A new friend brought up the idea of early retirement!

[Genevieve]

I've recently moved to Houston, and so I've been doing my best to make new friends.

Recently, I hung out with a new friend and she brought up the idea of early retirement... to me! I didn't mention it! How AWESOME is that?

She said, "So have you heard of this early retirement idea? I recently heard of it." She mentioned two blogs I read, the Billfold and Frugalwoods. And I was all "YES!!!!!"

I knew that the two of them (her and her husband) were frugal. Here were the signs:
- We mentioned we were getting a new phone for my husband, but were waiting on it to come in since we had ordered a pay as you go phone. Her husband said they both had Page Plus.
- We talked about buying used furniture on Craigslist
- We were hanging out a board game night.
- We both only own one car in this car obsessed city. The other partner takes the bus.
- Their one car... a hatchback... bought on Craigslist!
- When we came over for a dinner party, they had a freezer for bulk storage in their kitchen.
- They said something about Costco. I suggested that my new friend and I make a day of it and check out the prices right before their membership expired. Frugal friend fun! Future proposed day out is to go thrift store shopping.

So I plainly made my frugal ways clear, and it lead to a great conversation.

[Adventine]

Nice! It's always great to find another Mustachian in the wild.

[powersuitrecall]

I keep on dropping hints with friends and co-workers: "Man our vacation was great.  All we did was hang out at home and visited parks for 2 weeks. Wouldn't it be great to never have to go back to work?", and "I have this friend who quit his IT gig and now is building a cabin on a huge piece of land because he's FI".  No bites.  Ah well.  Eventually we'll land one.

Congrats Genevieve - you might even push each other and get to RE even earlier (REE?).  So cool.

[Retired To Win]

Nice! It's always great to find another Mustachian in the wild.

It's certainly a great thing to be able to talk to and brainstorm ideas with people who are on the same page as one is.  Genevieve is lucky to have found that couple.  For most of the rest of us, there's still this Forum.  It helps.

[mikefixac]

I'm a big fan of Fruglewoods. So, I'm curious, did you mention MMM?

It was ERE (Early Retirement Extreme) that changed the way I look at life. Also, I'm a big fan of the Boglehead forum.

[Genevieve]

As you can tell, I'm super excited to have found someone else out there that is open to the idea of early retirement! I didn't mention the MMM forum yet, but there will be many more times to bring it up.

We talked about how 1) we don't want to live in the woods - personal preference :) and 2) we like the bit about FI, but aren't sure if we'll actually do the RE bit.

She's in med school doing stuff she loves, so she doesn't really plan to retire early. But they are already saving ~50% of their income, so they will be FI soon enough.

I want to get paid for work I enjoy so much that I don't want to quit, but still have the freedom of FI so I can leave if I ever change my mind. I used to be really into the idea of retiring early before I quit my previous terrible job. But I decided I wasn't making enough to continue to same line of work that I hated all the way until we crossed the finish line. With enjoyable work, the pressure to retire early is off.

I'm lucky that my sister is really into frugality/personal finance as well so I have someone other than my husband to brainstorm with.