Our one year anniversary of our early retirement: Our thoughts and observations…

 

Our trip to Niagara Falls and Toby enjoying his visit!

Unknown:  “Retirement is wonderful if you have two essentials:  much to live on and much to live for.”

The month of August marks our one year anniversary of our early retirement!  Wow, how times flew by…

It seems like only yesterday that we sold our townhome, got rid of around 90% of our belongings, and started our nomadic lifestyle.  It’s hard to believe that was a year ago!

When we set out on our journey after retiring, we wanted to travel more and spend more time with family.  We think we’ve accomplished both those goals.

This is a quick rundown of our travels during the previous year:

• End of August - September:  Moved down to North Carolina to our brother’s place to establish domicile, then went to see our parents in September
• October:  Spent a month in an Airbnb rental in Ocean City, Maryland 
• November:  Booked a short trip to Bushkill, PA area for my mom’s birthday and spent time with family; spent a week in Mountain Creek, New Jersey 
• December - February:  Spent 3 months in an AirBNB rental in Atlantic Beach, North Carolina 
• March:  Back with family; spent a week at Mountain Creek, New Jersey 
• April:  Spent almost a month in an AirBNB rental in Claysburg, Pennsylvania 
• May:  Back with family; booked a short trip to Preston, Connecticut to enjoy with our family 
• June:  Spent a month in an AirBNB rental in Ellicottville, New York 
• July:  Spent a month in an AirBNB rental in Indiana, Pennsylvania 
• August:  Spent a month in an AirBNB rental in Altoona, Pennsylvania 

Throughout our journey since early retirement, we’ve visited so many beautiful places like Niagara Falls, Letchworth State Park, Ocean City, Atlantic Beach, Presque Isle State Park (PA), the Poconos, Fort Macon State Park, to name just a few…

We met so many friendly people along the way, from Leisha at the laundromat in Atlantic Beach who helped us with laundry every two weeks, to the gallery employee at the Chautauqua Institute who explained the ins/outs of the greater Chautauqua area, western New York.

We will always remember these and many other memorable and genuinely nice/friendly people.  Traveling wouldn’t be as rewarding if it weren’t for those memorable encounters along the way…

Here are our thoughts and observations on our one year anniversary:

• Living a nomadic lifestyle

We’ve never done an extended trip for a month or longer prior to our early retirement.  We honestly didn’t know what to pack, how to pack, what to not take, etc.

Our trip to Ocean City was an important lesson on how to properly pack for a month.  It really taught us what to take/what not to take.

For our first trip, we took two huge suitcases that were heavy just by themselves!  After lugging those huge suitcases up and down the third floor walk up (with narrow staircase to boot), we realized we didn’t need these in the first place.

On our succeeding trips (month or longer), we just took one large duffel bag per person for our clothes.  One advantage of these bags is that I can carry both my wife’s and my clothing bag in one trip, rather than two separate trips.

Whereas in that Ocean City trip, we filled up our entire SUV(!) to the brim, we got better by the time Atlantic Beach trip came around.

We learned we didn’t need so many shoes, socks, t-shirts, sweaters, and pants after all…We could just wash them when needed and wear them again…

Kitchen related stuff was another thing we got better at.  At first, we took everything:  frying pans, pots, cups, coffee mugs, strainer, etc.

We now use AirBNB rentals’ stuff.  This lightened our load quite a bit.

During our trip to Atlantic Beach, we decided to buy a water filter.  This was a great move for it allowed us access to clean water even on day one.  No more buying water and carrying that up the stairs!

• Handling our budget

Prior to our ‘D-Day’ for early retirement, we planned out how much we most likely needed to live month to month.  

After living a year after ‘D-Day’, we can safely say we’ve come in or under budget we had set out from the beginning.

We found out the ‘housing’ cost at AirBNB/Vrbo averaged out to around $1,020 per month.  This was slightly higher than what we originally thought our housing cost would be, which was around $1,000 per month.

We estimated groceries and take-out food to be around $400 per month.  During our month in Ocean City, we went over this budget by about $150.  We were just starting our journey and frankly we weren’t very good at watching our budget.  It felt like a vacation and we almost spent on food like we were on vacation the first two weeks there…

We bought extra snacks because we wanted to celebrate our newfound freedom and early retirement!

In the month of December, we splurged on food and drinks, thanks to Christmas and New Year’s, and that killed our food budget for that month.  

By January and February (second and third month of our three months long stay at Atlantic Beach) though, we noticed we spent less on food.  This balanced out the food budget nicely!

One other thing we noticed was after arriving at Atlantic Beach rental, we rarely needed to fill up on gas.  

With the exception of our trip to Raleigh area to see our brother and his family, we filled up on gas on average about once every two weeks.  Our initial budget for gasoline was $100 per month.  We saved about $40 per month when we averaged out over the three months stay.

