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 …

Park Model Living: What It’s Really Like

Our Park Model Community Have you ever driven by one of those communities with a million little trailers…and wondered who the heck lives there? Well, WE do! We live there! We were always curious, but never really thought about living in a park model until we made a reservation for an RV campground 4 years …

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 …

5 things no one told us about RVing in early retirement

We have absolutely loved being on the road 5 months this summer.  AND, we are 100% ready to head home for the winter. We set out for New England on May 15.  We had our route, itinerary, and campground reservations set for the entire summer, and we didn’t really deviate.  The only time we didn’t …

RV living…everybody’s got something to do

We get asked a lot of questions about who drives, who cooks, who cleans…basically, who does everything while we’re traveling. We’ve never even thought about roles and who does what. I guess we just kind of started doing what we’re doing and it’s worked! Carter’s Roles President and CEO. Carter likes to think he’s in …

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 …

How can we afford to be on vacation 5 months of the year?

We get asked a lot of questions about how we retired so early. We get even more questions about how we can afford to be on vacation 5 months of the year. Well...truthfully, we don’t see this as a 5-month vacation.  We’re just living life on the road.  We feel 100% blessed that we get …