What happens after you have spent years saving aggressively, investing diligently, building passive income, and escaping the traditional office treadmill? Ideally, you enjoy the freedom you worked so hard to create. In reality, ambitious people often replace one demanding boss with an even more demanding supervisor: themselves.
The theme behind the 2023 Financial Samurai goals was therefore refreshingly simple: get back to easy living. Rather than chasing maximum productivity, maximum wealth, and maximum applause from strangers on the internet, the plan emphasized maintenance, family, enjoyable work, physical health, and selective ambition.
That did not mean abandoning goals or spending every afternoon horizontal on a sofa while someone delivered grapes. It meant using financial independence as intended: to create more control over time, reduce unnecessary stress, and invest energy in experiences that make life worth funding.
What “Back to Easy Living” Really Means
Easy living is often confused with laziness. They are not the same. Laziness avoids necessary effort. Easy living removes unnecessary effort.
The distinction matters. A person can exercise regularly, manage a portfolio, raise children, create meaningful work, and still live relatively calmly. Trouble begins when every activity becomes a competition. A friendly tennis match becomes preparation for Wimbledon. A blog becomes a publishing factory. A comfortable investment portfolio becomes an excuse to check stock prices every eleven minutes.
The Financial Samurai framework divided the year into five areas: health, wealth, family, the Financial Samurai platform, and an “X-factor” category for unusual projects or personal challenges. The target was not perfection but roughly 70% completion. That percentage is psychologically useful because it encourages progress without turning every missed target into a courtroom drama.
Health Goals: Entering Maintenance Mode
Many annual plans begin with an aggressive weight-loss target. The 2023 Financial Samurai goals took a more sustainable approach: maintain a comfortable weight, play sports consistently, and avoid injuries.
Exercise for Enjoyment, Not Punishment
The plan called for tennis or pickleball about four times a week. The deeper lesson is to choose movement that is enjoyable enough to repeat. A technically perfect workout plan is useless when it makes you hide behind the refrigerator every time your gym bag appears.
Federal health guidance recommends that adults accumulate at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity aerobic activity each week, along with muscle-strengthening activity on two or more days. Recreational sports can help meet those targets while also providing competition, community, and stress relief.
For anyone adopting a similar goal, the most practical measurement may not be body weight. Track active days, energy levels, sleep quality, mobility, and whether you can climb stairs without negotiating with your knees.
Make Staying Uninjured a Serious Goal
In middle age, enthusiasm often remains twenty-five years old while the Achilles tendon has joined AARP. The original plan acknowledged this mismatch by emphasizing stretching, shoulder strengthening, recovery, and reduced overtraining.
Flexibility work can improve range of motion, while an appropriate warm-up, gradual progression, strength training, and recovery days can make a fitness routine more sustainable. Stretching is useful, but it should not be treated as magical armor. A five-minute hamstring stretch cannot protect someone who suddenly decides to play six hours of pickleball after spending six months communicating mainly with a couch.
Avoiding injury also protects more than athletic performance. It preserves the ability to travel, work comfortably, sleep well, and play with children. In that sense, healthy joints are income-producing assetsexcept they pay dividends in piggyback rides.
Wealth Goals: When Flat Becomes the New Up
After a difficult 2022 for both stocks and bonds, the 2023 wealth plan was intentionally defensive. Instead of expecting another glorious surge in net worth, the central objective was capital preservation.
Protect Financial Independence Before Chasing More
The original goal anticipated the possibility of additional stock and housing weakness. Because the portfolio included meaningful exposure to both public equities and real estate, even moderate declines could have reduced total net worth.
This is an important lesson for financially independent households: risk should be measured against lifestyle needs, not against a market index. Someone who depends on portfolio income to cover living expenses may reasonably invest differently from a thirty-year-old employee with decades of salary ahead.
Diversification, asset allocation, rebalancing, and a clearly defined time horizon can help manage risk. They cannot eliminate losses, but they can reduce the danger of having one investment, property market, or exciting idea carry the entire financial plan on its back.
Focus on Cash Flow, Not Just Net Worth
One of the most useful ideas in the Financial Samurai philosophy is that net worth may look impressive on a spreadsheet, but cash flow pays for groceries, insurance, vacations, and the plumber who announces that your “small leak” has developed career ambitions.
The 2023 plan aimed to increase passive income by roughly 5%, from approximately $380,000 to $400,000. The proposed methods included reinvesting online income, evaluating real estate opportunities, and using income-producing securities.
The exact numbers are far beyond the circumstances of most households, but the structure is broadly useful. Estimate annual expenses, identify dependable income sources, maintain liquid reserves, and avoid assuming that every asset can be sold immediately at an attractive price.
Federal Reserve research found that only 54% of U.S. adults reported having savings sufficient to cover three months of expenses in 2023. That makes emergency savings one of the least glamorous but most valuable forms of passive-life insurance.
