Wandering Money Pig - A journey of early retirement and FIRE (financial independence retire early)

  Tybee Island Lighthouse, Georgia Anonymous:  “Retirement is not the end of the road.  It is the beginning of the open highway.” Even after 4 years of living our early retirement, my wife and I still get asked similar questions we got when we initially told our family and friends of our plans to retire early.  Such questions are: 1) What do you do all day? 2) How do you save up enough funds to retire early? and 3) Is retirement still enjoyable?There are probably many other questions we do get asked about, but I would say these are the more common ones.   When we started planning for our early retirement way back around 2010 or so, we thought carefully about all of these questions ourselves.  What should we do to spend all that time after calling it quits from the rat race?  How do we save enough so we can live for the next 30-40 years?  How do we enjoy ourselves in retirement and not just live to survive? We both had good ideas about early retirement thanks to our commitment to the FI

  Fort Pulaski National Monument, Savannah, Georgia  Two years ago, my wife and I went on a West Coast/Southwest/Central South cross country road trip.  On that trip, we visited incredible national parks, monuments, and landmarks.  It is without a doubt what makes America great. It is knowing that every American can enjoy them without needing to worry that someday they’ll be turned into condos, amusement parks, or retail establishments.  Don’t we already have too many of these??? We experienced so much of what it means to live in this great country that is the United States of America.  The places we visited were amazing, many of them otherworldly, and awe-inspiring to say the least.  Places like Zion National Park and Death Valley National Park will live in our memories forever… We really got into visiting these national treasures that particularly trip.  Whereas in the past we would’ve stopped for not more than 30 minutes to take some photos at observation decks/overlooks, on that tr

  Savannah downtown, Georgia  Frommer’s:  “If you have time to visit only one city in the Southeast, make it Savannah.   It’s that special.” The first time we considered visiting the city of Savannah (Georgia), it was because of a guidebook that my wife and I had purchased to aid in our quest for a cross country road trip back in 2003.  In that guidebook, it mentioned the city as the destination in the Southeast where many famous movies were filmed including “ Forrest Gump ” and “ Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil ”. That summer, we had completed a 3 week long trip going from New York City to Aspen (Colorado), visiting close to 30+ attractions spanning multiple cities and states.  We had so much fun that we decided to do another road trip before moving to Hawaii at the end of that same year.  I was also a movie buff back in those days, so it made sense to stop by to see the sights where those movies were filmed. We dedicated another 3 weeks in November to drive down to Florid