I answered Kinder's three questions in my twenties. The answers weren't about money.

George Kinder's three questions are the best-known tool in life planning, and they're deliberately arranged as a funnel: each one takes away more of your excuses than the last. I answered them properly, in writing, while still early in my career and a long way from financially independent.

I'd recommend doing the same before you get too far into optimising a plan, because the questions are very good at exposing whether you actually want the thing you're saving for.

Question one

Imagine you are financially secure, that you have enough money to take care of your needs, now and in the future. How would you live your life? Would you change anything? Don't hold back on your dreams. Describe a life that is complete, that is richly yours.

My honest answer: not very much would change.

I'd stay where I am until I finish my current qualification, then move to the city as planned, and keep doing the same job. I'd drop to four days a week and use the extra day to volunteer as a school governor. I'd take six-month sabbaticals to travel slowly, off the beaten track.

That's it. That's the fantasy.

I sat with that for a while, because it's not what you're supposed to write. But the reason is straightforward: I need something to keep myself busy and my mind active, and work provides the challenge, a social life, and an identity. Remove it and I'd have to reconstruct all three from scratch.

What it told me: financial independence isn't an escape route for me, because there's nothing I'm escaping. It's a permission slip — for four days instead of five, for unpaid volunteering, for a sabbatical that doesn't need a manager's blessing. That's a much smaller number than "never work again", and it changes what I'm actually saving towards.

If your answer to question one is "I'd quit tomorrow and never look back", you have a job problem, and no amount of saving fixes a job problem in the meantime.

Question two

Your doctor tells you that you have only five to ten years left to live. You won't feel sick, but you'll have no warning of the moment of your death. What will you do with the time you have left? Will you change your life, and how?

Here the answer moved.

I'm not financially independent, so I'd still need to work — and I'd still want to, because I enjoy the work itself. But I'd immediately quit the qualification programme. It's stressful and time-consuming and its entire value is deferred; with ten years left, I don't need it.

I'd still move to the city with my housemate. But I'd stop trying to meet someone. And I'd spend every spare hour travelling, both to visit people I care about and to see new places with friends.

What it told me: the parts of my life that exist to buy future optionality are the first things to go when the future gets shorter. Qualifications, career positioning, the slow accumulation of credibility — all of it is a bet on a long horizon, and I'm making that bet consciously rather than by default. That's fine. But it's worth knowing which parts of your week you'd delete instantly, because those are the parts you're not doing for their own sake.

The other thing that jumps out: cutting the search for a partner but keeping the friends. Under time pressure, I'd optimise for the relationships I already have rather than the ones I hope to build.

Question three

Your doctor tells you that you have one day left. Notice what feelings arise as you confront your mortality. What did I miss? Who did I not get to be? What did I not get to do?

Two answers, and both of them stung.

I never built an identity outside of work — the hobby, the volunteering, the thing that's mine and isn't a job title. I'd been planning to for years.

I've not had a girlfriend.

That's the whole list. Not a house, not a portfolio, not a job level.

What it told me: the regrets are the to-do list. And notably, neither item is solved by money. I could hit every financial target I've set, on schedule, and still write exactly the same two lines. Meanwhile both are things I could start on this month — the volunteering especially, which I'd been quietly deferring until some future moment when things calm down. Things do not calm down.

That's the actual point of question three. Everything survives the first two questions on the grounds that there's time. The third one removes time and shows you what you've been postponing forever.

Why write it down, and why date it

I've now got several versions of my future written down over a few years, each one dated. Reading them back is more useful than writing them was:

• The oldest one is naive in specific, instructive ways — plans that assumed the world would sit still.
• The middle one is much more concrete and much less ambitious, which is either maturity or a failure of nerve.
• The current one contains things the earlier versions couldn't have imagined, which is a reasonable argument against over-planning.

I score the old ones occasionally: what actually happened, what I got wrong, and whether the misses were bad luck or bad thinking. That distinction matters. A plan that failed because the world changed is fine. A plan that failed because I never started is information about me.

If you're going to try it

Two things that make it work:

1. Write the answers, don't think them. Thinking about question one produces a paragraph you've already told yourself before. Writing it produces the version where you notice, halfway down, that you wouldn't change anything.
2. Answer question two before you've finished feeling clever about question one. The funnel only works in order.

It takes an hour. It's more useful than a year of adjusting your asset allocation.

Nothing here is financial advice; I'm not qualified to give any. The three questions belong to George Kinder and the Kinder Institute of Life Planning — the answers are just mine.