Celebrating 4 Years of Early Retirement

Isla Mujeres

Today, I celebrate my 4-year anniversary of leaving my CEO gig to retire early!!!

Well, not quite “today” – I’m a few months behind, but I figure it’s better late than never!

So today, we celebrate. WOOT WOOT.

And we’ll look back through the year to review where things are going well and where things can be improved.

So shall we dive in?

Is Early Retirement Worth it?

Why is this even a question? YES, it is worth it!

But it’s also NOT without its stressors, especially considering that life goes on, I’m running WAY too many side hustles, and I have kids. Nuff said right?

Anyways, following the same format of the last two years(Year 1 Review, Year 2 Review, Year 3 Review), I’ll go in-depth here on the same benchmarks:

  • Happiness
  • Health
  • Wealth
  • Work
  • Fun
  • Goals

Early Retirement: Year 4 Review

Alright, it’s Year 4. We’re not messing around anymore. Let’s dig in!

Happiness

I haven’t done a deep dive into my happiness in a long time, so for those who don’t know I do track it daily.

Since early retirement, I’ve found that my stress levels have gone down, and my happiness has gone up. Here is my progress so far:

  • In Year 1, I had a 42% increase in happiness
  • In Year 2, I was still 33.3% happier than before retirement
  • In Year 3, I have been 35% happier than before retirement
  • In Year 4, I had another 17.7% increase over Year 3.

In Years 2 and 3 I hit a bit of a plateau, but in Year 4 I had a pretty dang good 17.7% increase beyond even Year 3.

That’s the weird thing about happiness…sometimes it doesn’t feel like it in the moment, especially when dealing with some of the ups and downs of parenting and life, but when you track your happiness it reveals bigger threads that you can’t see on the daily.

But data can be deceiving. I’m not sure that I am all that much happier this year than last. They are probably fairly comparable…BUT I do believe I have figured out how to have fewer “bad days” and more “good days.”

For me, a big path to improved happiness adjusted for no other changes was simply getting outside more.

I’ve pushed myself to hike more strenuous mountains and bike harder, farther, and longer.

And all this has made me realize that my days are much improved when I’ve put forth some physical effort.

Plus, I can eat more calories (which is a win), and I sleep better as a result.

So while I did deal with some harder parenting moments in 2024 and also a bit of wanderlust, Year 4 was an improvement!

Even so, happiness is always a work in progress.

Health

In Year 4, I continued on the improvements from Year 3 and continued to be even more active.

Steps – Again, I pushed myself harder and for longer with another 5% increase in steps over last year:

Fitness – Since I started tracking my calorie burn with the Wahoo TICKR FIT in Year 3, I continue to push myself harder and harder.

In Year 3 I burned a total of 28,900 calories, but in Year 4 that shot up to 40,971.

It was a combination of biking, hiking, and rucking. Rucking is new for me, but basically, it involves me carrying around 20 lbs of weight in a backpack and walking around my neighborhood.

At first, it was hard as hell and I had to start with only the 10 lb plate, but now I can easily carry 20 lbs without my heart rate getting into Zone 2, so it’s probably time to add some more weight.

Either way, you can see that my fitness focus has been heavy, and like I said before I believe it has helped me to improve my happiness too!

Wealth

Net Worth – Well, our net worth is now back at an all-time high!

Considering how bad it felt at the time to hit the post-retirement low in September of 2022, I think we have come out alright since then:

This year even more so than in other years, I have tried to ignore the markets other than to fill out my Net Worth Spreadsheet every month.

I’ve gotten to the point where I trust in our investment plan enough that I no longer fret about any of the ups and downs.

Download: Easy-to-Use Net Worth Spreadsheet (Template for Google Sheets & Excel)

Expenses – Well, last year expense-wise was a big balloon upward.

Between a combination of our dog passing away, an out-of-network doctor, my son’s surgery, and some big travel plans, we ended up spending 8.7% more than the year before.

It’s funny because last year I was bragging about the ability to supercharge our travel budget, but in the end, everything else ended up causing us some personal inflation anyway!

Download: Expense Tracker Template (For Google Sheets & Excel)

Taxes – For the past several years, we have been able to pay $0 in taxes, this is one of the primary benefits of early retirement.

With low income and keeping capital gains within the 0% bracket, you can achieve this or close every year!

