Financial Advisor’s Own Math Says 20 Years to Freedom, He Cuts It to 3

Most people work two levers, spending less and investing more. A third one moves the timeline for time freedom up by decades.

ALAMEDA, CA, UNITED STATES, September 1, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ — The standard financial plan makes a simple promise. Work hard now, and your time becomes your own at 65.

Brian Herriot ran that math on himself at 45. A financial advisor by trade, he calculated after the 2020 market selloff that his savings and investments would make him fully financially independent in twenty years, at 65. Then he ran the numbers a second way, this time counting work he could design to be flexible rather than work he would eventually quit. That version took three years.

“The compounding is real. It just arrives late,” Herriot said. “The years when you actually need flexibility are the ones the plan asks you to work as much as you can and invest for the long term.”

The usual shortcut is to save aggressively and retire early, and the odds there are long. Gallup data suggests fewer than 2 percent of Americans reach financial independence in their forties, and the share has not improved as the idea has grown more popular.

Herriot had learned the cost of waiting early, and then lost track of it. In 1999, his wife Claire, who has cystic fibrosis, received a double lung transplant and nearly died the following day. She had grown up with a life expectancy of eighteen. She is now twenty-seven years past the transplant.

“I walked out of that hospital certain I would never postpone anything again,” Herriot said. “Then I spent the next twenty years back in the rat race, commuting ninety minutes each way to work, and missing out on too much of my son’s childhood.”

He took his first full summer off in 2023, three years after changing how he worked, at his family’s cabin in northern Wisconsin. He has taken every summer off since.

His framework, the Time Freedom Formula™, works three levers at once: lifestyle expenses, investment income, and flexible work. Most people only ever pull the first two, he argues, which is why the timeline stays stuck at 65. Adding the third moves it up.

Herriot is careful not to frame this as an argument against retirement planning. Saving and investing still matter, and working later in life is often part of the plan rather than a failure of it, provided the work is something you want to keep doing.

“This isn’t about quitting work,” Herriot said. “It’s about designing work you don’t need to escape from, so the flexibility shows up while your kids are still home and your parents are still around.”

Time Freedom: Rethink Your Work and Money to Create a Life You Love Now is endorsed by Cal Newport, author of Deep Work, Héctor García, co-author of Ikigai, and Tiffany “The Budgetnista” Aliche, author of Get Good with Money.

Herriot is available for interviews on how to develop the money confidence to start working more flexibly, and how to grow a lifestyle business that creates time for what matters most.

Brian Herriot is a financial advisor and entrepreneur based in Alameda, California. He hosts “The Time Freedom Podcast.”

Time Freedom has been named the Next Big Idea Club’s first September 2026 must-read in Personal Finance. It publishes September 15 from Page Two Simplified.

https://bookoftheday.nextbigideaclub.com/p/septembers-must-read-books

Media contact: Kirby Denison, kirby@timefreedom.life

Brian T Herriot
Herriot Business Consulting
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Written By: EIN Presswire