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| Snowshoe Mountain Resort, WV |
August 2022 marked my wife and myself’s two year anniversary of our early retirement. It is still hard to believe it’s already been two years since our retirement. In those two years, we’ve lived in various destinations on the eastern parts of the United States for a month or longer using mostly AirBNB.
All the traveling we were able to do is made possible by our decision to retire early, and we are ever grateful for that decision. In addition to all the traveling, we also got to spend around 4 months out of a year to spend time with our family.
Recently, I had written a post updating everyone on our two year anniversary of our early retirement, which covered things like places we’ve visited and our budget. In this post, I’d like to share my thoughts on the mental side of early retirement after actually living through early retirement.
Once we decided to retire early around June of 2020, we were busy trying to sell our home, and trying to get rid of our belongings. The realization that we were going to be doing this early retirement thing didn’t really hit us until we had a closing date on our home (August 24th, 2020).
After we had closed on our home, we were heading to our brother’s place in North Carolina. That’s when all the complex emotions hit us all at once. We were officially ‘homeless’, and we were jobless. We had been jobless before, but not ‘homeless’, where we didn’t have a place to call our own.
We had doubts about what we had done for about the next two weeks after that closing date. We were doubting ourselves on whether or not we had made the right decision at a relatively young/working age. Let’s face it. Everyone around our age bracket was working. Our family also was doubtful about our decision.
We had doubts on how we would manage this early retirement financially. Despite all our planning, you know how it is. No plan survives first contact with the enemy. You just don’t know how it’ll play out unless you actually are doing it…
We were wondering how we were going to carry all of our remaining belongings in our compact SUV. On that trip to North Carolina, our SUV was jammed pack with our stuff. Toby (our Pomeranian) had to sit in the front passenger-side footwell as we didn’t have an inch to spare! Just thinking about carrying all these stuff stressed us out knowing how much stuff we still had…
After our paperworks (North Carolina driver’s license, vehicle registration, bank/credit cards address changes, etc.) were done while in North Carolina, we could finally breathe out and start to enjoy our early retirement. Our mental state by then was much better.
We were starting to enjoy our retirement with its awesome perks like waking up whenever we want to, not going to work(!), and doing whatever we want to that day. The doubts and worries were slowly being replaced by calmness afforded by the early retirement.
When we finished our first month long stay at Ocean City, we were fairly confident that this early retirement thing was going to work out ok. We realized our budgeting actually worked. We were enjoying our daily activities or non-activities, depending on what we felt like: we could choose to walk on the beach/boardwalk, bike, or just stay home and lounge.
Living everyday with simple decisions like whether to go to the beach or not, made our lives stress free and carefree. We no longer felt that heavy burden to pay our bills on the 1st of every month. We no longer felt stressed out when something breaks and had to be replaced or repaired.
Living without a mortgaged home really freed us from the monthly stress that comes with never ending mortgage payment PLUS all the other bills that come with owning a home: sewer, electricity/gas, internet/cable, insurance, school tax/county tax/other taxes, water, etc.
In addition, it was just amazing to live without needing to maintain/repair/replace anything that breaks inside of our home. We spent plenty of money on the following things while we were homeowners: replaced roof, replaced water heater twice, repaired windows, repaired the deck, repaired the floor, painted the exterior/interior, repaired front stairs, redid the master bathroom, did kitchen makeover, cleaned mold on our siding, changed batteries (countless times) on smoke detectors/remote controls/thermostat, changed way too many lightbulbs, etc.
By removing the stress of needing to work and the stress of owning a home, we reduced our stress level to near zero. It was a lifestyle I always wanted, that is living like a beach bum, doing something or nothing each day, depending on my mood.
This seemingly perfect lifestyle didn’t last beyond 3 months. I was looking for a direction, a purpose, after the first 3 months of living the beach bum lifestyle. I felt like I was watching too many streaming videos or browsing the internet too much. This feeling would last for about a month until I decided to create content for my blog and for my YouTube channel.
This was end of December 2020, and I was glad I had found my calling! I was always creative growing up. I was really happy when doing that, whether that’s creating music, or creating guitar lessons for my students. I wanted to continue that tradition with the blog and videos.
Since that turning point, I’ve been very happy with my retirement. No more doubts or feeling lost and aimless, while living day to day. I’ve been feeling fulfilled every day since…
Here are our top 3 doubts and worries when we retired, and how we’re doing now, after two years:
- Are we doing the right thing by retiring early and NOT working at our age, when everyone else is?
Prior to telling our parents and siblings, we weren’t sure how they would react to our news of early retirement. Lucky for us, our parents did come around fairly quickly once they realized we were stressed out from work.
