Background
For those of you who are new to our blog and YouTube channel here is a little bit of background information.
We are Jackie and Richard, we are both early retired teachers having completed almost 30 years of service to the education system.
We had made the decision in our mid 40’s that we were always going to early retire from the teaching profession at the age of 55 when we could access our teachers pension with a lump sum that would help us to live until we get to our state pension at the age of 67.
In the summer of 2021 our lives changed forever when we lost both Richards dad and younger brother within weeks of each other. It was at this point we did a lot of reflecting on our lives and made the brave decision to early retire at the age of 51 and relocate to the Yorkshire Dales which was closer to Richards mum who has dementia and needed our support.
Leaving the teaching profession at 51 meant that we would not have access to our teachers pension for nearly three and a half years and would need to survive on our savings and equity from the sale of our family home in Cheshire.
Fears and anxieties leading up to our early retirement
Like many people, the decision to leave our careers after 30 years is a daunting one and we had many fears and anxieties leading up to it. In this blog we thought we would address some of them with our reflections on how we have dealt with them in the 18 months since we retired. We have not mentioned finances in this blog as we feel that is a separate issue that we may write about at a later date.
Loss of identity
One of the biggest questions we get asked is ‘How do you deal with the loss of identity when you are no longer a teacher?’
When you meet up with people, one of the first questions you get asked is ‘What do you do for a living?’
For us, we simply reply that we are early retired and we are loving life travelling and spending time with the people that we love.
Mentally after 30 years of being a teacher – that is what you identify as. You were a person that had huge responsibilities to the young minds that you educated. Your life was governed by term times and expectations of the job role.
When you early retire, your focus moves from the needs of your job to the needs of us as individuals. We now spend our time focussing on our health, our relationships and our continued personal development as life-long learners. We do still refer to ourselves as ex-teachers but our focus is now primarily on our enjoyment of being early retired and our travel adventures.
How do we fill our time?
When we first told people that we were going to early retire, we continually got asked the questions:
What will you do with yourselves?
How will you fill all that time?
The answer is pretty simple – we still feel like we do not have enough time to do the things we want to do! It has been 20 months and we have not had a dull moment yet!
Making the decision to relocate to the Dales as soon as we retired certainly helped us to keep busy. We took on a complete renovation project and project managed it ourselves. We also spent months decorating and learning new skills to do some of the renovations ourselves.
Richard learnt some joinery skills; he built an airing cupboard and replaced most of the skirting boards. I learnt how to make curtains, cushions and blinds. We had fun becoming learners again and the sense of pride and satisfaction from completing the project was immeasurable.
We have a real thirst for travel and have made the most of any opportunity that comes our way to get out and explore the World around us. We have a VW campervan that we use regularly; we get away on extended trips around both the Uk and Europe living as cheaply as possible.
We have spent half a ski season in the French Alps living in our campervan this winter. Last year we spent almost 10 weeks in the USA travelling with my mum who is on a mission to visit all 50 states.
When we are at home in the Yorkshire Dales we get out hiking and cycling regularly and we have set ouselves goals and challenges such as our mission to complete all of the Wainwrights.
How do we maintain our sense of purpose
Richard loves his psychology and one of the theories that he is always quoting is Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. In essence, we all have a series of needs that are placed in priority order for us to consider. We are unable to deal with higher level needs until our more basic needs have been met. For example, we find it almost impossible to learn new and complex skills if we are hungry. Once our most basic needs of food, shelter and water have been met, we can move onto higher order needs such as relationships- for example giving and receiving love.
When we made the decision to early retire, we knew that our relationship needs would need to be met away from the workplace. We would need to meet new people, make new friends and join new groups.
The highest level of our hierarchy of needs is self actualisation- being creative and fulfilling our higher order cognitive needs. The problems that we have to solve in our early retirement are very different to the work place problems that used to fill our working days. Realising our "why" and what is our life's purpose, is the highest need we can achieve.
Personal identity
As I mentioned previously, for most of our adult lives we identified ourselves as teachers. We had both been part of our respective school communities for over 15 years and felt a strong sense of obligation to the students and their families. We were role models, mentors, educators and highly respected, with people regularly coming to us for advice and support.
But we were not just teachers.
We are Jackie and Richard - parents to 2 amazing young adults. We are embracing our new found freedom to spend quality time with our extended family.
We are life long learners with a passion to dedicate much of our newly retired life to learning new skills and knowledge. Richard is learning a new language to enhance his travel experiences. We have learnt many new skills during the process of renovating the house.
We are Early Retirement Wanderlust; having learnt the skills to set up a YouTube channel to document our early retirement journey.
We are explorers with a thirst for travel and a sense of adventure to find out about other cultures.
We are freelance writers with regular articles being published in a variety of magazines.
We have realised that we are so much more than just Jackie and Richard - retired teachers and we have also realised we can be anything we want to be.
Importance of maintaining relationships
One thing we are truly grateful for in our early retirement is the time that we now have to invest in our relationships with others. Teaching and working life was pretty full on, particularly in term time, we felt we had no quality time for anyone, including each other.
It was only after we had been retired for a few months that we realised how little quality time we had spent with each other over the past few years. We were at work from 7.30am - 6pm every day and spent the rest of the evening either at the gym or marking and planning for the next day. We longed for the weekends and holidays where we could get away in the van. We absolutely love our time together now. Any worries that we may feel smothered or overwhelmed by having so much time together have completely dissipated.