Practice Purposeful Decumulation
The most unusual 2023 goal was not to save more. It was to spend approximately 20% more.
After decades of accumulating wealth, disciplined savers can struggle to switch into decumulation mode. Spending may feel irresponsible even when the money exists specifically to support a better life. The Financial Samurai plan proposed directing additional money toward better food, family travel, childcare, charitable giving, gifts, and more comfortable flights for aging parents.
This is not permission to set a retirement account on fire at a luxury resort. Purposeful spending requires boundaries. A useful method is to divide extra spending into categories:
- Time-saving spending: childcare, cleaning, transportation, or professional assistance.
- Health-supporting spending: nutritious food, preventive care, fitness, and recovery.
- Relationship spending: family visits, shared meals, celebrations, and travel.
- Meaningful giving: donations and direct support for causes that matter.
- Pure enjoyment: hobbies and memorable experiences with no spreadsheet justification required.
The goal is not higher consumption for its own sake. It is converting money into time, comfort, connection, and memories while those benefits can still be enjoyed.
Defeat Real Estate FOMO
The plan also called for resisting the urge to purchase another expensive San Francisco property. Owning more real estate could increase future wealth, but it could also add maintenance, concentration risk, tenant issues, paperwork, and the occasional 11:47 p.m. message about a toilet.
Financial independence becomes fragile when lifestyle complexity rises faster than passive income. Before buying another property, investors should examine its expected return, financing cost, liquidity, management burden, geographic concentration, and effect on personal freedom.
An investment that produces a respectable return but repeatedly interrupts family dinner may be less attractive than the spreadsheet suggests.
Family Goals: Spend Time Where It Cannot Be Recovered
Money can be earned again. Investment losses can sometimes be recovered. A child being three years old happens once.
The 2023 family goals focused on giving more attention to a young daughter, visiting parents, teaching a son to swim, and creating better alignment between different parenting styles.
Schedule Family Time Like a Real Commitment
“Spend more time with family” is a warm intention but a weak plan. The Financial Samurai approach translated the intention into specific blocks of time throughout the day.
This is especially relevant for parents of young children. Pew Research Center found that parents whose youngest child was under age five were substantially more likely to describe parenting as tiring and stressful than parents of older children. More time with children can be rewarding, but it also requires energy, patience, and realistic expectations.
The solution is not to achieve perfect presence every waking minute. It is to protect a few reliable periods when work, email, and market news are not allowed to barge into the room wearing muddy shoes.
Invest in Safety and Shared Skills
Teaching a child to swim was another concrete objective. Swim lessons can be expensive, particularly when private instruction is necessary, but water competence is more than an extracurricular activity.
The American Academy of Pediatrics describes swim instruction as one layer of drowning prevention, alongside close supervision, barriers, life jackets, and appropriate water-safety practices. Lessons do not make a child “drown-proof,” but they can provide important survival skills.
Align Parenting Styles Without Creating a Supreme Court Case
One parent may favor tough love while the other responds more gently. Neither approach works perfectly in every situation. The practical goal is not identical personalities but consistent boundaries, respectful communication, and agreement about major expectations.
Parents can discuss predictable areas of conflict before the next meltdown occurs: discipline, sleep, schoolwork, devices, chores, safety, and how to respond when a child ignores a warning and immediately demonstrates why the warning existed.
Creative Goals: Produce Less, but Make It Better
The Financial Samurai platform had followed an intense publishing schedule for more than a decade. For 2023, the goal was to reduce output from roughly four weekly publications to about three, shorten posts by approximately 25%, and reclaim part of the weekend.
More Output Is Not Always More Progress
Online creators can become trapped by their own consistency. Readers expect regular content, algorithms reward activity, and a quiet day can feel like professional disappearance.
But chronic workload has consequences. The American Psychological Association describes occupational burnout as a condition associated with chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. Psychological well-being, adequate support, and manageable demands are therefore not fluffy benefits; they are part of sustainable performance.
Shorter posts and fewer publishing days can improve clarity, protect eyesight, reduce editing demands, and leave room for deeper thinking. Brevity also forces a writer to remove verbal furniture nobody was sitting on.
Use New Formats to Keep Work Interesting
Another goal was to record at least 30 podcast episodes. Audio offered a way to explain nuanced ideas, respond to reader feedback, improve speaking skills, and preserve stories for family.
The broader lesson is to redesign work before abandoning it. A writer tired of articles may enjoy audio. A consultant tired of meetings may prefer workshops. An investor tired of active property management may prefer simpler, diversified exposure. Sometimes burnout is not a signal to quit the entire field. It is a request to change the format.
X-Factor Goals: Keep Room for Surprise
A financial plan should not be so optimized that it squeezes out curiosity. The X-factor category included improving at pickleball, writing another book, making a close new friend, and possibly returning to paid employment.
