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

  Unknown:  “What do you call a person who is happy on a Monday?  Retired.” Recently, I came upon an online article where it featured several young workers who were all under the age of 24.  All of them were young workers who quit their jobs of less than 2 years due to high stress and burnout, to travel.  One of the featured persons was a young lady who chose to travel the world with whatever savings she had, and another was of two buddies who both quit their jobs to travel in a converted bus.   Reading the article brought back some great memories of my own.  My wife and I did exactly the same thing (twice): Once, when we quit our jobs and sold everything to move to Oahu, Hawaii from New York City, and another time when we chose to do the same thing, but almost in reverse, to move back to the East Coast, namely to the suburbs of Philadelphia.   Getting ready to embark on a new journey was some of the best times of our lives.  We vividly recal...

  Ocean City, MD during sunset Walt Whitman:  “I take to the open road.  Healthy, free, the world before me.” The day we started our early retirement (August 24, 2020), was the day we said goodbye to our townhome, a place we called home for close to 14 years.  It was the best “home” we had up until that point in our (my wife and I) lives.   Lots of good things happened while we lived there:  I got my last job, which would allow us to retire early and we brought home our baby Toby , a super furry Pomeranian!  It was truly an “ American Dream ”, to be able to live in a nice suburb of Philadelphia , feeling safe with plenty of room to roam inside our 3 story townhome.   We felt like we had “made it”.  We would spend evenings sitting in our walkout basement, looking outside at the fast moving traffic on US Route   422 while talking.  We would play our favorite music in our living room in our surround sound home theater system by Onkyo ...

  Alum Cave Bluffs, the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, TN John Muir:  “In every walk with nature, one receives far more than he seeks.” Living on the East Coast of the United States, it’s hard not to be reminded of the Great Smoky Mountains .  It seems most people have visited the place, thanks to its close proximity to most big cities on the East Coast.  It is also the most popular and most visited national park in the US with over 12 million visitors in the calendar year 2022 alone.   My in-laws have visited it, and so has one of my best childhood friends.  They talked about the mysterious, cloud filled mountains that look like smoke, and they talked about the vastness of the mountains. My wife and I had talked many times about visiting the Great Smoky Mountains National Park , but we never got around to it until February of this year.  We were wrapping up our 2 1/2 months long cross country road trip going from North Carolina to Southern Cali...