial freedom? Let's revolutionize how you approach
personal finance in a positive and uplifting way.
Sit back, listen in, and enjoy the show.

(00:22):
I could have retired ten years earlier if
I had stayed in my first job.
Instead, I decided to not take the smart
financial decision.
In 2010,
I started my first job. Well, my first
career position. I had a job working at
Canadian Tire
As a receiver in the local store, I
would rise before the sun to unload trucks.

(00:43):
And they were full of random merchandise ranging
from car tires to small kitchen appliances.
Each day was a different adventure as we
never knew what would be coming in on
the trucks.
The job was exactly what it was, a
job and not a whole lot more.
I never pictured myself moving up in the
ranks at the local retail store.

(01:04):
It was something pulling money to pay for
bills
and keep me busy while my wife was
at school getting her master's.
But my first career job, my first full
time job
was as a field merchandiser
with Canadian Tire Corporation.
For people who have no idea what that
is, let me simplify it for you.

(01:26):
You know, when you walk into a store
and everything's changed, they've moved the ketchup, which
was an Aisle 4 next to the
mustard, and now it's in Aisle 15 with
the barbecue sauce. And you get frustrated because
you had just learned where everything was in
the store, and you knew how to get
in and get out really quickly.
And now it's a gigantic hassle.

(01:48):
Yeah. I'm the guy who makes those changes.
I'm the evil villain in this whole story.
No. I was making good money in the
role. My wage doubled from where it was,
plus I had benefits.
It was nothing amazing by the stretch, but
it was close to almost $60,000
a year. Now remember, this was 2010. That
was pretty impressive money for someone just getting

(02:09):
their first job.
For a kid out of university and getting
his first real paying job, this money was
huge.
I'm not gonna deny it. Having
that kind of income meant I could do
more than just survive.
I could still remember opening the large Manila
envelope,
a heart pounding to see the offer letter,
and I was taken back by that pay

(02:30):
increase I had just received. I remember calling
my wife
and happily explaining I got the job, I
got the job.
Now the job had other perks because I
spent a lot of time in the road.
While I was away,
everything was paid for. So the hotels I
stayed in, the gas I had to expend,
food I need to eat, and a little
bit of money for entertainment. I mean, I

(02:51):
spent
nothing when I was working.
I was doing nothing but pocketing my paycheck
each month, and I had the added benefit.
At that time, I was living with my
parents
while we were still trying to figure out
where to move next, so I had zero
expenses.
But this job had a fair share of
downfalls.

(03:12):
I was on the road for two weeks
at a time in a city I didn't
know for four months at a time. I
was not working for stores in major cities.
I wasn't in Toronto and Montreal and Ottawa.
But I was in small rural stores with
populations of less than 60,000 people.
Every day,
walking to that store for the first time
was like being a freshman at the local

(03:34):
high school you just moved to.
You're that weird
outsider in town.
It always felt
just like
how it happens in the movies when that
new guy shows up for the first day
of class, and you're being introduced by the
teacher to all the kids, and they're just
staring at you making snap judgments.

(03:55):
It was always weird that first morning being
introduced to the start the the staff at
the store,
you could feel the judgmental
eyes as you were introduced to the store
employees.
They already knew I was the villain.
I was the corporate fat cat, really just
a middle man between them and the corporate
juggernaut.
But I was the one who was coming

(04:16):
into their small town
where they were happy and had been for
years to uproot what they knew and make
it all shiny and new. That tension, it
wears on you.
Now during those two week stretches, I lived
out of hotels,
the kind with the continental breakfasts where everything
tastes flaky like cardboard and burnt coffee. I

(04:37):
was in no five star places.
Every morning, I'd sit alone at a tidy
table,
eating my scrambled eggs that were powdered, most
likely, watching the local news play in the
background.
Lunch usually consisted of a sandwich from a
local diner or a fast food burger, and
I ate alone in my car so I
could think in peace for ten minutes.

(04:59):
Dinner was usually at the local pub sitting
in those high stools that had leather seats
that were definitely worn and ripped.
And having one or two beers, I'd be
looking at my Blackberry,
answering emails I'd received all day, but didn't
have the time to answer until then.
And between those emails and refills, I would

(05:19):
catch myself wondering,
is this it?
I was making money, but I felt
hollow.
Being alone not only made those two weeks
on the road difficult,
it
added to my stress level.
I was overworked and stressed all the time

(05:39):
as the job was relentless.
The timelines
to flip a store were basically set in
stone
down to the minute.
If things were late to be delivered or
we fell behind schedule, that weight
of keeping that project
and the timelines
was on me.
I had to weigh that burden.

