- Yaron Goldstein retired at age 36 after a career in data science.
- Mr. Goldstein keeps busy in retirement by pursuing hobbies and planning time with family and friends.
- He also recently re-enrolled in university.
Yaron Goldstein retired at age 36.
It’s not uncommon for early retirees to experience some kind of lifestyle shock. People who quit their jobs find themselves craving the social interaction of the 9-to-5, or struggle with over-budgeting or having too much unplanned time from a packed schedule. There are some too.
After a career in data science that took him from Boston Consulting Group to Google and Meta, Goldstein also worried that he wouldn’t feel fulfilled if he stopped working. But it’s been nine months since he retired, and he says his hobbies and passions keep him busy.
“Honestly, I don’t know how I’ve been spending the past year,” he told Business Insider. “Because I still struggle with finding enough hours each day and enough days each week.”
A 3-week trip to the U.S. that sees more than New York and Silicon Valley
Goldstein grew up in and lives in Germany. When he first retired, he spent his three weeks traveling by train across the United States and exploring new cities.
“I’ve been to the United States 15 to 20 times, but I only knew New York and Silicon Valley. I didn’t know anything else,” he says.
On his second weekend since his retirement, Goldstein said he fulfilled a lifelong dream and attended Berkshire Hathaway’s 2023 shareholder meeting in Omaha, Nebraska, along with Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger.
Munger’s death in November 2023 was a new memory for Goldstein.
“You can put things off your bucket list for a long time because sooner or later things will run out,” he says.
Wrote a children’s book about data science
During his time at Google and Meta, Goldstein often joked that a data scientist’s role was to apply child-level logic to seemingly complex things. After his retirement, he decided to write a children’s book about data science.
“I also want to have children one day, so it would be very good for them to have something that would help them understand what their fathers did back in the day,” he said.
Goldstein’s other passion is green tea.
He started importing tea directly from Japan about three years ago to distribute tea to friends and colleagues. Now he wants to set up something more structured, like a small online store, to make Japanese tea accessible to more people in Germany.
get another degree
As a young man, Goldstein read a trilogy of children’s books about physics and Albert Einstein, which sparked his interest in numbers and science.
After retiring, he decided to take advantage of Germany’s free university education and recently re-enrolled at university to study physics.
“I’m studying with new students right now, and it’s a very, very strange experience,” he said.
Goldstein’s daily routine
For Goldstein, there is never a day without plans.
He wakes up at 7am and goes to bed by 8am. He listens to financial news podcasts, prepares and drinks green tea while checking local news, reviewing his financial portfolio, and updating his personal spending report.
The rest of his day is mixed. He attends his university classes three times a week and makes regular plans to meet up with his friends. He adds activities to his daily routine such as swimming two to three times a week and walking 12,000 to 15,000 steps each day.
Goldstein schedules time for her grandmother and mother several times a week.
He listens to 20 to 30 hours of podcasts each week and one audiobook every two weeks. He also has a list of TV shows and video games that he has saved for his retirement and is currently working on.
As someone who got into investing thanks to a mentee-mentor relationship, he said he plans to teach more of his friends the basics of investing.
“I coach young people, usually in their early to mid-20s, on ‘financial adulthood,'” he said.
Are you part of the FIRE community in Europe or Asia? If you have a story to share, contact this reporter. shubhangigoel@businessinsider.com
