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

  Ralph Waldo Emerson:  “It’s not the destination, it’s the journey.” I love living in the Continental United States of America, period.  The landmass is so beautiful, so varied, and so unfathomably large.  It is a place where you simply do not run out of roads (new roads) and new places to explore.  It is a place, in short, to fulfill your wildest, unquenchable thirst for travel and adventure.   So, why do I even mention the word “ Continental ”, you say?  Well, when I lived on the small island of Oahu, Hawaii , I eventually ran out of new roads and new places to explore, and that depressed me. I was missing the big landmass that is the Continental USA, or as the Hawaiians say, “the mainland”.  After living there for over 2 years, I longed for those trips, where the roads never seem to end.  That feeling that I’m by myself (well, my wife too), driving on a desolate road in the middle of a Mojave Desert surrounded by nothing but long-since-de...

August 2026 marks my wife and myself’s 6 year anniversary of our early retirement.  Has it already been 6 years?  Wow… It seems like yesterday.  I handed in my resignation in July 2020, worked another 5 weeks, then said goodbye to my boss and the company I had worked for since 2007, on August 17, 2020.  We then had couple of weeks to sell/donate/get rid of most of our belongings, empty our home, then leave the place we called home for the previous 14 years. My wife deserves most of the credit for working frivolously, getting our townhome ready for sale, getting rid of our stuff, putting down new floors in the kitchen, and doing countless hours of miscellaneous work, in the months leading up to our last day in Pennsylvania, August 24, 2020.  We still remember going to our home closing on August 24 (by 9:30 a.m.!) to sign our closing documents, then heading towards our new life, as retired nomads. We spent the roughly 10 hours driving to our brother‘s place in Nor...

  In the early years of my wife and myself’s journey of early retirement, we primarily used long term rental platforms like Airbnb or VRBO (Vacation Rentals By Owner) for our lodging needs.  Because we technically don’t own or rent a permanent place of our own, this made sense. Living as nomads doesn’t mean we move from one place to another frequently.  Thanks to these aforementioned long term rental platforms, we’ve been able to stay a month, sometimes few months, in a rental property of our choosing. We’ve lived the life of “ slow travelers ”, meaning we stay at one place for a long time, seeking to explore a particular area in depth, and also so we can live a semblance of a so called “normal” life, where we have a semi-permanent place to rest our heads each night.  We enjoyed our early years of our early retirement, as we got to “live” in a particular area, trying to experience what life is like as a local. We explored local parks (and sometimes parks 100+ miles ...