(06:02):
I was waiting close to twelve hours a
day, training new workers, the skills they needed,
fighting with current employees
who hated the change,
constantly planning for the next two weeks, and
trying to make up for lost time because
we were always behind.
When I was able to go home for
forty eight hours, I'd drive home on a

(06:22):
Friday night, and I'd have to return on
Sunday night. I was exhausted.
I don't know about you, but I never
sleep well in hotels. The bed never feels
right because it's not your bed. It's not
your home.
You're you're sleeping in bed. Hundreds of other
people have slept before,
staring at the popcorn ceiling the same way

(06:44):
everyone else has.
On top of that, my mind is constantly
on, thinking about all the changes of the
day
and the challenges and figuring out, okay. Well,
what went wrong? How can we overcome these
obstacles to get back on track?
The answer usually came down to I have
to put in some extra hours because there
just wasn't enough manpower to help out.

(07:06):
Now, when I did get home, my wife
was excited
to see me
because she had been alone for two weeks
as well.
Because after about a year on the job,
we did move out of my parents' place,
and we found our own place to live.
And, of course, she wanted to do something,
like go out for dinner and reconnect.
I didn't wanna eat out because I had

(07:27):
just done that for two weeks straight. And
when you've been eating fast food and someone
else is cooking, the last thing you wanna
do when you get home
is go out for dinner.
And I had two weeks worth of laundry
I had to do and wanted to just
sleep in my own bed.
This was not

(07:48):
this was not only putting stress on myself,
but also my wife. She was happy I
was home, and she wanted to see me.
And
I wanted to see her as well. It
was always an amazing jolt
when I would see her that Friday night.
But that feeling faded
as my mind shifted from what had to
be done at the store to what had

(08:08):
to be done around the house.
And that miserable feelings
that I had started to hurt the relationship
because I was not the man she married.
But I was a ghost of myself.
I was physically there, but mentally and emotionally,
I was gone those two days because I
was just so

(08:29):
stressed and tired.
And it always made me wonder. I was
making great money,
and I should be happy.
I only had a mortgage that we can
afford on one of our paychecks, and I
was still able to cash
into an investment. It's about $2,000 a month.
I was
on the road to financially

(08:51):
financial success as a 26 year old. So
why was I so unhappy?
Shouldn't I have all this money?
Shouldn't having all this money make me happy?
Society tells me we have
having money should make you happy. Right?
But when your paycheck goes up, your problems
go down. Right?
But it wasn't. I was stressed. I was

(09:12):
miserable, and I couldn't and I could feel
this daily.
I was
regretting my job, having to prove my wealth
and knowledge as a 26 year old to
people twice my age, owners of the businesses
who just expected me to do everything for
them.
And
when you're in as deep as I was,

(09:32):
I started to justify the feelings. I was
telling myself things like this is what success
is like. You have to pay your dues,
work through these tough times, and you will
make it just like the American dream.
And it's funny being a Canadian, and we
talk about the American dream because we hear
it a lot.
And for me, having gone through the high

(09:53):
school in The States, I firsthand
saw that American dream everyone talked about, not
just what we see in TVs and movies.
I learned about grandparents and parents of colleagues
in high school who started a job from
nothing and built it into a huge success
story.
As an a kid who grew up in
lower middle class with hand me down clothes

(10:13):
and ate mac and cheese about twice a
week.
Being successful and having money for all the
things you wanted was a dreamland.
Now, every success story started the same.
They worked hard, long hours more than anyone
else around them, working through the tough situations
that would break a normal person to reach

(10:35):
this pinnacle of success.
And it was a situation I was currently
in. I was living through
these tough times these people were talking about.
And if I could battle my internal struggles
and listen
to the voice of my head,
sometimes,
sure, these times are hard.

(10:56):
But
the success at the end of the road,
and that is what you're aiming for. This
pain will go away. This too shall pass.
This was the moment where I had to
make a decision of what path do I
want
to make in my life.
Do I follow the path so many people
before had done

(11:17):
and start pushing these difficult times
through an even though this will be short
lived,
I would get to some dream happy ending?
Or do I draw the line in the
sand and walk away from a walk away
from it all?
In those visions of early retirement, have enough
money so that I could purchase the things
I wanted to having the life my parents

(11:38):
never did when raising me and my brothers.
This choice is difficult one, one that can't
be taken lightly,
and still change the whole trajectory of my
life.
One path was
money, status,
and burnout.
The other was everything else. It was my
marriage, my health and my sanity.

(11:59):
There's a saying
in finance, we use a lot take the
emotions out of investing, which talks about having
those knee jerk reactions to investing news buying
when you hear
about a hot stock or selling when everything
falls off.
But that saying has been stretched
by some to cover everything in finance,
that your decisions

(12:19):
about how to make money,
and your choices
should all be made
without considering your emotions.
I don't believe in that. If you take
out emotions, pursuing money becomes emotionless
and uninteresting. You have to consider emotions when
you decide any financial decision. We can't live
our lives

(12:40):
with
walls around us swallowing our emotions to make
decisions solely based on the smart financial outcome.
For me, emotions will always be factored in.
And that is why in my decision, I
choose the latter, I decided to not take
the smart financial route.
I made the conscious decision to focus on

(13:01):
my life.
I knew in my heart if I kept
down this road, though I would end up
financially well, my life was going to suffer.
The woman I fell in love with might
possibly leave me.
As I was focusing too much my energy
on work than on her, my health would
continue to get worse as I was using
alcohol and food and caffeine as medication to

(13:23):
allow me to work through these tough times.
That vision of me being alone and unhealthy
was not something I wanted.
I wanted to better my life.
I wanted to gain control of who I
was again and keep my wife and family.
And that was what and still is so
important to me.