These goals combined play, creativity, relationships, and optional work. They also recognized that early retirement does not always mean permanent inactivity. Some financially independent people eventually return to work because they miss teamwork, structure, challenge, recognition, or simply having somewhere to wear pants with buttons.
The friendship goal may be especially valuable. Social connection supports well-being, while loneliness and isolation are associated with higher risks of depression, heart disease, and cognitive decline. Joining recreational sports, volunteering, attending local events, or participating in school communities can create repeated contactthe basic ingredient from which adult friendships often grow.
How to Create Your Own Back-to-Easy-Living Plan
1. Define What “Enough” Looks Like
Set a target for annual spending, emergency savings, retirement contributions, passive income, and desired work hours. Without an “enough” number, every achievement simply unlocks a more expensive target.
2. Choose Maintenance Goals
Not every year must be a dramatic expansion. Maintaining health, relationships, income, and net worth during a difficult period can be a major success.
3. Set a Minimum Acceptable Completion Rate
A 70% target allows flexibility while preserving accountability. Select the most important goals first so that missing several lower-priority items does not derail the year.
4. Budget for Enjoyment
Create a dedicated category for travel, family visits, hobbies, generosity, or convenience. Money is easier to spend intentionally when enjoyment has already been approved by the plan.
5. Review Life Complexity
List every property, business, account, subscription, recurring obligation, and volunteer commitment. Identify which ones create meaning and which ones merely generate passwords.
6. Schedule Recovery Before Exhaustion
Protect evenings, weekends, vacations, and low-intensity exercise. Recovery should be part of the system rather than an emergency response after motivation has collapsed.
Experience Notes: What Happens When You Actually Try Easy Living
The first surprise when adopting an easier-living plan is that reducing commitments can feel uncomfortable. After years of measuring progress through income, output, and achievement, a quiet afternoon may initially resemble failure. You finish your work early, look around suspiciously, and wonder whether an urgent email has escaped beneath the furniture.
A common experience is the urge to fill every newly created space. Cancel one project and another appears. Reduce a publishing schedule and suddenly there is time to start a video channel, redesign the website, write a book, train for a tournament, and research artisanal coffee equipment. The calendar becomes crowded again, only now the chaos has better branding.
The more effective approach is to leave some capacity deliberately unused. A free Saturday is not an operational defect. It can absorb a child’s birthday party, an unplanned family visit, a long game with friends, or the simple need to recover after a difficult week.
Another practical lesson concerns spending. Long-term savers may create a “fun budget” and then repeatedly refuse to use it. They compare airline prices for three hours, choose the least comfortable itinerary, arrive exhausted, and congratulate themselves for saving $180 while sacrificing an entire day of the vacation. Purposeful decumulation requires evaluating value, not merely price.
For example, spending more on a direct flight for elderly parents may deliver a higher emotional return than purchasing another collectible, gadget, or investment property. Paying for childcare during a stressful month may protect a marriage and improve the time parents spend with their children. Hiring help for a recurring household task may create two extra hours every weekmore than one hundred hours a year.
Easy living also reveals which goals were driven by genuine desire and which were driven by identity. An investor may discover that managing another rental property is not exciting; being known as someone who owns many properties was the exciting part. A creator may realize that publishing constantly is less satisfying than producing one thoughtful piece and then going outside.
Health goals often improve when intensity is reduced. Four sustainable workouts a week can be more valuable than seven heroic sessions followed by an injury and six weeks of complaining. A lower-pressure routine leaves room for mobility, sleep, recovery, and the occasional dessert that does not require a formal apology.
The hardest adjustment may be accepting that an easy year will not always feel easy. Markets move, children get sick, homes require repairs, and family responsibilities expand without checking your annual theme. Financial Samurai’s later review acknowledged that 2023 became more stressful than planned, even though the year also included strong family moments, better-than-expected market performance, and gratitude for good health.
That outcome does not invalidate the goal. A calmer plan cannot control external events, but it can create enough financial and emotional margin to handle them. Easy living is not a promise that nothing difficult will happen. It is a decision not to manufacture additional difficulty merely to prove that you are ambitious.
Conclusion: Financial Freedom Should Eventually Feel Free
The most important message in the 2023 Financial Samurai goals is not the passive-income target, publishing schedule, sports ranking, or annual spending figure. It is the idea that wealth should support a life rather than become an endlessly expanding assignment.
A successful year may involve maintaining instead of maximizing, spending instead of accumulating, playing instead of competing, and protecting relationships instead of squeezing one more task into the day. There will always be another investment opportunity, business idea, renovation, or productivity system promising to transform everything. Meanwhile, children grow, parents age, joints become opinionated, and weekends disappear with suspicious speed.
Back to easy living does not mean giving up. It means becoming selective enough to work hard only on what deserves the effort.