Early Retirement? Maybe Not So Extreme…
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It's been pretty quiet over here with our finances recently. Once we bought the car, we've been building up our car fund a bit (to cover our current cars' maintenance costs).
Our finances have been automated so we're continuing to pay down the student loan and the mortgage while contributing to our retirement accounts.
I've been using the last month or so to catch up on my blogroll and my personal library.
Among what I've been reading are Early Retirement Extreme (both the blog and book) and Mr. Money Mustache.
Could We Plan Our Retirement Differently?
After going over some of the numbers in the book and the blogs, I chatted with my husband a bit about this.
For those who have been with us from the beginning, our goals have been fairly straightforward.
Besides paying off all of our non-mortgage debt in 5 years (we have 2 1/2 years left), we also want both of us to have the option work to from home. (My husband enjoys his work, so it's more about having an option rather than anything else.)
Our financial system is based on that – retirement was seen later rather than sooner.
We thought about retiring earlier than average, but our thinking was if we enjoy doing the work that we, than why think about retirement?
However after some reading and thinking I've had a slight shift on my thinking. I was talking to my husband about some goals that we had (not just financial).
It’s given me some food for thought, so expect some future posts here starting next week (and on My Financial Reviews) about how this will affect our finances.
I'm going to spend part of this weekend looking some of the calculators for early retirement and look at the numbers.
Thoughts on Retiring Early
I'd like to hear about your family's retirement plans. How many of you are working towards financial independence or retiring early?
I plan on “retiring” once the house is paid off – the goal is 50, but it’s probably going to be a little later than that. My husband will retire at 57 (government employee).
My husband and I were working towards earky retirement as hard as possible when we both hated our day jobs. Now that we are self employed from home, we still save, but earky retirement is less important to us than it was. I guess we just wanted to be happier and didn’t know what could help us with that until we had it. 🙂
I would love to retire at 55, but not completely stop working. If I could just move from my 8-5 job and do something I am absolutely passionate about (without worrying about the money), that would be ideal. Whatever you do, continue to put money away, as it give you choices in the future. You could choose to work, choose to retire, or choose to do something in between. Live entirely for today and you might have no choice. A good now vs retirement balance is ideal.
Interestingly, many millenials don’t plan on retiring. Not me of course.
I feel like I could retire earlier than average, but I have become aware that If I’d done a few things differently, I could have retired significantly earlier. Most of my missed opportunities were the result of being young and not having financial goals or strategy. If I understood then what I know now, things would have been much different.