Just informed HR that March 12th will be my last day, so it's real now! Still not feeling any overwhelming joy, or peace, but I guess I should take the fact that I continue to at least move forward on this, despite the anxiety, as evidence that I'm winning against that anxiety / OneMoreYear/Month/Week-itis.
Welcome skyrefuge! I like the sound of your plan! I’m hoping to get a few multi-day bike trips in this summer, but nothing that qualifies as nomad status!
Thank you! I now realize I haven't updated my location, I've been in the Seattle area too for the last 18 months. As a consolation prize for not retiring last August, we did an 8-day loop on our bikes around the Olympic peninsula, highly recommended! Being retired this spring (while still staying in the area) means maybe this time we'll get a good chance to ride a
car-free SR20 into North Cascades NP on a Tuesday with an abnormally warm-and-sunny forecast.
Like you, these crazy market returns make the thought of selling my time for more paychecks less appealing, especially when investment returns are outpacing paychecks.
Yep, NW was up ~$50k in the two business days since I joined this thread, that sure helped highlight the futility of "one more week" and help steel my nerve. Though on the other hand "retiring at a market peak" wouldn't have been how I drew it up either.
Lol. Welcome to the club! ;) Congrats on making a huge (albeit also scary) step. Do you have a specific plan for your nomad times? Seems like a great way to protect against those SORR-scaries.
Thank you! Our plan is a long-term, long-distance self-contained bike tour, with rough shapes planned. My wife has been saying "3 to 5 years", which would be awesome, but who knows? One target is to hit all 50 states, so we'll be starting with the lower-48 in late summer, heading south, see if we can do a semi-outdoor winter along the southern border, and then hopefully will be able to get through the next winter in New Zealand, and after that, who knows! Riding bikes, staying physically strong, and limiting our possessions to what we can strap to our bikes means we'll ironically be living a more-Mustachian lifestyle than we ever did pre-retirement!
And yeah, even if we get soft and spend way more than the average long-term bike-tourists, at a minimum we should get a better idea how much money we "really" have when it comes time to settle again, because we'll know if current market valuations were a one-time fluke, the start of a relatively-stable plateau, or even just a point on a still-continuing upslope. But the bike tour has been a long-planned thing (even somewhat of a motivation for early-retirement), because that's what we love to do; any improvements to our portfolio-survivability are just a lucky side-effect.