Week # 1 - Here we go… our early retirement plans suddenly get very real.

Up to this point, our early retirement plans had been just that- plans. This week sees those plans becoming very real with the finality of handing in our notices at work.

In this weeks blog we look at:

• making our early retirement plans official,

• examine the challenges of keeping travel and adventure at the forefront of our plans,

• understanding and coming to terms with the concept of fear

• the importance of routines in our lives and thinking about what will happen when the routine of work ends.

Over the course of the next few months, we intend to produce a weekly blog to document the steps we make towards our ultimate goal of early retirement in September 2022. We intend to not only look at the practical steps we have to take, such as resigning from our jobs, but also look at the effect it has on us a couple as well as the other practical arrangements that we have to put in place to make early retirement a reality.

Early retirement- the big announcement & moving things forward.

This was the week that we had always planned for the news to break with our work colleagues. For us, it was important for our younger work colleagues to understand that we we not leaving the profession because we were dissatisfied, but we were doing it for us as a couple. We have loved our jobs and viewed our 30 years of teaching as a real privilege to have worked with all of our young people.

Once the news broke, we finally had the opportunity to publish our website and blog- something that we had been planning since Christmas. We initially aim to release two posts per week, a midweek blog on anything that may be of interest or takes our fancy, and a weekly update blog on a Sunday.

Our next steps towards early retirement involve plans for our house and looking into alternative sources of income just in case times get hard in the coming years. More ideas on these in our future blogs.

A taste of the future- half term Scottish roadtrip.

We returned to the new term of work after a great weeklong winter trip to the Cairngorms, Aberdeenshire and the Moray Firth. We always knew it, but this trip confirmed our longterm desire to spend time travelling and exploring new places in Nelson our campervan. We purposely set out with few plans and sought to see if we could cope with just winging it, following our noses and keeping our days as simple and flexible as possible. We filled our time with lazy starts, exploring our surroundings and taking time to indulge our passion for photography. Even better, we managed to moderate our alcohol consumption for the week in the van- a major win for us both!

As always happens at the end of a great holiday, we start thinking about our next break. We have to finely balance our need to keep saving money for when we give up our pay cheques in September, with our need to still try and live our lives as normally as we can. Although we desperately want to get out to Europe for the Easter break, we know that there will be plenty of time for that in the future when we don’t have to return after only 2 weeks. To keep us on budget, our initial thoughts are to visit a new part of Scotland- the Isle of Arran and the Mull of Kintire, but lots more thinking and planning to do on this in the coming weeks.

Keeping things positive- retirement wobbles and understanding fear.

We hope it is only normal to feel apprehensive when planning for such life changing decisions that we are about to make- after all, we are turning our backs on 30 years worth of job security and routines.

Since making the decision together, we have honestly never once had any doubts that it is the right thing for us to do. However at the start of this week, announcing to all of our work colleagues our intentions to pack in our careers suddenly made things seem very permanent. The natural fear of the judgement of others suddenly and unexpectedly came to the surface in a most primal way, and this surprised us. We found myself wanting to justify our decision to colleagues who really didn’t warrant or require that explanation.

It was fortuitous then that the High Performance podcast I was listening to a couple of weeks ago examined the origins of fear that really resonated with the situation we found ourselves in this week. Pippa Grange illustrated perfectly the primal origins of fear that are hard wired into our brain’s physiological processes through evolution. In essence, we only have two base fears that our mind deals with subconsciously:

• life threatening fear

• fear of not fitting in with our tribe

Our ancestors needed to avoid life threatening situations with sabre toothed tigers but also needed to be accepted as part of the tribe in order to survive together within a group. To risk being ostracised from the group was to risk certain death. Our automated responses to these two fears remain deeply embedded with in our modern brains and are completely outside our conscious control.

Clearly, our decision to retire early is not a life threatening situation, but there is a very real fear that we are potentially not fitting in with the tribe, by doing something so radically different to the accepted norm of working until 67. Knowing our fears were related to this evolutionary psychology offered some comfort in understanding these unexpected feelings and gave us further confidence to push on with our plans. In the modern world, it’s good to be different as long as we are at ease with that decision.

Getting back into routines… and routines for our early retirement.

A week on the road inevitably disturbs the routine of everyday working life. There is something that is quite comforting about the everyday routines that we adopt. They are safe, stable and provide us structure for our lives. It has been real to get back to the simplicity of everyday nutrition- getting our food prep back on point each day and avoiding the temptation of comfort carbs. We are always physically active when on the road, but no where near as disciplined and routined as attending CrossFit classes regularly that we restarted this week.

The comfort of dropping back into these routines posed a us a number of questions for the future.

• When we no longer have a normal working day, what will our days look like?

• Will the days drift, and be uncertain?

• How will we maintain the focus, comfort and support that a regular daily working routine provides?

These are all questions that we need to seriously ponder in the coming months in preparation for the big change in September.

So that’s it... week # 1 over and done with. A week that has been a long time coming and is the start of something really exciting, but also a week that has probably posed more questions than answers. We think that this is going to be a common theme as we step into the unknown. A life of so much less certainty, and bucket loads of uncertainty, but we see this as a good thing. It means that life is fresh and new, bringing a new level of energy to our plans.

Have a great week,

Richard & Jackie