We’re Officially Retired

Spousal Support is HUGE

Of the two of us, my wife is definitely the more conservative, cautious, and just plain rational human in this relationship.

In fact, when I brought the news home that I was getting laid off, she was actually excited…which was not what I was expecting.

She was ready for our journey through corporate America to be done as well…even if the numbers on the spreadsheet didn’t fully add up.

Her typical black-and-white, by-the-book attitude was largely silent in our conversations. Instead, she was excited about the next chapter in our journey and ready to start as soon as possible.

And so, the day I walked out of that job interview, I had mentally already moved on to the next chapter.

The Next Chapter of Our Lives

Our oldest son just turned 9 in April. That means for nearly a decade my wife has chosen to put many of her life skills and passions on hold to be a full-time stay-at-home mom.

Today, of course, we have 4 kiddos with the youngest not quite 2 years old.

Part of the dream of early retirement has simply been to raise our children together; to travel, go on day hikes, spend time at the pool, jump on the trampoline, cover the entire driveway in chalk, ride bikes, kick the soccer ball, blow bubbles.

You know, the big things in life.

These are things my wife and kids already do, of course, but I never get to participate because “daddy has to work”. But now daddy is home and gets to have fun too!

Another part of the early retirement dream is to transition more of the child-rearing responsibility to me so that my wife can start pursuing more of her hobbies and passions that she’s put on hold for so long.

She loves to sing and write music, but she hasn’t touched her guitar or the piano in years. We have an entire recording studio setup in our bedroom that has also not been used in years.

She’s been involved in different choirs over the last several years, but even the smallest engagement has been a huge effort on our part to make sure we had childcare, or that I was home from work on time to get the kids dinner, or even that I could take the kids for an hour or two on the weekend so she could practice.

Now that I’m home full-time, she has more time to fully engage in these things, knowing that the kids are taken care of. (Well, mostly taken care of. I’ve been told jelly beans don’t constitute a healthy lunch. The kids disagree! So go have your fun, momma! We got this.)

I’ve got other hobbies I’d love to jump into as well. After playing nearly every day for 10 years, my own guitar has collected a healthy layer of dust sitting in the corner of our living room.

I’ve still been taking pictures, but probably have 500 or more sitting in the queue waiting to be edited. I haven’t updated my photography site in years.

And, of course, I started this blog with grand dreams of sharing our financial journey, only to discover that blogging is pretty time intensive and ain’t nobody got time for that!

(Well…except all you awesome people who have done an amazing job writing on your blogs regularly and sharing your awesome journeys with us. You amaze me!)

Being home full-time is a game-changer.

The Short Term

For now, we’re focused on our upcoming month-long trip to Costa Rica in July.

We almost canceled this trip when I found out I was getting laid off, but as we talked about what we wanted our lives to look like in retirement, we realized this trip is exactly what we want it to look like.

• Slow travel.
• Spending more than a week at a time in another country.
• Learning to love and appreciate the diverse cultures around the world.
• Raising our kids with an awareness that the world is bigger and brighter than our city or state or even our country.

We’ve been brushing up on our Español and look forward to slow traveling through Costa Rica for a month.

After that, we’ve got a week-long back-to-school beach trip scheduled with some great friends. We should already be plenty tan from our Costa Rica trip, so what’s one more week on the beach, right?

Then it will back to school, and our family will get to discover what our new normal looks like.

The Long Term

Full transparency – we don’t have a solid game plan for what our schedules look like long term, or exactly how we’re going to cover that gap year.

That may seem foolish, and that’s likely because it is, but the temptation to keep plugged into the steady paycheck for one more year, then one more year, then one more year after that, is a recipe for living the type of life we never wanted to get caught up in.

The truth is, many people have taken much greater risks with far less cushion than we have in order to build the type of lifestyle they wanted.

Were we really so scared of failure that we were unwilling to take even the tiniest leap of faith?

Worst case scenario, one of us…gulp…gets a job to cover that gap year.

Seriously, the failure scenario is spending one year going back to our old normal. I don’t think that qualifies us for any grand risk-taking awards.

More to Come

So there you have it. We are fully aware that we don’t know what we don’t know.

We expect to discover new and amazing things along the journey, so even our list of passion projects right now may not be the full or most important list in the next 6 months…or even 3 months.

Things are very much wide open at this point. We have some plans, but we are holding them very loosely.

We know that we aren’t going to tackle everything on our passion list in the next few months, but that’s the beauty of early retirement. We don’t have to.

We’ve got the next 40 years to play around with all these ideas.

Thoughts From Others:

What Does Early Retirement Feel Like? The Positives And Negatives Of Not Working For A Living – from Sam at financialsamurai.com

We Retired Early – from Tanja at ournextlife.com

How I Retired at 36 – from The Early Retirement Dude