2 year anniversary update! (and, my first post here in two years, proving that the “I’m busier in retirement than I ever was when I was working” trope definitely applies to me!)
My wife and I gave ourselves a 6-month window in which to try out a “normal” retired life, before transitioning to a nomadic life on our bicycles. The first few months were pretty idyllic and close to what I imagined. I hadn’t been very wound up with work, so it took almost no time to wind down. We paid almost no attention to the day of the week, but quickly learned to live life in reverse: if it’s the weekend, stay home! And instead go out on the weekdays to explore the nearly empty trails all over the Cascades, or on long bike rides (applies to more mundane things like grocery shopping too!) With COVID vaccines available, we finally had friends and family come to visit us in Washington, and made several trips to meet with family in various beautiful places.
Then, 4 months in, the bliss was shattered. My wife’s mom, who was due to join us soon in Washington to help clear out and pack up all of our stuff in preparation for our nomadacy, called with crushing news: a cancer diagnosis. Like a true loving mother, her unselfish and sweetly-idiotic concern was mainly about
our plans being disrupted. Of course we weren’t having any of that nonsense, and my wife decided to immediately move to New Mexico to be there to support her through treatment. We planned that I’d follow in a month or so, once I closed out the rest of our household. Instead of “messing up” the early days of our retirement, I saw it as the exact (but unpredicted)
reason for our retirement. What higher use of our freedom could there be than caring for loved ones in need?
But, cancer, the indefatigable bitch, was naturally determined to take as much advantage of that freedom as it possibly could. It immediately put my mother-in-law into the ICU, which pulled me down to New Mexico just a day or two after my wife arrived, so that I would be there to support her in supporting her mom. Within a week, we were bringing mom home to die. There, my wife and I spent the next week as mom’s 24/7 caregivers, doing some of the hardest work we’ve ever done, work that was painful and numbing, but also incredibly intimate and more-rewarding than any work I ever did in my career.
After she died, we stayed on for a couple more weeks to handle her affairs.
To not have to give a single fuck about our jobs during this terrible month-long period was a tremendous gift. I can't imagine how we could have done it if we were still employed. I know we would have somehow (people do it all the time), but I can't imagine how. Just four months into early retirement, the “disadvantages” of two decades of “scrimping and saving” were repaid in full, and any enjoyment we’d get out of retirement from that point forward would be a bonus.
In the end, mom went so quickly, that there never ended up being any “move” to New Mexico, and we found ourselves back in Washington with time to start our bike tour roughly as planned, if we wanted to. Pissed at her for finding a loophole in her quest to “not disrupt our plans”, and doubting whether it was still the right choice, we went for it and became nomads on the autumn equinox of 2021. What possessions we could not fit on our bicycles sit in our 10ft. x 10ft. storage unit.
Halfway down the Pacific Coast, I met up with some former colleagues in Silicon Valley. The night before, as I pre-wrote some conversation topics in my head, I was mildly shocked to discover that my brain had completely flushed every work-related technical topic from my memory. Like, gone. And gone for a long time already. I mean, I had always been pretty sure that my retirement would stick, with no backsliding, but I had no idea that my subconscious was equally on-board. Or, even
more on-board: “man, on the rare chance this guy ever decides he wants to go back to work, that would really suck, so let’s burn down that bridge and make it impossible for him even if he wanted to!”
We took three months to get from Seattle to Southern California, wintered for three months in Baja, took two months in spring/summer 2022 to ride from Chicago to Maine while staying with family in between, and then two months meandering the Maritime provinces of Canada.
By that point, a year into our nomadacy, riding away from her grief had stopped “working” for my wife, and brought our movement to a halt. Literally: her brain began telling her body that it no longer knew how to balance on a bike, and she lost the ability to start. So instead of spending winter 2022/2023 in New Zealand as planned, we decided to shut down the biking for six months, get in some long term visits with family, and then time on our own back in Washington. Once again, having the flexibility to say “this life isn’t working at the moment, let’s change it up” is tremendously valuable. We plan to restart travel in April in the US, then do New Zealand for next winter.
Broadly, I’m not sure if I’m any happier in retirement than I was before. That’s not too surprising given the homeostasis of happiness (and the fact that my job didn’t make me unhappy). And it’s also difficult to disentangle the effects of my wife’s grief from the effects of our retirement. While our chosen lifestyle definitely produces a lot of Instagram-worthy highs, it also comes with a lot of stresses, many due to the complete absence of the routines and predictability that accompany a more-settled life. Essentially there is a much higher day-to-day variance in happiness-level than before, but since the average remains largely the same, I think that’s a win. One of the most delightful discoveries recently was when news of sweeping layoffs in tech surfaced; my habitual chest-tightening reflex reaction was to think “oh, shit, is this going to affect me?”, but this time that quickly got replaced with the realization that I never need to worry about my life being derailed by the semi-random whims of an employer ever again! Ahhhhh….glorious!
Ok, money. We’re some of the least-Mustachian bicycle-based nomads out there. We do far more hotel/AirBNB stays and other pampering than most people living a similar lifestyle. Beyond our inherent wussiness, probably the biggest reason is that most people living this life don’t have the financial resources that we do. But I’m also aware that living less-pampered would likely shorten the duration that we’d continue to enjoy this lifestyle, so it’s a tradeoff. Our expenses are highly-variable (we’ve stayed in Maine campgrounds that cost 3 times what a Baja hotel cost) but it seems to have averaged out to about $70k/year. That’s about a 2% WR (of our retirement day NW). We don’t own any real-estate, which, on one hand, simplifies the calculation (all our “housing” expenses are quite transparent, and unlike MMM’s calculation, included in that WR). But since we likely will want to purchase a home at some point, it makes it difficult to know if we “really” have a 2% withdrawal rate right now.
In summary, retirement hasn’t precisely followed my expectations thus far, but that’s probably a good thing, and I definitely have no regrets!
We're going to start rolling again in about a month, we always love when people follow along on
Instagram, or you can read the novel's-worth of words I've written already at
https://www.neilandrett.com (if you thought
this post was long...!)
whale watching (I kissed a whale), swimming with seals
haha, sounds familiar
@JoJo ! Are you one of the people I talked about FIRE with at Ojo de Liebre?! (ok, I didn't actually kiss a whale,
but my wife did! It was literally the entire reason we went to Baja!)
