There are many reasons to early retire. 6 months into our own early retirement adventure we have found that making this change has given us freedoms in our lives that we had not previously envisaged.
Time to relocate.
In our early retirement dreams we always planned to relocate to one of our happy places. Without the restrictions of employment we were free to relocate anywhere we wished and this was really liberating. Once we were freed from the confines of work, it enabled us the time and the space to relocate across the country. We could never have envisaged this if we had to change our jobs at the same time. This would have added too many restrictions to the choices available to us. In addition, we would personally would not have coped with the demands of selling and buying a house whist working full time. Our house purchase in particular was very stressful, protracted (6 months!) and demanded almost daily contact with legal teams at the end to get it across the line.
Time to renovate and project manage.
At various times during our renovation project, we have looked at each other and questioned how on earth we could have done this whist holding down a job as well. We know that many people do manage this, and we take our hats off to them, as we know we would not have coped with the pressures or the stress. The number of times that we have had to schedule things at short notice, at the bequest of trades people, is beyond belief. Having to be available to make snap decisions is not something we could have done if we were holding down a teaching job. Not to mention living in a building site for months on end, or not as the case may be. We have used the ultimate freedom of retirement and our campervan to escape the carnage and flee to our happy places when the renovation work got too much.
To travel and adventure.
We know that one of the primary reasons we retired early was to travel and see the amazing world that we live in. When we worked, we traveled well, and loved every minute of it. We were invariably away every weekend and every holiday, increasingly disappearing at the first available moment and delaying our return to the very last minute before having to reluctantly returning to work. Early retirement has afforded us the freedom to maximise these times and has removed the need to be tied to particularly times of the year for our adventures. For the first time in our lives, we have not been restricted to school holiday times- we have travelled Europe in beautifully warm September, we have skied in cheap January, we have spent a sunny February in Arizona…the opportunities are just endless, and exactly why we made our life changing decision to retire at the age of 51.
To find new places.
We would never have probably travelled to Arizona if it was not for the opportunity to meet up with Jackie’s mum who was out there. Like so many of our adventures, you never really know where your favourite place is until you have been there. The world is so massive, with so many places to see, there are so many of our favourite places out there that we don’t even know exist at this moment in time.
To take new opportunities.
Having the freedom of time allows us the opportunity to take up experiences we would not have previously been able to. Just before Christmas we house sat our friends beautiful house in the Lake District for a couple of weeks whilst they were on holiday.
When our patience had completely run out with our house purchase, we were able to say F**k it and we disappeared to the Outer Hebrides on a one way ticket until the purchase was completed. It may sound impulsive, and it was, but it saved our mental health and wellbeing in what was increasingly becoming a very fraught situation.
We are currently in Arizona visiting Jackie’s Mum, taking up the opportunity of some free accommodation in a beautiful part of the world combined with some valuable family time.
Time with family.
When we worked, we found ourselves in a strange position as we travelled so much in our free time, we found that we had less and less time for our family. We recognise that this was by our own doing, but it was a frustrating friction we could do without. Now that we are retired, we have so much more time for our families. We can visit them whenever we wish, and are not restricted to weekends. In addition, we are more available to them, as we can be around more at weekends rather than been away travelling all the time (we can do that mid-week now!). This has been particularly useful with my Mum, who is struggling with dementia and her needs are ever changing. Having the freedom to be able to visit at short notice, at any time of the week is a real blessing.
Time with friends.
Similar to the above point, we have welcomed the freedom to catch up with friends in our retirement. We know, much to our embarrassment we have not been good friends to have over the last few years of work. We found it hard to find time for friends in our packed schedules and this was something that needed to improve. Since our retirement, we have caught up with so many friends that we had perhaps neglected in the past. We have rekindled some lovely friendships that we really value. We are so excited to finish our renovations so we can continue this reconnection by having people up to the Dales to stay. So much so, we are planning on staying in the Dales this summer, just so we are available to host when everyone else in the working world is available to visit. Just typing this makes me giddy with excitement.
Time with each other.
Working life has a cost. We work to get to a position of having more time, but by doing this, we actually have less of the time that we crave. This is especially true in our relationships. Although our jobs brought us the money and the opportunities that goes with that, our jobs were full on and we rarely had time for each other in term time. We would leave home early, get home late and have work to do in the evening. By the time the weekend came, we were so exhausted we had little left to give to each other. Until you truly step off the treadmill, you have no awareness of the effect of that treadmill on your everyday life. Now we have all the time in the world for each other and it is our choice how we spend that time. We do choose to spend a lot of our time together, but we also have our own time for ourselves, which makes for a healthy relationship.
Freedom to be present.
Quite often in our working lives we were distracted by the pressures of work. Things worried us and played on our minds. We found it difficult to switch off- particularly digitally post the pandemic when the work/home boundaries for everyone got a little blurred. We used to find ourselves at weekends doing amazing things, in beautiful places, yet we lacked the ability to be truly present in these moments due to the distractions of work. This was even more evident towards the end of holidays when our minds inevitably shifted to work. We used to joke about dropping into work mode a week before the end of the summer break- but it was sadly true.
Now we find it easier to be present in the moment and truly appreciate the experiences we have. It is by no means prefect, as life is never perfect and keeps throwing curve balls to distract us, but it is noticeably easier to remain in the moment when we are early retired.
Look after health and well-being.
We have always been fit and active in our working lives, fitting in the things that maintain our health and wellbeing around work. The difference now is those things take priority rather than just being fitted in. For example, we see it as a daily priority to get out into nature and walk- wherever we may be.
We try to remain active in some way every day. We take time to prepare and enjoy our meals rather than rushing the whole process. We sleep better and for longer, because we have the time for that- we go to bed when we are tired and get up when we are rested. I can count on one hand the number of times I have set an alarm in our 6 months of early retirement.
Learn new skills.
As teachers we both firmly believed in the concept of lifelong learning. The unfortunate thing when working is that much of that lifelong learning is associated with work and little time is available for learning the things that you may be truly passionate about. For us, we knew that we would need some projects that would keep us mentally stimulated in our retirement as it would not be a good idea to go from full on working life to nothing. We decided early on in our early retirement planning to create a blog of our retirement adventures to document our journey. This then evolved into developing our YouTube channel for the same reason.
Both projects have put us completely outside our comfort zones, and have forced us to learn and develop an entire new skill set. We are learning on a daily basis- and it is exciting…if also a little scary at times, but it makes life fun.
For me personally, I have also branched out into other areas. I had a frustration when blogging that I could not touch type, the process was too slow, so I have embarked on learning to touch type using an online programme on a daily basis. When I confessed my embarrassment of being unable to speak French in one of our blogs, one of our readers recommended Duolingo as a good learning platform, so I am now a month into daily French lessons as well.
Freedom to be impromptu.
Our latest adventures on our Arizona road trip is a prime example of this. We headed north for 3 nights in the Grand Canyon, but Mother Nature had other ideas. A freak storm blew in as we were staying on route one 66 and we were well and truly snowed in. On a normal trip, this would have been a disaster, ripping through the itinerary, but for us, on our retirement timeline it was just a small inconvenience. We had built in some unallocated days later in our trip, so we did a bit of re-jigging and added a train transfer to the Canyon and we were back on track.
If you want to see us discuss these issues first hand, we have published a YouTube video on just this topic that you can watch by following the link below: