Something we need to plan for better is how we’ll get social interaction after we leave the workforce. In other words: We need more friends! Soon, we’ll have our best free time when our current friends are at work, so need friends whose time aligns with ours. Plus, having good friends does wonders for mental and physical health, especially as we age.
The massacre in Orlando reminds us that nothing is guaranteed, and while we can’t do everything, we can do those things that are most important. So today, a call to action. Whatever you’ve been putting off, stop putting it off. Do it now.
Over the years, we’ve gotten better at travel than just about anything else. So today we’re going off the financial path for a sec to share our best life hacks for staying healthy while traveling. Questions welcome!
We all know that tomorrow is not a guarantee, but let’s be practical. We simply can’t do everything. But sometimes we let that fact be the source of extra excuses — excuses not to focus enough on fitness, or not to spend time with family. But that ends soon!
We value our health pretty much above everything. If we had a such thing as a “health portfolio,” it’s safe to say we’d value that above its financial counterpart. Something we are thinking a lot about is how we’ll ensure that we always have access to good quality medical care at every stage of our lives. Here’s the rundown of options we’re currently considering as the landscape keeps shifting.
we’ve had that mythical first year of freedom on our minds in a big way lately. like any aspiring early retirees worth our salt, we spend lots of time thinking about everything we want to do when we have more time on our hands, but we’ve been getting more specific, and thinking about the things we’ll do as we adjust to our post-work era, and some of the big life goals that we want to tackle right away.
we’ve mentioned several times over the past few months that we’ve been working on a monster post on health care, obamacare/aca coverage and how the subsidy limits are affecting our retirement budget projections. but we’ve realized that the more interesting topic is the moral catch-22 of the affordable care act subsidies.
one of the misconceptions we used to have about frugality was that frugal people were cheap at all costs. it’s easy to view frugality as all or nothing, or to see frugality as trumping other values. but it doesn’t have to. a breakthrough idea for us was reframing how we see frugality in terms of the business term triple bottom line.
we feel the sunday blues in a big way. and we know why: not only do we just not love having to work every day, we know that we’re in especially high pressure, stressful, occasionally soul-sucking jobs. but we didn’t just default into these golden handcuffs of ours, and we don’t stay in our jobs because we lack imagination. our choice to stay put in unsustainable jobs is a clear-eyed decision we’ve made, based on considering all of our options and deciding what’s most important to us. the most important thing? getting to our exit date as soon as we possibly can.
early retirement is a bfd. and it’s not for everyone. it’s a very different path from the one most people follow for a reason, and it’s not one we should go down without having our eyes wide open. early retirement won’t magically fix everything we wish was different about us or our lives, and it comes with its own set of pitfalls and stresses. to help sort this out, we’ve put together a list: the ten questions you should be able to answer before you retire early.
today we’re sharing the clearest glimpse yet into where we are on our journey toward early retirement in money terms, along with a detailed breakdown of how we plan to fund both our early retirement and our full retirement. we’re talking percentages instead of absolute numbers, but are going into a lot more detail than we ever have before. that’s right: it’s all the charts.
we hope we live super long lives. but we can’t predict everything. so while we enthusiastically plan for a long future, we also make sure that we have everything in order should the unthinkable happen, and something tragic befall one or both of us.
do you feel like a grown-up? if you’d asked us that question a year ago, we would have said no. in fact, it was a guiding a principle of our lives that most people never grow up, they just learn to fake it. but recently, we realized that something has changed. we can’t put our fingers on exactly when it happened, but somehow, we started to feel like grown-ups.
it’s easy to get frustrated, wishing we’d figured out our early retirement plan at a younger age. but what would that get us? it sure wouldn’t make us retirees at this moment! we’d much rather go with the “better late than never” way of thinking, and be grateful that we found this path at all.
we feel super lucky to have somehow retained our spirit of curiosity, and we think it will serve us well in our (hopefully) very long retirement, since we think curiosity is a big part of what will keep us from getting old too fast. here’s our plan for fostering a spirit of lifelong curiosity to keep our minds nimble and active for decades to come.
it’s so easy to be blind to our own bad habits, and so to avoid forgetting about the bad ones we’ve recently identified, we’ve started making a list of what we want to change just as soon as work is in our rearview mirror. we’re calling the list our resolutions for retirement, and expect this list to grow over time.
we have always loved doing things ourselves. what’s funny in retrospect is how little the money piece has mattered to us in questions of diy, at least with the small stuff. but of course that was then. and this is our running-like-hell-toward-early-retirement now. money matters. especially the saving of it. so now when we diy things, it’s just as much about saving money as it is about the joy of making something.
lots of being healthy is absolutely free: getting outside to exercise in the fresh air, choosing not to smoke, maintaining a healthy weight, avoiding toxic people. and we do all of that stuff. but we also spend out on our health in some big ways, and plan to do even more when we’re retired. some of these expenditures may not seem health-related, but we see them that way, and that makes them worth it to us.
today’s topic is one we wrestle with a lot, and which feels central to us as early retirement inches closer and closer: how will we define ourselves once our careers no longer define us?
we frequently read blog posts outlining people’s grocery spending and practically have to pick our jaws up off the floor afterward. you’re spending only $30 a week for groceries?!?! you’re feeding a family of four for $70 a week?!?! we even read one post talking about how the […]
