It is fair to say that in the 10 months since we early retired from teaching, we have really struggled to establish effective daily routines…and for good reason. We sold our family home, relocated to the Yorkshire Dales, were houseless but not homeless- living in our van for 14 weeks whilst we waited for the purchase of our cottage to go through and we have just come out of a 5 month renovation project to transform our tired cottage into our dream early retirement home. Life sometimes just gets in the way of living our best life, and the last few months have illustrated that perfectly- but that is fine and we are now ready to live the early retired life we dreamed of.
When we were planning our early retirement, we had some basic aims that we wanted to fulfil. We wanted to use our time to maintain our health to the very best we could- all too often in our working life our health needs came below our work needs. We want to now prioritise both our physical and mental health so that we can enjoy a long life to the full.
We wanted to continue to learn and stretch ourselves. As teachers for 30 years we firmly believe in the importance of lifelong learning. When we worked, our jobs provided that level of challenge and stimulation and we needed to replace that with other things in our early retirement.
We know that one of the biggest challenges that retiree’s face is maintaining relationships without the inbuilt social structure of work. Although we are really excited about our time together as a couple, we also want to make sure that we look outside our little relationship bubble and stay engaged with the people that we love around us.
Finally, we retired early to have fun and adventures. Without structure, it is sometimes too easy to fall into a comfortable status quo and neglect our thirst to get out there and discover new things. It’s a big world out there and we won’t discover it by simply sitting on our sofa and drinking tea (or wine!). We want to use our retirement to build memories and the important experiences in life that we value.
Without the formality of work, life can seem to get a bit unstructured. Wether we want to admit it or not, we all love a routine…some of us more than others! They provide a structure, a reassurance, a framework to build the things that we love doing. So here we go, we have sat down together and set out the routines that we want to embed over the course of the next month to bring more structure to our lives in the following key areas:
Weekly budgeting
After all the months of renovation, we need to get our retirement budget back on track. When we set put on this journey, we had a rough financial plan that will keep us going through the next few years. In the last few months it has been hard to differentiate between our renovation spending and our normal weekly living expenses. Now that the renovations have come to an end, we can now start to get our finances in check.
Whenever we have needed to maintain a strict budget during our working lives, the only method that worked for us is what we refer to as the “cash is king” method- ie trying only to deal in cash for all of our weekly expenses. We know that our fixed monthly expenses are already covered by our direct debits, but it is the weekly spending to actually live that can quickly spiral out of control.
We know that we have £120 a week to live off for the next couple of years. This must cover all of our weekly expenses- namely food, diesel and entertainment costs. To keep to this plan, we will only take out £120 from the ATM once per week. For us, that is better to do on a Friday so we can make sure we have enough food for the week, enough fuel for the van and any spare cash for the weekend. It is easier to survive a normal weekday with limited cash than to survive a weekend without cash.
Weekly meal planning
The simplest way to keep our weekly cash flow on track is to have a ruthless meal plan and food shopping list each week. We used to be so wasteful with food a few years ago and realised that not only were we wasting money on a weekly basis, but it was also really environmentally unacceptable to allow food to go to waste.
One of the things that we will not compromise on is our food. We enjoy our food and we want to eat healthy, nutritious and enjoyable meals. We could really slash our weekly spending on food further, but this would not fit with our priorities for our early retirement.
Each week we plan out what we plan to eat for the following week. We have a pretty consistent repertoire of breakfasts, lunches and snacks so that part of the shopping list does stay pretty standard week on week. We do however tailor our list to fit with our plans for dinner each week. We enjoy cooking, and we enjoy cooking fresh food together each night. When we plan our meals we try to incorporate left overs into our plan for the following day- particularly for lunches- we save loads of money (and food) by planning to cook for leftovers.
Exercise
We want to stay active in our early retirement and use all the additional time that we have gained from giving up work to benefit our health. We try to incorporate some form of physical activity into every day. Relocating to the Yorkshire Dales has ensured that we have the beauty of the great outdoors right on our doorsteps. As we get older, we lose strength, endurance and flexibility. Movement is so important for both our long term physical and mental health. We plan to maximise our movement in a number of ways:
Jackie loves her Garmin and tracks her daily steps rigourously. We aim to increase our average daily steps significantly now the house renovations are complete, the weather is getting better and the days are getting longer.
