Celebrating 5 Years of Early Retirement

Today, I celebrate my 5-year anniversary of leaving my CEO gig to retire early!!!

Wow. Nuts. Insane.

Just a few words that come to mind.

Of course, my early retirement at times hasn’t FELT like retirement…especially during the many times when I’ve managed to overextend myself with side hustles.

But then I go on a four-week trip, FORGET about everything, let automations do their thing, and all is well again…

And that is exactly what I want to continue to do more of as I head into my 6th year of retirement. I need to get back to the early retirement basics.

I want to remove myself from most of my side hustles, de-stress my life, and spend less time on this computer. That’s the dream right?!?

So let’s take a look back at the past year, the ups, the downs, goals for Year 5 of early retirement, and everything in between:

Is Early Retirement Worth it?

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

However, early retirement is NOT without its stressors…life still goes on, parenting is tiring, and well, I am running too many side husttles!

So while early retirement has surely been better than working my corporate job, it still has its own issues.

Anyways, following the same format of the last two years (Year 1 Review, Year 2 Review, Year 3 Review, Year 4 Review), I’ll go in-depth here on the same benchmarks:

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

Early Retirement: Year 5 Review

Alright, it’s the end of Year 5. What a number –> lets dive in!

Happiness

As you can see, my happiness really shot up as soon as I retired, but then you pretty much settle into early retirement, and things dipped down a bit in Year 2.

However, each year since then, I find myself tweaking things and making day-to-day improvements to my overall happiness.

Again, this doesn’t mean that I don’t have bad days, because I certainly do, but I have found many ways to reduce the amount of bad days while at the same time increasing the amount of good days.

BUT – I don’t really feel any happier than I have ever been. In fact, in many ways, I feel more burned out and tired than ever.

I think the key difference to my happiness has been in the ability to take even more vacations, be available for fun activities when my kids are home from school, and just try to focus on the now.

I still have stress, mostly self-imposed from trying to run side-hustles. However, the results are clear, retirement is good for your happiness. Or at least for mine!

Health

Heading into this year, I have continued to make fitness and health a core priority.

I’ve been hiking more, walking more, lifting weights again, etc.

And you can see it reflected in my steps:

Steps

Another big surge in steps this year for me.

Some of it is largely due to visiting more theme parks, which tends to give that month a big bonus, and we happened to do a lot of that this year. I’m not sure qe can keep up, frankly.

But all in all, it resulted in a 14.39% increase over last year!

Fitness

In year 5, I continued to push myself….I went on more hikes. I started lifting weights again.

And I also worked out harder for longer with an emphasis on Zone 2 training.

My typical workout these days is now up to an hour, and that includes 20 minutes of stretching and weightlifting, followed by 40 minutes on the treadmill at an incline.

I am still using my Wahoo TICKR FIT and managed to burn a total of 81,270 calories in Year 5, which is up 98.36% from Year 4.

I think there is no doubt that I am in the best physical condition I have probably ever been in, and I hope to continue this trend in Year 6.

Wealth

Net Worth – After the tariff scare to the market earlier in the year, we are now back to an all-time high!

During the dip, I took the time to lock in some gains, and as I expected, the markets calmed and everything shot back up.

I usually try not to time the market, but this opportunity, similar to COVID seemed temporary at best, and that turned out to be true.

It’s nice to see this continued growth for us, even as we probably overspend a bit (more on that later), but it also goes to show that once your nest egg is at a certain level, each year’s impact matters less and less.

I track our net worth once a month in my Net Worth Spreadsheet, but otherwise, I don’t fret too much over this any longer.

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

Expenses – Our expenses continue to rise a bit.

Last year, they actually ended up going down about 5% by the end of the calendar year, but this year we’ve spent much more on travel (again), and it will be going back up by probably 5% or so.

I think we’ll see how the year shakes out, but certainly it hasn’t had any huge effect on our overall net worth, and so we can let it slide.

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 to it every year!

