Sometime in the late-nineties, a magazine would arrive at my student house on a CD-ROM. Not a link. Not an app. A shiny disc, in the post, that you fed into a computer the size of a small fridge and then waited, while it whirred, to find out whether it would work at all.
The magazine was called Blender, and it was one of the first of its kind: music, video and words crammed onto a disc. I loved those CD-ROMs.
Behind it was a man called Felix Dennis.
If the name means nothing, the empire will. Dennis was one of the great British publishers. He’d stood in the dock as a young man in the Oz obscenity trial, then built a company that gave the world Maxim, The Week, and a long shelf of computer magazines, and made himself, by the end, something north of half a billion pounds. He spent a fair chunk of it, by his own cheerful account, on drink, drugs and company. He was not a man who died wondering.
He also, late in life, started planting trees. Not a few at the bottom of the garden. A forest: the Heart of England Forest, hundreds of thousands of native broadleaves across Warwickshire, still growing now.
Which is what makes a line from his book How to Get Rich stick in the mind. Dennis wrote that if he had his time over, he’d have made just enough money to live comfortably, as quickly as he could, cashed out by the age of 35, and gone off to “write poetry and plant trees.”
I heard Morgan Housel turn that line over on a podcast recently and land roughly where I land. It sounds lovely. It’s also wrong, and wrong twice.
To retire at 35 on “just enough”, Dennis would have had to spend his twenties and early thirties living small, in precisely the years when a bit of money buys the most: the freedom to take the risk, start the thing, say yes. And then what? Dennis stopped being poor and started being Felix Dennis because he could not sit still. Hand a man like that a quiet cottage and a notebook at 35 and he isn’t writing sonnets by 40. He’s bored stiff and buying a magazine.
Here’s the part that matters for the rest of us, the ones without a publishing empire to fall back on.
The fantasy of sprinting to a number and stopping assumes the person you’ll be at 35, or 55, wants what you want today. They won’t. People change. The goalposts wander. “Enough” turns out to be less a finish line than an ongoing conversation with yourself.
And look at what actually happened. Dennis did write the poetry. He did plant the trees, a whole forest of them. He simply did it with the fortune, later, rather than instead of it. The money didn’t get in the way of the meaning. It paid for it.
That, as we see it, is the job. Not to name a magic number and slam on the brakes, but to shape money around a life that keeps changing shape: the work you actually want to do, the people you want to bring with you, the trees, whatever your trees turn out to be.
Felix Dennis got rich, and then got to the poetry. The order wasn’t the mistake. Believing he’d have been happier skipping the first part: that was.
We help people in Hook and across Hampshire, Surrey, Berkshire, Sussex and Kent think about what their “enough” is really for. It’s usually a more interesting question than the number.
Altor Wealth Management LLP is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA number 769033). Registered office: Landmark House, Station Road, Hook, Hampshire RG27 9HA. This article is general information, not personal advice. The value of investments can fall as well as rise, and tax treatment depends on your own circumstances and can change.