In fact, it was the same for Ocean City, as we mostly walked around the boardwalk area and enjoyed the beach.  We only filled our gas twice for the month of October.  *Saved around $50 for that month.

We did put aside $200 for entertainment budget each month which we can use for having fun.  In most months, we only used around $50 of that entertainment budget, so we used that to balance our budget as needed.

Examples of our entertainment budget were things like bicycle rentals in Ocean City, parking/entrance fees to New York State parks, and doing the treetop adventure/obstacle course in Holiday Valley.

One takeaway we got after living a year after retirement is that you have to be flexible when budgeting!

If you splurged on food for the month, cut back on something else.  My wife kept a budget (wrote all purchases on a piece of paper) for several months just to make sure we weren’t going over, and I’m glad she did!

We got a pretty good idea of our budget, and we understand it requires tweaking to make it work each month.  

Budgeting, whether pre-retirement or post-retirement, is something you must do each and every month!  You can’t figure out how you’re doing financially if you don’t know where your money is going!

• Flexibility 

This is a word I use often and it applies to everything in life!  Whether that’s finance, relationships, and/or lifestyle, you must have it to succeed.

As mentioned above, we balanced our budget by spending less on other things when we went over on food budget, for example.  

The ability to be flexible (adapt) is a key attribute to being successful in all kinds of life’s endeavors.  Something will always happen.  Just understand that something will happen, and adapt accordingly.  

Remember, no one’s perfect.  We just need to understand we will fail at something, and that’s perfectly ok.  Just figure out how to adapt and be flexible with your situation to succeed at it.

• Communication with your significant other 

There were times when we hit some rough patches, but then, who doesn’t?  Not everyday will be a vacation day just because you’re retired.

We realized us spending more time with our family can be stressful at times.  Because we’re retired, they sometimes expect bit too much from us.  We don’t need anyone telling us we should do something for them because we’re not ‘working’.  

We still have to say no when we both feel strongly that we don’t want to do something they ask.  This doesn’t change just because we’re now retired!

Setting a boundary, even among family, is a good idea, retired or not.  

Talk it through with your significant other and family if you both feel strongly about something.  The worst thing you can do is to let all these animosities and hurtful feelings build up.  Diffuse the bomb before it blows up!

• No job!

Our biggest reason for our early retirement was the stressful job.  We dreaded going to work the last couple of years prior to our retirement.

We haven’t worked for awhile now (year for me, and about 2 years for my wife), and this is by far the best thing about our retirement!

We love not having to get up each morning to get ready for work, and we love having so much time to do whatever we want to do.

One added benefit of not working is that my eyes are no longer strained since my retirement.  Whereas I would stare at monitors for about 8 hours a day when I worked (which used to give me a headache and itchy eyes), now I no longer have to.  This means no more strain on my eyes.

• Traveling the last 8 months out of the year

This was one of the reasons why we wanted to retire and we’ve done exactly that.  We are visiting places we wouldn’t have been able to if we had our usual two week vacation.  

We like the pace of slow traveling (staying a month or longer) as we can take few days out of a week to visit places, then relax the rest of the week.  This schedule has worked perfectly for us so far.

• Importance of keeping busy and finding a purpose 

It took me 4 months to get bored with being retired.  I finally got caught up with watching all the YouTube videos I ever wanted to watch, I slept as much as I could, and I did absolutely nothing at times.

By around December of last year (4 months into our early retirement), I was bored.  I needed to find a purpose.  I found that by being creative and reading more.  It was around that time that I started writing this blog and doing my YouTube videos. 

Lately, I’m getting back to relearning and enjoying classical music and really listening to some of the greatest music ever written.  It feels good to be doing that again.  It feels like I’m back in college, simply loving the music and the learning of music. 

My wife has been painting much more and learning to do landscape paintings these days.  She’s certainly keeping busy herself.

Finding a purpose, learning, creating, and reading are keeping us busy these days.  This, we feel, is something that is absolutely necessary for retirement.  Believe me when I tell you that doing nothing after retirement will only be awesome for a month or few months.  You have to find something, a purpose, to fill your time.

As much as we’ve traveled, we still have our non-travel days.  We have to find something to do on those days…

In conclusion:

Our retirement journey is already a year old!  In that time, we’ve been amazed by beautiful scenery, marveled at (and thankful of) our nomadic lifestyle, enjoyed not getting up for work, and sometimes frustrated at dealing with family issues.

Some of these things were not unlike typical things a person might go through on a typical year, retired or not.  Well, except maybe the not getting up for work part…

There will always be good and bad in our journey through life…Deal with it, adapt, and enjoy the ride.  We only get one life to work with…

Looking towards the future, we’re excited to begin our second year of early retirement!  We’re not sure where we’d visit next, but that’s what gets me psyched in anticipation!

Hope you ride along for our continuing journey!

Thank you all for reading!

Jake

Wandering Money Pig 

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