Retire Early: Starting the Journey
Well hello there. My name is Victoria and welcome to Gorgeous Life Blog. Today is a very exciting day on my blog because my husband and I have made a life changing decision to retire early.
How can you retire early?
When I first started the research, I was wondering the same thing.
But I discovered that there is a whole movement online called the FIRE movement. Financial Independence Retire Early.
The hardcore people in the FIRE community are super dedicated to quitting their full time jobs well before the retirement age and they all have a pretty similar plan to accomplish their goal.
The idea is to get out of debt, save money, and then invest the money into assets that will provide a return in the future. Assets are usually real estate, retirement accounts, stocks, mutual funds, ETF’s, etc.
They calculate the amount of money they will need in retirement and build their wealth until they reach that amount in assets.
Why retire early?
I don’t know where in the world you are reading this post, but here in the United States, the typical retirement age is 65 years. This is just so depressing to my husband and I.
When we really sit down and think about it, we are expected to work full time during the best, and healthiest years of our lives, all to prepare ourselves for retirement.
But when it is time for retirement, we will be old. 65 years isn’t terribly old when you take into consideration that JLO is 50 and still looks the way she does, but we don’t want to live our lives that way.
We don’t mind working hard, but we want to retire when we are still young enough to really thrive and live life.
Making the decision to retire early.
My husband and I actually agreed last summer that we wanted to retire by the time we are 40.
I want to make it clear that we aren’t sure if he is just going to walk away from his job in ten years, but the idea is to be so financially secure that if he did want to stop working, he could.
Unfortunately, since making the decision last summer, we didn’t take a single step towards our journey. It can be very intimidating to try and accomplish something so huge.
Finally, after an entire year of making the decision the first time we have actually taken the first step. I’ll get to that in a minute.
What we are doing differently
As I mentioned before, many people in the early retirement community really buckle down and make a lot of sacrifices to save as much of their income as possible.
While we plan on doing this, we don’t plan on depriving ourselves of things that make us happy for the next ten years. For example, I love to get hot stone pedicures. They cost a lot of money though once you factor in the tip.
Many people who are serious about saving for retirement would just do their toenails at home and not spend the money, because that money could be put to work paying off debt, or invested somewhere.
But I don’t want to lose sight of the beauty of the present just because I have a future goal. I always shop with coupons and try to save money as much as I can, and there are things that I will sacrifice, but things that contribute to my overall happiness will not be sacrificed at all.
The same goes for my children. In 10 years when we plan to be financially stable, my youngest will be 18 years old. We love making memories with them at home, but we also love going to dinners as a family, going to the movies, and traveling (in moderation). While I do my best to save money on all of these activities, I will never deprive my children of these memories for the sake of retiring later in life.
My kids understand our goals and they know there are some things that we won’t spend our money on, but they know that we love making memories with them and we wouldn’t sacrifice that.
Taking the first steps.
Here is what I’m so excited to tell you! My husband and I sat down and calculated our net worth for the first time! This is an important step because this tells us exactly where we are from a financial standpoint. And we are able to see what we need to work on.
I was able to find a free net worth sheet that I downloaded and used on Google sheets. It was so simple and I was so happy to find a free resource. We will be updating it again at the beginning of the year and then every 3 months after that!
I also have a list of baby steps that we must take immediately that won’t be too hard for us to do. I’m so incredibly excited for this journey and I can’t wait to see what life has in store for us in the next 10 years.
I’ll be keeping you updated on our plans to retire early and I hope this series inspires you to take charge of your finances one way or another.
If you have any questions, leave a comment below or in the IGTV video! Thank you so much for reading.
