Some of you may remember I took the plunge in January. A brief summary - I was 45 when I resigned my job, now 46 (obv), near 5 year old son, wife just turned 40 and still working. Arguably, as I've said before, I'm just a stay-at-home Dad ... of which more very soon...
If I had to sum up the experience in a few sentences, it would go like this: as things have turned out, I couldn't not have FIRED: as soon as we got to our dream location (Gulf Islands of BC), the day-care we had arranged for our son fell through so I found myself doing full time child care for the first six months. Then our rental turned out to have dry and wet rot and a lovely rat population, so it was all hands on deck to find our dream home rather more quickly than I'd expected.
We bought our dream home - and in many ways, it surpasses our dreams - in April. 1.5 acres with a hobby cabin, cherry trees and blackberry bushes, forest and lawns. Views of the Pacific Ocean and Rockies; the works. It still needed renos, though, and the small matter of our belongings arriving, admin for new arrivals in a new province (US), etc etc - all meant that I was actually busier until July this year than I had been in my $200K+ job - but a different kind of busy; a real busy - trapping vermin, chopping wood, lifting boxes, playing with my boy. Still a shock to the system, though, as I'd imagined getting further into my writing career (see below) than I have been able to.
And for those of you who followed my post about my switch from copywriting to "real" writing, well, my news there is that my next book will be out in Spring 2018, and I am writing book reviews (paid gig) for the local newspaper, and hoping to pick up assignments from two other media outlets. I've also done a very little (<$5000) consulting as a copywriter over the last six months, which basically paid for a lavish (in Mustachian terms) 40th birthday for my wife.
It's only now, 8 months in, that I am beginning to have those experiences to savour - this afternoon I lay out in the sunshine on our front lawn with our puppy and read a book. Yesterday I took Andy (our puppy) for a 45 minute hike in the woods with not another soul around. Today also I made jam, blackberry liqueur, and started a rumtopf (German spiced rum and fruit) that will mature in the depths of the Canadian winter.
Finally, and tellingly - yesterday I also made a trip in to Vancouver to seek out more freelance work after my son goes to "big school" in mid-September. and you know what? I really don't know how keen I am on it. As the days pass and I see the value in cooking our own meals, baking our own bread, making our own booze, bringing our son up ourselves, hacking around with renos, electronic repairs, etc... I don't know. I always planned to go back to work and stressed this in my earlier, pre-fire posts, but now I honestly feel I'm happier as a low-paid freelance writer dude than writing corporate stuff.
Anyway, just wanted to share. Please also share your updates, I enjoy reading them.
EDITED TO ADD: If I could do one thing differently, it would be to have less money in retirement funds and more in liquid investments. We have $900K in retirement funds that we *could* call on if we absolutely had to, and/but "only" $300K in liquid investments, which doesn't really yield enough to meet our expenses. Again, I'm really more of a stay-at-home Dad as wife is still working and earning well, but I still put myself in the post-FIRE bracket because of my career change, however illegitimate this may be. BA
