The husband (ha!) and I have been on the MMM path for a few years. We're 31 and save roughly half our income. We give nearly another 5% to charity. No kids planned but we are tethered to a house and a well-loved dog. We have a tentative plan to quit our jobs around 42-45 and work just enough to pay our daily bills, because our retirements will be well-funded at that point.
But. That is so far away! And lately I've been feeling so restless. There's a whole host of reasons for this restlessness, starting with the fact that my husband and I started dating when we were just 20 and ending with us spending our whole lives in the suburbs of one state.
We are typically very good at finding happiness where we are. We hike, bike and spend lots of time outdoors. I typically love reading and cooking too -- we are, mostly, homebody-type people.
Except lately I've been feeling like I'm not ready to settle into this life. I didn't take full advantage of my 20s; I was too career-oriented (which HAS paid off, but you're only a twentysomething once). We have money set aside for travel now, which helps, and my career is going well, which helps too.
But we are low on friends in our current city, family is getting us down, and I'm wishing we spent more time acting like the young childfree people that we are.
There's a neighboring city where we have some built-in friends -- more than the suburbs where we are now. My work also has a regional office in that city, and there is some precedence for headquarters employees being based at regional officers. We have full-time telework available, if approved, but I believe you need to be reasonably close to an office in case of IT issues, etc. So moving there for a little while is not completely untenable.
However, the husband is a teacher who is not certified in that state, and having him switch districts (and states) seems like a lot of hoops to go through for a temporary move, with real pension implications. He has nine years of service in our current state. I think it's wiser for him to get to twenty years of service in one state before attempting to leave to another state. (Likely, once he hits 20 years, he's out. I'm the breadwinner.) I hate hate hate realizing this though -- I hate being/feeling trapped. But it does seem shortsighted to ignore this.
I'm trying to balance my restlessness and work flexibility with his work limitations. One option that jumped to mind is to spend just a summer in the neighboring city. I think it would be trickier but probably not impossible to get telework approved for just the summer. Or, perhaps I could even drive down for two days of work and stay with family the night between -- it's only about a two-hour drive, so doable if a little crazy.
I think we could probably fairly easily find a house/cat sitter for the summer, at one of those house-sitting websites, although I'd love to hear if others have experiences with that. The only real hangup that I can see, beyond getting telework approved, is that we'd have to pay for both our mortgage and rent. This seems financially stupid but less financially stupid than some other things I could be doing with this feeling of restlessness.
But looking at this plan from the outside I do have kind of that sinking feeling that this is half-baked, unlikely, doomed to fail. Or maybe it'll just be too uncomfortable. I don't know.
What would you do if you had a serious sense of restlessness, some work flexibility, fairly solid finances, no kids and a summer to play?
