Our third year anniversary of this blog: Thank you readers!

 

Sculpture Garden, National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.

Colin Powell:  “A dream doesn’t become reality through magic; it takes sweat, determination, and hard work.”

My wife and I are so fortunate and blessed that we’re able to live our lives the way we always wanted to.  Our dream of retiring early turned into reality in August 2020, and we’ve been living as early retirees ever since.

Of course, we paid our dues to see our dream become a reality.  For about 10 years, we worked hard, sacrificed, and lived below our means to accrue enough money for us to retire early.  Our journey of FIRE (financial independence retire early) wasn’t without its challenges.

We wanted to buy stuff, we wanted to go on vacations that include a flight/hotel, and we wanted to splurge on things like everyone else at times.  Although we did splurge once in awhile, for the most part, we stuck to our plan to pay down the mortgage, put away as much money into our retirement accounts, and to cut down on our expenses.

All those sacrifices and planning paid off in spades, and on August 17, 2020, I walked away from my job of 14 years as an Information Technology Help Desk Team member to live how I wanted to, that is traveling and spending time with family.  

Throughout our journey, we’ve shared our experiences of getting to that point, living early retirement, as well as our many travels the past 3 years.  It is true what people say: time flies when you’re having fun.

It is hard for me to believe that we’ve been retired for over 3 years now!  This blog (Wandering Money Pig) is also just over 3 years old as well!

On our 2 year anniversary post, I mentioned we were planning on using hotels/motels for most of our travels.  We stuck to that plan for the entire year, as we didn’t stay at AirBnB or Vrbo for the entire year.  Having our Pomeranian Toby leave us (crossed the rainbow bridge) in March 2022 had lot to do with that, as we were ready, finally, to re-explore and re-engage with more culture, and to travel farther than we normally do.

As mentioned last year, we did complete our epic cross country road trip spanning over 10 weeks going from North Carolina to Southern California.  We explored so many wonderful places both old and new, and we really enjoyed the freedom after moving on and living without our baby Toby.  We know he’d want us to be happy…

As of this writing, we are planning another month+ long trip, this time to American South and South Central to states like South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, and Mississippi.  Please stay tuned for that trip.  We’ll keep you posted!

I also want to take the time to thank everyone for following this blog for the past year.  If year 2 was a tough one due to loss of loved ones (Toby and some of our dear friends), year 3 was a time for mending and living our lives.

We know life sometimes suck, and our loved ones will inevitably pass, but that is life.  It’s what we do to deal with it that makes us stronger and makes us adults.  We are doing our very best to move on in the best way we know how: that is, spending more quality time with our family and enjoying our travels.

Continue to follow us on our journey of FIRE and of our travels.  I can honestly say this is the life I always envisioned and we’re living it right now.  Like Frank Sinatra once said, “I did it my way…”.  You can’t ask for more from life…

Thank you again everyone.  Be well, and be happy!


Jake

Wandering Money Pig 








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