Last year, I was finally able to start Roth conversions, and so we did end up paying some tax, but it was minimal. We will definitely do it again this year.

Work

Writing – I continue to want to write more, but run into obstacles.

Most are self-imposed by taking on too much, and I declared earlier in the year that I was done with my affiliate website.

However, selling it has been easier said than done, and after listing it on several of the popular marketplaces, it is still for sale.

The main issue is that AI is completely and utterly changing the website landscape, and so many people who were operating websites and looking to grow, no longer are even in the game.

So long story short, I have again spent too much time on my affiliate site and less on writing, but this is a trend I hope to fix going forward.

Consulting – Never again! A philosophy since 2001.

Affiliate Website – We mostly discussed this with the writing section, but my affiliate website is for sale, and I hope to be divested of it soon.

If I cannot sell it, then my plan is to remove myself from the business more by outsourcing more things to my team.

This was my original intent, however, I also wanted the business to for cash flow purposes, and so I have neglected to spend on things that I know I could handle decently well.

That has been useful to the business, but not to me.

So now that I have operations running smoothly again, I can begin to outsource more, even if that means less profit for me.

I’ve already started the process, and it will help to free up more of my time for things I actually want to be doing, even if I end up owning this website for the foreseable future.

Time – My goal for this past year was to work less, and overall, I somewhat made that happen.

Like I said above, I’ve put more of an emphasis on working out, and so I spend 20% of my time doing just that.

I also have spent less time working on side hustles, even when I do.

I’ve found a nice rhythm, though I am really looking forward to selling off my affiliate website, which takes up 40% of my free time!

If I can get rid of that, I can truly go back to being retired and spend more time pursuing passion projects like AR.

Fun

Travel – It was another great year for travel!

Sensoji Temple, Tokyo
Sensoji Temple – Asakusa District Tokyo, Japan

Last fall, we spent my kids’ fall break at Disneyland, which was awesome.

And after a long 4-month break from traveling anywhere, we then went to Japan for spring break on a 14-day trip (which also included Tokyo Disneyland and DisneySea).

It was truly a wonderful trip and everyone in my family loved Japan from the food to the people to the sights and can’t wait to go back.

Finally, this summer, we took the whole month of July to get out of the desert heat and get out to the beach in Carlsbad, California.

It was truly a blessing to sit on our patio, right across from the ocean. Highly recommend!

Carlsbad - Tamarack Beach Sunset
Carlsbad – Tamarack Beach Sunset

I think it definitely will be something we do every couple of years from here on out!

So overall, it’s been a great travel year, and we look forward to continuing in that tradition next year.

Hobbies – This year was another year in which I spend far too much time on Duolingo and Pimsleur.

Since last August, I have been busy trying to learn Japanese.

Honestly, I can’t say it helped a ton on our trip. Japanese was much harder than learning Italian, and so I was able to communicate a little in the very few situations in which it was needed, but mostly just stuck to the easy-to-remember phrases.

I really enjoy learning languages, but I probably need to do something a little more intensive than Duolingo or Pimsleur.

Otherwise, this year I hiked a ton, and probably did more puzzles than ever this year.

I also recently managed to get hooked on The New York Times’ games and greatly enjoy Wordle, Connections, The Mini, and Strands.

Books – I continue to read a ton of fiction, mostly Brandon Sanderson, as I was immersed in The Stormlight Archives, which were great, but the longest ass books I’ve ever read, haha.

After finishing that series, I figured I would give Mistborn a try, and honestly, I like that even better. It follows fewer characters and therefore, moves more quickly.

Here is what I’ve been reading over the last year:

Non-fiction:

Fiction:

Goals

Finally, I want to circle back to my goals for the next year.

I’ve made a few adjustments to last year’s, but we mostly remain the same:

  1. Continue to manage my finances and grow our portfolio by 10% YoY
  2. Sell my affiliate website and spend more time relaxing
  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 – 1 time a month
  7. Go on more hikes – 4-6 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 with whom I have connected along the way! It’s on to Year 6!!!

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