(13:44):
So
I quickly moved out into a new job,
where I was the bottom of the pay
grade to the position
where I was at the top, Meaning, there
was no raises for me until I was
able to move to another position, which might
take a few more years. My salary was
capped.
Even though I was giving up this path
to early financial success,

(14:05):
you know what I did get? I got
to be home.
I got to sleep,
and I needed sleep.
I was able to be happy and rekindle
my relationship with my wife as I was
actually
able to have conversations with her, not just
venting fest about a crappy two weeks
I just had in being alone. I also

(14:26):
saved my stomach from ulcers from the five
cups of coffee I needed daily on the
job.
But most importantly,
I felt like me.
I'll be a two year old version of
myself with a lot more gray hair.
Yes, my stressful job for two years resulted
in me getting gray hair as you see
now. The good news, I won't be going

(14:47):
bald at least.
I learned through the experience. Money is not
everything. I live the story. I've been the
guy who thought the paycheck brought happiness,
and I've been the guy who learned it
is not.
I figured out
having more money didn't make me happy if
it came at the expense of my health.

(15:10):
For the longest time, I believe that the
only way to get ahead was to work
harder,
longer and sacrifice more.
That's what we're told that if you just
push through the exhaustion,
if you just hold out a little longer,
one day, it'll all pay off.
But when we never talk about is the
costs along the way.

(15:32):
The missed dinners with family,
the weekend spent working instead of resting
the constant background noise of stress
that follows you everywhere.
When you're chasing financial success, it's so easy
to convince yourself that this is just temporary,
that you'll make
time for your health later, or you'll see

(15:53):
your friends later.
And things will eventually slow down. But the
truth is,
life doesn't wait for you to find balance.
You either make space for it or it
quietly slips away.
Building wealth is important,
but it's not everything.
Don't fall into the trap of thinking the
only way to improve your future is to

(16:14):
sacrifice your present.
Maybe
this means saying no to overtime so you
can actually say yes to dinner with your
kids. Maybe it means choosing a job that
pays a lot less, but let you actually
sleep, actually breathe, and actually live.
Because the truth is
your financial plan isn't just about dollars.

(16:36):
It's about designing a life that feels fulfilling
and sustainable.
It's about finding that point where your money
supports your happiness
and doesn't replace it.
Something we often forget about. Money does not
buy happiness.
Money will solve your current problems,
but the new ones will appear.

(16:57):
As you level up your life, you level
up your problems as well. More money will
not eliminate all your problems. It will just
cause new ones to appear.
So as you work towards your goals, remember
this. Yes. Save.
Yes. Invest.
Yes. Plan.
But also live.

(17:17):
The best return on investment you'll ever get
is a life you don't want to escape
from.
I take this approach with my clients when
it comes to their finances.
When I talk to people about financial planning,
I remind them,
it is not all about the numbers.
We we don't chase higher returns.
We chase happiness.
We don't try and lower tax rates. We

(17:40):
try and lower your frustrations.
We don't maximize your net worth. We maximize
your life.
In the end,
all of this,
building wealth, reaching your goals,
it shouldn't hurt
a philosophy I've adapted into my practice.
Now, I wrote an article and dropped it
on my website where I talk more about

(18:01):
the impacts of stress in your finance, how
a lack of sleep and stress hurts your
heart,
your health, as well as your financial decisions.
I also give a few tips on things
you should you should consider
on your journey to improve your finances.
And I'll have that link in the show
notes below.

(18:21):
Don't forget to like, subscribe, and listen to
the next podcast.
Until next time.
Thank you for listening to the No Pricks
Allowed podcast with Erin Buckner from Cactus.
Click the follow button to be notified when
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or give us a call at (613)
876-9899.

(18:43):
And don't forget to click the follow button
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The information covered and posted represents views and
opinions of the guest and does not necessarily
represent the views, opinions of Cactus. The content
has been made available for informational and educational
purposes only.
The content is not intended to be a
substitute for a professional investing advice.

(19:04):
Always seek the advice of your financial advisor
or other qualified financial service provider
with any questions you may have regarding your
investment planning. The contents of this podcast do
not constitute an offer or solicitation for residents
in any other jurisdiction
where either Aaron Buckner and or Sterling Mutuals
is not registered
or permitted to conduct business.

(19:26):
The opinions expressed are those of the authors
and do not necessarily reflect the views or
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Commissions, trailing commissions, management fees, and expenses,
All may be associated with mutual fund investment
that please read the prospectus carefully before investing.
Mutual funds are not guaranteed.

(19:48):
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