Yaron Goldstein retired at 36.
It’s not uncommon for early retirees to experience some lifestyle shock. Upon quitting the workforce, some people realize they crave the social interaction that comes from a 9-to-5, find they are budgeting too hard, or struggle with going from having a packed calendar to having lots of unstructured time.
After a career in data science that took him from Boston Consulting Group to Google and Meta, Goldstein, too, was worried about not being fulfilled once he stopped working. But nine months into retirement, he says his hobbies and passions keep him more than busy.
“I honestly don’t know how I lived a year in the past,” he told Business Insider. “Because even now I’m struggling with getting enough hours out of each day, getting enough days out of each week.”
A 3-week trip around the US to see more than NYC and Silicon Valley
Goldstein grew up in and lives in Germany. When he first retired, he spent three weeks traveling around the US by train and exploring new cities.
“I had only known New York and Silicon Valley and nothing else, even though I’ve been in the US 15 to 20 times,” he said.
In his second weekend of retirement, Goldstein said he checked off a longtime dream and joined a Berkshire Hathaway shareholder meeting session in 2023 in Omaha, Nebraska, with Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger.
Munger’s death in November 2023 was another reminder for Goldstein.
“On your bucket list, you can also only procrastinate for so long, because sooner or later things will be gone,” he said.
Writing a children’s book about data science
At his jobs at Google and Meta, Goldstein often joked that the role of a data scientist was to apply children-level logic to things that appear complex. Upon retiring, he decided to write a children’s book about data science.
“I want to have kids myself one day. So it’s going to be very nice for them to have something to understand what their daddy did a long time ago,” he said.
Another of Goldstein’s passions is green tea.
He began importing tea directly from Japan about three years ago with the intention of distributing it to friends and colleagues. Now, he’s looking to establish something more structured, like a small online store so more people can access Japanese tea in Germany.
Getting another degree
When he was younger, Goldstein read a trilogy of children’s books about physics and Albert Einstein, which kickstarted his interest in numbers and science.
In retirement, he decided to take advantage of Germany’s free college education and recently re-enrolled in university, this time to study physics.
“I’m now studying surrounded by freshmen, which is a very, very strange experience,” he said.
How Goldstein structures his days
For Goldstein, no day is without an agenda.
He wakes up at 7 a.m. and leaves bed by 8 a.m. He listens to financial news podcasts, prepares his green tea, and drinks it while taking in the local news, checking on his financial portfolio, and updating his personal expense report.
The rest of his day varies. He attends university classes three times a week and plans regular meetups with friends. He has added activities into his routine like swimming two to three times a week and walking between 12,000 and 15,000 steps every day.
Goldstein also schedules time for his grandmother and mother several times a week.
He listens to 20 to 30 hours of podcasts every week and one audiobook every fortnight. He also has a list of TV shows and video games he saved for retirement that he is working through.
As someone who got into investing thanks to a mentee-mentor relationship, he said he plans to teach more friends about the fundamentals of investing.
“I’m coaching younger people, usually in their early to mid-20s, on ‘financial adulting,'” he said.
Are you part of the FIRE community in Europe or Asia? If you’ve got a story to share, get in touch with this reporter: shubhangigoel@businessinsider.com
