I don't think I'm clear on what kind of advice I could give that might be useful for you. Not on money management I hope. I left a perfectly lucrative career before figuring out what I wanted to do and am consistently broke as fuck. That said, I can speak knowledgeably about how to get by on very little.

Personally, the idea of retiring young doesn't appeal to me. I suppose if I decided to have a family, then I wouldn't want my career getting in the way of that, but as things are now, I'd guess that if I do have a family it would be in my mid 30's to early 40's. I don't know that retiring early is an option for me, especially as I've spent most of my 20's just learning what it is to be alive. Though I think if you can set yourself up such that you don't have to work, that would be really great.

The thing about money is that it is so often used to buy comfort. Most people don't realize just how addicted to comfort they are and thus, tend not to really know how little comfort they need. A spartan existence is liberating in some ways, but it has its drawbacks too. I've found that while I can pretty easily live that way, I'd much prefer to be able to buy quality things and have the ability to finance things like my love of travel. I've also found that by living that way early on, I have a tendency to be very thrifty even when I do have money. For example, this shows up in how I use food. I really try to use every part of the fruit, vegetables and meat that I buy and it's led me to learn things like how to bake bread.

A lot of the greatest poets of the 20th century had day jobs and I get the impression that it wasn't always just about paying the bills. Often, working means necessarily engaging with people and the world in a structured way that we might not otherwise have the opportunity. I feel that this can be invaluable to writers, especially poets. In my own experience, I found that it was difficult to write when I was teaching and in part I blamed my students for sucking the joy out of language. It wasn't all their fault, but when one spends their days instructing and (mostly) correcting mistakes and dealing with arcane questions about grammar that aren't really important except on some test that some miserable person has come up with to draw a paycheck, well, writing can be kind of a chore. I did learn a lot about actually using the English language though, which was nice. I feel like I'm able to figure out how to communicate complex ideas in much simpler terms now.

At the moment, I'm looking at grad programs in conflict resolution or more broadly, organizational/behavioral psychology. Conflict is a fascinating force in human lives and it occurs at every level of interaction. I'm trying to find a way that I can learn deeply about the psychological and neurological aspects of conflict as well as its practical applications to organizations, including applications cross-culturally. I have the feeling that learning about this will take more than one master's or maybe a Ph.D, but I'm not really interested in the academic side, just the practical.

Because the field I'm interested in is based on human interaction, I feel that writing will easily have a place in my life and it will be something that I'll be able to do on my own time that will work well with what I aim to get into professionally. And, if I don't like it I can go back to what I used to do, but with skills that would likely net me a higher rate than I used to be able to demand.

In any event, my only real goal at the moment (in the broad sense) is to create the kind of life that the "old me" would envy and that means working in a field where I can be engaged on multiple fronts in ways that are sure to surprise me. Learning more about people and the lives they lead seems to me, that it will inevitably lead to more writing.