Celebrating 6 Years of Early Retirement

Today, I celebrate my 6-year anniversary of leaving my CEO gig to retire early!!!

Another year of early retirement has flown by.

I am still shocked that we are at 6 years. My kids can barely even remember me working in an office or running a company.

So it’s strange that they won’t even remember that, even though it was such a large part of my world for so long.

And yet, I don’t regret ANYTHING.

I’ve been able to travel so much more over the past 6 years than I would have if I were working.

And more importantly, I’ve been able to focus on my health by working out more and going out on solo hikes at least once a week.

Of course it is not all seamless, and I still have plenty of things to keep me busy, investments to maintain, and an affiliate website to run, plus new side projects I’ve taken on….But overall I can’t complain one bit!

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 even after another year, I am running too many side hustles!

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, Year 5 Review), I’ll go in-depth here on the same benchmarks:

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

Early Retirement: Year 6 Review

Alright, it’s the end of Year 6. What a number –> let’s 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 number of bad days while at the same time increasing the number of good days.

YET – I don’t really feel any happier than I have ever been. In fact, in many ways, I feel just as burned out sometimes and as tired as before. Life tends to do that to you.

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

I still have stress, mostly self-imposed from trying to run side-hustles or support my family… however, the results are clear: retirement is good for your happiness. Or at least for mine!

Health

I continue to try to make fitness and health a core priority. No matter what I do in a given day, I try to build my day around my physical fitness.

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

And you can see it reflected in my steps:

Steps

This year it was a small surge in steps.

But I think I’ve tapped out what I can reasonably do without moving to a more walkable city or pushing myself even more.

All in all, I am happy where I am and will continue to aim for around 10K steps a day.

Side note: I also recently got a Fitbit Air for my birthday to track sleep and more accurately track steps, so we will see how that impacts things here too!

Fitness

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

In year 6, I simply continued doing what I was already doing.

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.

My new Fitbit Air works great at tracking my heart rate all day and takes the place of my Wahoo FIT tracker that kept on breaking on me.

One thing that does need improvement with my fitness is my weight/body fat %. I definitely have built up more muscle, but also have been eating a bit more as a result of more intense workouts and have also gained some fat.

My goal for year 6 is to eat slightly healthier and cut back on the extra pounds.

Wealth

Net Worth – Well, again we’ve had a little bit of a wild ride so far this year, but remain well up at the moment!

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.

If the market has another year or two of growth, I think most of our sequence-of-return risk will be mitigated. One can only hope!

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

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Expenses – Similar to last year, our expenses continue to rise a bit.

This year it is due to Health Insurance rates that went up 42%, combined with general inflation on groceries and other items, and we are looking to be about 6% increased over last year.

We also spent a lot on travel this year, though in looking at last year’s spend I think we end up having spent more in Year 5 than in Year 6 on it.

And yet even with expenses on the rise, our net worth has kept up with it and helped to mitigate the risk here.

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.

This year I was able to continue conversions, but we somehow managed to get a $2,600 refund. I’ll take it!

Work

Writing– I started the year by committing to write a little every day, even just a few paragraphs to try to get back into the groove.

In that process, I started to compile all of my writings from AR into a book. That is still a work in progress and something I will continue to work on.

I also took some time to write a sort of autobiography, but deemed that not worth it after feeling like I had too little to write about and not enough life lived.

So I spent the first two months of the year doing a lot of that before getting sucked into AI vibe coding. More on that below, but regardless, I continue to want to write more, but run into more self-imposed obstacles and, frankly, too much to do!

Right now, actions do speak louder than words, eh?

Consulting – Never again! A philosophy since 2001.

Affiliate Website – After 8 months of listing my affiliate site for sale, I took it off the market in January.

There were just too many low-ball offers, and the site wasn’t headed in the right direction to make it worth my while.

As part of the sales process, I started outsourcing much more of the day-to-day, so I have a person running Facebook, another running Pinterest, and another editing videos.

