Well I suppose the Internet Retirement Police could be called on me for saying two years of FIRE. Many of you know I FIREd in June 2016, then returned to my job from Sept 2016 to June 2017, being half-time for six of those months. I re-FIREd, if you want to call it that, exactly one year after my original FIRE date.
So far FIRE has been very different than what I thought it would be. I took a part-time job for fun at Publix for two months over this past winter and, while I learned a ton about how grocery stores work and really enjoyed the experience, I no longer believe that picking up a part-time job during a recession or a bad sequence of returns is a good safety net. I was naive to think that. I had almost no control over the hours I worked (time of day) in the Publix job and it was almost impossible to take off for more than 3-4 days in a row. Based on what I heard from other co-workers while I was there, that's a pretty standard experience in the retail industry. For those of us who have retired, a job like that will quickly reveal to you just how intolerable a lack of control over your own time has become to you. If we were truly in a bad way financially I could deal with it but I think my happiness in that situation would be reduced significantly more than I imagined it would be. Given the wage I was earning ($10.50/hr) I think a creative person could easily find ways to make money doing something they control, a side hustle, etc. that would still allow you that freedom over your own schedule. If we ever found ourselves in the position that more income was needed, I would be looking there first, and at a part-time job as my last resort.
We also have not done nearly as much travel as I thought we would have. I have a chronic knee injury, likely from years of being undertreated and it not being as high of a priority to me as it should have been, that flared up in February. Unrealized by me at the time, the muscle in my left leg had atrophied from favoring the leg for so long that my right thigh is two inches larger in circumference than the left. I had lost all the muscle definition in my left quadriceps. I decided that enough is enough and I'm going to treat my rehabilitation of the injury like an athlete would. There's an amazing physical therapy office that focuses on athletes where we used to live in Maryland so I've been driving from NC to MD every 2-3 weeks to see them and advance my rehabilitation. Every day I'm doing something to rehabilitate the injury. Even on the days I'm not weight lifting there are activities that help facilitate muscle regrowth and healing. I'm spending 1-3 hours every day focused solely on getting my knee back to 100%. I would never have been able to do this while I was working. There simply wasn't enough time in the day, and when I was younger I didn't have any idea I'd still bean dealing with the injury five years later. I'm just over 8 weeks into my therapy and I'm very excited about the results that I'm seeing. It's promising that I might be able to return to unrestricted physical activity within the next year, and before now I thought it was likely that I'd never be able to do certain things again. That's a hard pill to swallow at 34 years old. Because I have made my knee my top priority, that has meant giving up extended trips because I have to have weightlifting equipment available to do what needs to be done. Ultimately, giving up extended travel for the next 6-12 months will be worth it if it ensures that I'm 100% rehabilitated and we can do whatever travel we want for the next 2-3 decades.
We've seen family more this past year than we did when we lived less than 30 miles from everyone. My wife was still working remotely until recently (she just FIREd two weeks ago - BOOYAH!) and she had to go back to MD every so often and work a week in the office. Between that and my return trips to see the therapist, we've been seeing family practically every two weeks. When we first moved to NC our families figured they would see us a lot less, and we could tell they were sad about that. We both grew up together and our families all live within 30 miles of one another. However, I knew that having the freedom to control our time would mean we'd still see them a lot. We tried telling them this but I knew they wouldn't believe it until they experienced it. Well they've been experiencing it now and I can tell that everyone is happy, and surprised, that we're back in MD as often as we are. This likely won't continue forever though, because we want to make a huge multi-month tour of the US, and start travelling internationally, once my knee is rehabilitated.
I've realized that I'm a lot more okay with doing nothing than I thought I would be, and by nothing I mean activities that don't really have any purpose beyond filling your time. It's actually fairly easy to pass the day without a whole lot going on. I go for walks, bike rides, occasionally to the beach, I read, surf Flipboard for interesting articles, do some household chores, have dinner with everyone (we live with another family) and wind down the night with a little TV. My rehab limits my ability to be too physically active outside of my therapy because we're already trying to push the envelope as far as we can to rehabilitate my knee as fast as we can so additional work puts me at risk for re-injury. Prior to FIRE, I don't think I would have viewed myself as a person who was happy just letting the days pass, but so far I've really been enjoying myself.
Over the past year I've been actively working to streamline our lives so that when we finally have the green light to travel, we can just leave. I've been selling/giving away the things we've been most hesitant to get rid of and eliminating other tasks and chores that do not facilitate flexible, spontaneous decisions. Now every decision we make to buy, sell, or give away something is focused on whether that thing will help us be mobile, or allow us to do the activities we want to. I've been surprised at how much of a process this has been. Though, I think it's really only been this way because we don't have a hard deadline like the sale of a house, and we're not yet in the position that we could say tomorrow that we wanted to drive away from home and not come back for six months. Our trips back to MD have been a dry run of sorts for us, in that we get to see what it's like to try and take as little with us as we need to get through the week. We're really pairing down clothing and gear and I'm relishing the nimbleness than accompanies being lightweight. I think when we do finally start travelling I'm going to enjoy living out of a backpack (or something close to it).
So life is good! When I think about going back to my old career now I'm almost repulsed by the thought. It just seems so unnatural, so unhealthy (office environment, less exercise, etc.). I told my wife during an exceptionally nice week in NC this past Spring that I've never been happier to be alive. Truly. It might be the first time in my life I've experienced unbridled joy. There are days where I find myself almost disbelieving that this is real life, like I'm dreaming. It's a wonderful feeling.