We need ways to exercise that doesn’t involve the cost of going to the gym. We have the best free gym in the world on our doorstep- the hills and the great outdoors. We have never been keen runners, but running in the countryside is so different to pounding urban pavements. We have invested in some trail running shoes and intend to get out a few times a week for very short runs. It is more important for us to be consistent in our running habit, rather than the actual distances involved. We are starting out with very modest runs of 15 minutes and building from there, depending on how we feel.
We love to cycle…but only in nice weather! As we move into the warmer and drier months we intend to build into our weekly routines some cycling around our local area- just for fun- not for set miles or set routes, but just to get out and explore. Living where we do, even going to the pub can incorporate a bit of a challenging cycle!
One of the things that I am most concerned about as I get older is my flexibility, or lack of. Put simply, I am as stiff as a board! I have never worked on any kind of mobility programme and wore that badge with indignant honour for most of my life…right until I realised that my significant lack of mobility in my shoulders and hips in particular could potentially have a significant effect in my old age. I am trying to build in to my daily routines some form of mobility work, based initially on my stiff shoulders and hips. Who knows how successful it will be…it is fair to say that I hate it at the moment, but doing nothing is not an option.
Blogging
We started our blog and website for a number of different reasons:
To document our adventures in our Early Retirement so we have something to look back on in future years.
To be creative and to produce something on a regular basis that others enjoy.
To produce an outlet to share the photographs and images we love to take.
To inspire and support others who are thinking of following a similar path.
To learn new skills in writing and web design.
All of those aims remain, but during the renovations in particular, we have found it quite difficult to fit our 2x a week blog into our schedules…particularly when our YouTube project came around and made similar time demands. We love our blog and are quite proud of what we have produced, we just need to be a bit tougher with our selves and get on and write on a daily/weekly basis.
YouTube
Launching our YouTube channel was one of the scariest things that we have ever done. We still find it incredibly difficult to be on camera, edit videos effectively and produce something that we are proud of and other people appreciate. We both agreed in the initial stages of our early retirement that we needed something that would put us completely out of our comfort zones, challenge us to learn new skills and make us better human beings as a consequence of doing the project. We both agreed very strict principles for this project- namely:
It will not get in the way of our early retirement life.
If it stops being fun, we will stop doing it.
It will not ever be a job- it is just a bit of fun to structure our time.
We want to build a community of people who are thinking of early retirement or actually doing it.
We will provide value to the community and never use the project as a money making scheme.
Like any new project, it hasn’t been easy and continues to offer its challenges, which at times can be frustrating, but when has anything easy been rewarding? We want to get back to producing 2 videos a week based on our early retirement adventures and our overall experiences of early retirement.
Vanlife
Without knowing it, as a consequence of the renovations to the cottage, we have really neglected our van life adventures that we love so much. Since returning from skiing in January, we have only spent a few nights away in the van…and only overnight local trips to avoid either workmen or gloss paint in the house! This is from a couple who have spent nearly 600 nights in the van whilst we were working! We are starting to feel the travel itch again and are busily planning our next few trips. As much as we love our new house and as much as we want to get people up to stay, we also want to get away in the van.
We have just had a few impromptu days away for our wedding anniversary and realised how good living in the van is for our health. We sleep better, we sleep longer, our stress levels are lower, we are more active and we are just really happy when on the road finding the hidden places.
Wainwright’s and Everest challenges
Linked to our need to routine our exercise goals, we absolutely love being out and about in the great outdoors. Jackie has taken part in the Everest Challenge for a number of years, looking to climb multiple Everests over the course of the year. It is a great challenge that has kept us both seeking altitude wherever we can get it over the course of the year. In the past few months, for obvious reasons this has faltered and it is something that we need to revisit. Similarly, since my 50th birthday I have been bagging the Wainwright peaks in the Lake District. The last Wainwright we bagged was from before Christmas, and we are both feeling the calling of the Lakes- a place that we love and need to spend more time there now we are freed from he constraints of the working week.
Keeping in touch and staying connected with people
If we are honest, this is one of the areas of our life that we have struggled with from when we were working. When we were teaching, we used to try and get away in the van as much as possible for our own mental health and wellbeing. As a consequence, we were rarely around at weekends or holidays to catch up with the people that we love. As we moved into retirement, we have found it difficult to catch up with people for entirely different reasons- we have been living in a building site for the past few months and haven’t had the house to host any visitors.
We know that relationships with the people that we love are the most important things in life- there is nothing more important. But we also know that for a variety of reasons, we often neglect those relationships when life gets tough. We are determined to keep in touch with our friends and invest in those relationships that we value- particularly now that we don’t have the opportunity to catch up with people on a daily basis at work.
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