That has made it much easier for me to leave it on autopilot and improve the technical infrastructure.

I also wanted to figure out how to leverage AI better, and I eventually downloaded Claude and was blown away by how capable it is.

So I have spent the last 4-5 months working with Claude Code on various projects.

It is pretty amazing what Claude Code can do now, you can check out an example here, and I’ve launched a few new products that I have helped the affiliate site.

Of course, this year revenue and profit have been much better than last year due to a bit of luck, with website-specific profit up 50% over last year.

This should help me better position myself to sell in the future, but in the meantime I am enjoying more of a hands-off approach, using Claude code as my engineering staff, and may just continue to own and operate and enjoy the cash flow.

Time – Last year my goal was to work less, and in Year 6 I pretty much kept that in place.

I still theoretically would like to do less, but I have found myself enjoying vibe coding and learning Claude Code, and so I am currently following wherever that leads!

Either way, I still spend about 20% of my time working in some manner on a commercial project or this site, another 10% working on pure personal projects like booking vacations or household chores, and another 20% working out.

The remaining 50% is for life.

It certainly feels like I work full-time sometimes, but the reality is that we travel about 50-60 days a year, plus I never work on anything when my kids have days off from school, so it really is more of a part-time effort at the moment.

Fun

Travel – It was another great year for travel!

Last year we had an amazing travel year between Japan and spending part of the summer in Carlsbad.

In the fall, we went camping at the Grand Canyon, then my wife and I took an anniversary trip to Temecula.

In the spring, we went to Lake Powell and then Moab to visit Arches and Canyonlands. We stayed at UnderCanvas in Lake Powell, which was badass. Highly recommend!.

We were blown away by both areas, but specifically really enjoyed Lake Powell and Horseshoe Bend.

Then this summer we decided to go to New York, Paris, and Brussels. I was itching to use my AMEX points for a Business Class or Premium Economy redemption.

While our trip was great, traveling to all those big cities in the summer was a bad idea in terms of weather. It was far too hot, and coming from Arizona, you want to escape the summer heat, NOT travel to it.

So great trip, but bad time of year. My kids really loved New York though, and we enjoyed our short time in Brussels…but next year we are going to opt for cold-weather climates!

Hobbies – Last year I burnt myself out on language learning, so I haven’t done any of that in a year.

For a long time I was hooked on The New York Times’ games and greatly enjoy Wordle, Connections, The Mini, and Strands.

But at some point I dropped that altogether and have just focused on the basics.

I have been hiking as much as I can, reading every day, and doing puzzles or LEGO builds every few months.

Books – I really got into the podcast Founders in the past 8 months or so and have listened to the last 5 years or so of content, and that has led me to read some really amazing books in the last year:

• Zero to One by Peter Thiel (10/10)
• Liftoff by Eric Berger (9.5/10)
• George Lucas: A Life by Brian Jay Jones (9/10)
• Disney’s Land by Robert Snow (8/10)
• On Writing by Stephen King (8/10)
• The Creative Act by Rick Rubin (7/10)
• Churchill by Paul Johnson (7/10)
• Poor Charlie’s Almanack by Charles T. Munger (7/10)
• A Man for All Markets by Ed Thorp (7/10)
• Let My People Go Surfing by Yvon Chouinard (7/10)

I also continue to read a good amount of fiction, mostly Brandon Sanderson, with The Mistborn Trilogy and now a few other books like Elantra and Warbreaker.

This summer I have been digging into Shogun, which has been fantastic, and enjoying the Japanese samurai world of the 1500s. I am now nearly finished with Shogun Part II and have been watching the first season of the TV show:

• Shogun by James Clavell (9.5/10)
• Warbreaker by Brandon Sanderson (9/10)
• Elantris by Brandon Sanderson (8/10)

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. Build and manage fun side projects leveraging AI/Claude
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. Go on more hikes – 4-6 times per month
7. Continue to travel and check off things on my bucket list
8. More date nights/days!
9. 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 7!!!