A knock on affect of long working days and then getting away in the campervan on weekends and holidays was that we did not see as much of our family as we wanted to. Even though we only lived 5 minutes away from my mum, I would only see her a couple of times a week for a quick coffee. Now, we love being able to go and stay for a few nights every couple of weeks. We see our children more often and can visit Richards mum in the home a couple of times a week. Having the time and opportunity to travel with our family is priceless. whether that be touring the USA in a motorhome with mum or skiing with the kids out of term time.
Taking early retirement and relocating to a different part of the country was a big decision and we knew that one thing we would need to ensure was that we didn't lose touch with our friends. Luckily, most people are quite happy to come have a weekend in the Dales and with Luke and mum still living in Cheshire, we still get to see people regularly.
Something we had not anticipated but which has been an absolute bonus is that many of our friends are of an age where they too are retiring. And even better many have invested in camper vans. We have found ourselves in the amazing situation where we have reignited old friendships from pre children days and have a better social life than we have had in years!
Health and Well being
With out realising it at the time, our working life as teachers had a huge effect on our mental health. We have found since retiring that the quality of our sleep is much better, we are not lying in bed restless and worried about a certain child or the prospect of an OFSTED visit. Our minds are no longer preoccupied all the time. We both wear Garmin watches and have noted a significant difference in our heart rate - especially in the day.
We both take the time to look for the positives in any day and situation and have adapted the attitude that if you have no expectations for the day then you will never be disappointed. We have realised that you can only control the controllable and we reflect on what we are grateful for each day.
We invest heavily in our physical health and have set ourselves several goals to ensure that we remain active in some way every day. Richard has an early morning routine of stretches to aid his mobility and to increase his flexibility. I endeavour to do over 300,000 steps a month, not a hard task now that we live in such a beautiful place. Most of the activities we do are free and easy to access. We do regular hikes and have a target to climb the equivalent of 4 Mount Everests in elevation each year. We plan to get out cycling regularly over the spring and summer months and when we are away in the van these are easy targets o maintain.
We have found it so much easier to have a more healthy a balanced diet in our early retirement. We have to shop to a budget and plan our weekly meals before going to the supermarket. We have the time to cook properly and have made a big effort to get into the habit of eating at least 5 portions of fruit and vegetables a day. We rarely eat high calories snack foods between meals any more, a bad habit we had slipped into. When we were working we had slipped into a really bad habit of sharing a bottle of wine most nights after work, in our retirement we have got into a mindset that it is a weekend treat.
How do we keep ourselves busy?
Over the months we have developed our own daily routines and habits to give us some structure. Richard still gets up at around 7am and does some journalling, stretching and he also uses this time to do some video editing for our YouTube channel so it does not eat away at our day. I must admit, I have a much slower start to the day, but we are both up and about by around 9!
When we are at home, we like to get out for a walk or a hike most days. We will then plan what we want to do. As I mentioned earlier, we love the fact that we can spend so much more time with our family regularly visiting both mums and the kids.
We started our YouTube channel as an opportunity to learn new skills and as a way of reflecting on and recording our journey into early retirement. It is something that gives a real focus and purpose to our weeks, we have got into a routine of sitting down and recording twice a week to release a videos on a Thursday and Sunday morning.
We have called ourselves 'Early retirement Wanderlust' as one of the main things we wanted to get out of our retirement was the freedom to travel and explore in our campervan. We set off at any opportunity and have a jam packed year full of wonderful travels planned. We do have quite a limited budget and particularly when in the UK we will travel as cheaply as possible. Quite unexpectedly, we are in a position where our YouTube income will allow us to travel to more far flung places which is really exciting!
Keep up our positive outlook
We have made a conscious decision to have a positive outlook on life and to surround ourselves by positive people. We plan to have something to look forward to each day, no matter how small. Today it was simply to visit the 2 gorgeous Swiss valais black nosed sheep down the road and to see the lambs.
We do not watch live TV and try to avoid the negative news and social media. We try to reframe most negatives into a positive - if the weather forecast is horrendous for the day then that is just an opportunity to get some recording done or declare a duvet read a book day!
We fully embrace that we are in a new phase of our lives and we have the gift of the time and freedom to indulge ourselves. When we were in the USA, we met an extraordinary man who called himself 'Hippie'. He was a thru-hiker who had spent the past 5 months walking the continental divide trail from Mexico to Canada. We chatted to him for about half an hour, which had a profound effect on our lives. He explained that he was war vet and that he was 'walking off the war'! He said 2 things that really resonated with us.
The first was - as ex teachers and an army vet we had fulfilled our societal obligations and given back into the community and now was the time look after ourselves.
The second thing he said was that he never had any expectations of the day so he was never disappointed!
With those profound words said, he disappeared back into the forests of the Colorado mountains!
So back to the title of this blog. Although we no longer identify as teachers, we do not feel we have lost ANY of our identity, it has simply evolved. Our lives feel full of purpose and self worth. Our bucket list of things we want to do and achieve just gets bigger. We are never bored, we are far more positive in our outlook and we love our life as it is. There have been a few tough days, but we do not dwell on them - we simply move on and control what we can. We intend to make the most of every minute of our early retirement as we do not know what life has in store for us.
Jackie and Richard
