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

  Bellagio pools, Bellagio, Las Vegas  Key summary: Lodging costs for 72 days (11/28/2022-2/9/2023):  $3744 Food costs:  $2412 Gasoline costs:  $896 Miscellaneous/Entertainment:  $3750 Total spent:  $10802 Back around the summer of 2022, my wife and I started planning for a cross country road trip that would take us from North Carolina (where we are based), all the way to Southern California.  Our planning coincided with the passing of our furry and extremely cute Pomeranian Toby the previous months. We both felt bit awkward and frankly bit lost without that fur ball, and we both felt the time was right to start traveling further out than our usual modus operandi of traveling within the Eastern United States.  We thought, correctly, that a cross country road trip would be the one to take. There are so many reasons why we chose to do a cross country road trip rather than take a ‘normal’ vacation and take a flight somewhere and visit a destination for a week or so.  Here are some of tho

  Our Toby (2020) Since our early retirement in August 2020, my wife and I have been traveling about 8 months out of the year, and just about every time, we chose AirBnB as our default choice for our month or longer stays.  It worked out great, as we were initially traveling during the peak of the pandemic when not many people were traveling. This allowed us to get reasonably priced rentals using AirBnB.  Our first month long stay was in Ocean City Maryland , where we paid $865 for a small one bedroom, 3rd floor walk up unit, about 2 blocks from the famous Ocean City boardwalk.   We didn’t initially like the unit as it reeked of smoke, wasn’t very clean, and the shower was sized like a college dormitory where it was maybe about 4 square feet.  We kept hitting our elbows and knees each time we took showers.  Despite all that, we learned to like it after deep cleaning the place and airing it out.  We, of course, liked the price above all else. Ocean City was followed by a 3 months long

  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 recall that feeling of freedom and sheer joy, kno

  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 .  On weekend mornings, all of us would hang out in ou