Finally, after 4 years of retirement, I may also be able to start Roth conversions. Fingers crossed!

Work

Writing – Let’s face it. I haven’t written nearly as much as I wanted to on AR.

I put a heavy focus on growing Twitter, and using threads to drive email subscribers and audience for this website.

While that did work, it also took a toll on my time for writing.

As such, I’ve mostly ended up updating/cleaning up older articles and turning some Twitter threads into blog posts.

The results have been that I now have a bigger email list, but less engagement.

My hope for Year 5 is to fix that.

Consulting – Never again! A philosophy since 2001.

Affiliate Website – Man, oh man! As many of you know it’s been quite a ride with this website.

Last year I put a lot of focus into building up an editorial system, but then in September Google launched the Helpful Content Update which just about wiped out every affiliate website on the planet.

So since last September, I’ve had to strip the website back to the barebones of expenses and rebuild from the ground up.

It feels like I’ve done it 4-5 times with this site. What a pain!

But out of the ashes of my affiliate website, I was able to finally build a more passive way to operate the site.

Focusing my efforts on Facebook and Google Ads, I have managed to take all of the great content we created for the site last year and make it work.

The site now turns a profit every month and while it is much smaller than I had initially hoped, it is more consistent and easier to manage.

So overall, this was a blessing in disguise (most crises are).

Time – My goal for Year 4 was to work less.

To that end, I was able to make it happen. Overall, I worked for 30 less days than I did in Year 3. Not too shabby!

But on top of that, I worked less too.

I spent way more time working out. And I also worked for fewer hours when I did work.

So overall, this was a huge win and one I know that I’ll continue with going forward now that I have stabilized my affiliate site and have a more passive system in place.

Fun

Travel – In Year 4 we continued our hardcore commitment to travel.

Last fall break we went on a family camping trip, and then my wife and I celebrated our 15th anniversary on Isla Mujeres in Mexico:

Isla Mujeres, Mexico – Photo Credit: Accidentally Retired

Then this year we took the kids to LEGO Land for spring break and then dropped them off at their Aunt’s house for a few days.

This summer we took our big trip heading to England and Italy for a total of 17 nights which was beyond epic. Here’s just a small taste:

Dolomites
Driving through the Dolomites – Photo Credit: Accidentally Retired

We might be spending a ton on travel, but in my mind I will never get this time back with my kids. It is absolutely worth it!

Hobbies – Probably the big one this year was deciding that I wanted to learn to speak Italian before our trip to Italy.

Never mind the fact that the Dolomites predominately speak German, but I figured Italian was a much easier language to learn, especially having taken some classes in Spanish in high school and college.

So I proceeded to start learning via Duolingo which really is a fun way to learn a language. I religiously spent time on the app every day to keep a streak of 142 days leading up to the trip.

Right before we left the trip, I tried out the 7-day trial of Pimsleur, and though Duolingo is quite good, I wish I had gotten onto Pimsleur earlier because it would have helped me to level up to actually have a real conversion.

So after preparing for nearly 6 months, I was able to have some real simple conversations with Italians, but mostly I think I annoyed people and then they would speak English to me anyway. Ah well. It was a fun add-on hobby this year.

I also continued all my others especially getting out on more hikes and bike rides, and hitting the slopes again.

Books – Another year, and another long list of great books to read.

I think the main reason for this, is that I have simply ditched and stopped reading books that I have lost interest in. I didn’t used to do that, but hey, why suffer through a book?

Here are the best ones I’ve read in the last year.

Non-fiction:

Fiction:

Goals

Finally, I want to circle back to my goals for the last year. Again, I don’t really have any big changes. Everything continues to be relevant and a work in progress:

  1. Continue to manage my finances and grow our portfolio by 10% YoY
  2. Grow the web business to offset 50% of our expenses (while at the same time working fewer hours personally on it)
  3. Manage capital gains and income to pay $0 tax for the year
  4. Improve my relationships all around; family, friends, kids, wife, etc.
  5. Have fun and enjoy running AR. Write what I want, when I want.
  6. Play more golf – 2 times a month
  7. Go on more hikes – 2 times per month
  8. Continue to travel and check off things on my bucket list
  9. More date nights/days!
  10. Be more present and mentally available with everyone

And that’s that.

Thanks to all of you who have been following my journey and who I have connected with along the way! It’s on to Year 5!!!


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