After spending time with them, which we couldn’t (not month long) possibly have done if we were working, they actually accepted/approved our early retirement. This way of life of spending 4 months with them, has become a nice routine for us and for them.
We no longer feel bad not working these days. When we see our friends who are working, we can proudly say we’re enjoying our retirement. All of them are of course envious of our lives, and they all wish they can do the same. Their approval went a long way towards us accepting our own decision to retire early.
- Can we make this early retirement work financially?
Until we actually were living in our first month long stay in Ocean City, we didn’t really know the answer. We saw, that despite going over slightly on groceries and takeout, we were able to balance our budget. We rarely drove that month as we walked and biked everywhere. We only drove to shop for groceries or to do takeout.
This allowed us to use the budget for gasoline towards our food budget. Same thing played out in our 3 months long stay at Atlantic Beach during December 2020 to February 2021. For the month of January and February, we drove very little. The food budget was blown up in December thanks to Christmas and New Year’s, but by saving money on gasoline for January and February, we again managed to balance our budget.
In addition, the municipal bond fund we had purchased in September of 2020, went up in value, at least for the first year. During the second half of our second year of our retirement, it decreased in value thanks to the deleveraging of everything (stocks, crypto, bonds, real estate).
The bond fund had gone up in value by roughly 13-14% at its peak (November 2021), then lost value by roughly 14-15% at its lowest. We’re monitoring it each month, to see if we need to use our savings for awhile.
My internal thought was that I would do just that if the bond fund’s value decreased by 20%. Luckily, the value started going up after hitting the low point. So far, we didn’t need to tap into our emergency fund.
Note: our bond fund does pay an annual interest of 4.5% (2021) to as high as 5.3% (2022).
We’re still glad we bought these. There was a time right after we retired whether we should buy a 50%/50% mix of stock index fund and bond fund or not. We’re glad we didn’t, as stock index fund would’ve lost much more value than 15%. On top of that, stock index funds pay typically 1 to 1.5% dividend payouts, much lower than bond funds.
- How will we carry all of our belongings in our SUV for our month long (or longer) trips?
The amount of stuff we packed on that trip to North Carolina to our brother’s place after closing our home was incredible. We had stuff on the front armrest and on top of us, encroaching our driver/passenger seat spaces.
Our first month long trip to Ocean City also featured jammed pack SUV. We foolishly brought our huge suitcases which were a nightmare to carry up to the third floor walk up. We brought too many clothes, too many kitchen stuff, and too many art related stuff.
We had learned our lesson since that first trip. We got progressively better at packing for these trips, but we’re nowhere near perfect. We still bring way too many clothes and kitchen stuff.
This is still a work in progress as we do need to bring our stuff, but can’t figure out how to reduce them at this point. Admittedly, this is something that stresses out my wife more than myself. She’s the one who has to pack our kitchen stuff, bedding stuff, and bathroom supplies (extra toilet paper, cleaning supplies, floss, Listerine, soaps, etc.).
For me, the carrying of our stuff on travel days (carry them from my parent’s place to the apartment garage, then from the car to our rental) is the hardest part. I think our first trip to Ocean City was absolutely the worst due to its small staircase, and due to it being on the third floor.
That stressed me out as we were both straining and sweating by the end of the ‘move’. Subsequent trips were much easier as all of them were either second floors or first floor rentals.
Another thing we started to do since our last trip was to bring some of the bags into our SUV the prior night, so we have less things to carry (or worry about) on the travel day. This little change helped reduce stress, although not get rid of it completely.
In conclusion:
Planning for our early retirement and actually having a jump off date brought out many conflicting emotions during the month of June through August in 2020. We had doubts, trepidations, worries, and just feeling overwhelmed.
Even after we had downsized and closed on our home, we still had these same emotions heading down to our brother’s place. It took us a good two weeks to settle down, then to start enjoying our retirement.
It wasn’t until we actually completed our first trip that we felt relieved about our decision. It helped that our family and friends were supportive, which went a long way.
The initial doubts about our decision slowly dissipated after several months of living our retirement. We knew by February of 2021 that we could make this work financially. This allowed us to relax and not be so worried about whether we can make this work or not…
Our belongings we carry is still a stressful event, although less now than the first year. We’ve learned to deal with it better since our first stay.
No decision will ever be perfect. Even though we had planned it for a long time, planning something is always different than ACTUALLY doing something.
Most things we worried about those few months leading up to and after our early retirement are gone. We understand the carrying of our stuff will always be something we will stress about.
Bottom line: Even with good planning, there will always be something that will require adjustments. Even so, we wouldn’t change anything about retiring early. Retiring early has given us the freedom from stress (mostly), and stress from jobs.
We choose to do what we want to on any given day, and for that we’re grateful!
Thank you all for reading!
Jake
Wandering Money Pig
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