5 Things We Learned in Our 2nd Year of Early Retirement

1 It’s a marathon, not a sprint When we first retired, we felt like we needed to cross off all of our bucket list items as fast as we could.  We’re not sure if we thought we’d run out of time or we’d want/need to go back to work, but it just felt like we …

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How long can we put off drafting our wills?

Q: How long can we put off drafting our wills? A: 6+ years. 😊 Our financial advisor asked us to draft our wills when we got married almost 7 years ago.  We kept putting it off and putting it off and putting it off.  Well, I guess it took a global pandemic for us to …

Emergency Dental Expenses on an Early Retirement Budget

I’ll start by saying Carter is 53 years old and doesn’t have a single cavity.  HOWEVER, he has managed to crack 4 teeth.  I guess he follows his own motto (DON’T DO ANYTHING HALFWAY) even when it comes to dental hygiene! We both clench and grind our teeth at night.  And, we both wear nightguards …

Working: how much do we miss it?

Do we miss working at all?  The obvious answer is HECK NO.  And, that answer would be 95% accurate.  But, we’ll be honest, there are a few aspects of work that we really do miss.  What we DON’T miss: Our cat used to like to "work" with us! Meetings and never-ending conference calls.  When we …

5 very practical lessons we learned in our first year of early retirement

As our first year of retirement came to a close, we set down to talk about what went well, what didn't meet expectations, and lessons we learned along the way.  Here are 5 of the more practical things we learned about ourselves and living life as early retirees. 1 We’re starting to sound more and …

Christmas on an early retiree budget

Merry Christmas! Christmas is JOY and STRESS all wrapped into one holiday.  We really try to focus on the joy of the season and not stress too much.  In some ways it’s easier to be less stressed out since we’ve put ourselves on a pretty strict budget.  I know that sounds like reverse psychology mumbo …

Pure Torture: Helping Our Parents With Technology

Did reading the title of this post make you cringe just a little?  Us too!  When my dad was getting ready to retire, his employer introduced email.  Actually, it wasn’t even called email at that point.  His employer called it “the DG” and it had read receipts for every message.  That meant when his boss …

Are we freaking out about the stock market?

Holly and her mom. We all know the stock market is constantly going up and down, and then up, and then down again.  We don’t regularly watch the market, but when Holly’s mom called multiple times over a couple weeks to see how we’re handling the changes in the stock market and the news that …

4 things we wish we would have done before we retired early

There are times when we think we’ve done a really great job of setting ourselves up for early retirement.  And, there are other times when we fully acknowledge there are soooooo many things we wish we would have done much earlier in life.  We realize hindsight is 20/20, and here are 4 things we wish …

THANK YOU to Our Retirement and RV Communities

Just a couple years ago we were living “normal” lives.  Until last year we had normal jobs, a normal house, and normal routines. Honestly, we didn’t think anything was wrong or needed to change in our lives.  Yes, our jobs were tough and required 60+ hours a week.  Yes, we had a huge home that …