Retired in 2013 at age 33. Life is Good.
Now that we’re back in Raleigh I’m planning on releasing a more regular stream of trip reports from our nine week summer vacation in Europe. After we spent five nights in Lisbon, Portugal, we took a short turboprop flight to our second destination of Malaga, Spain for a quick two night stay. What started out in the planning stages of the trip as a pit stop in Malaga on the way to Granada turned out to be a surprisingly interesting city to spend a few days.
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The Root of Good family started its grand nine week European vacation with five days in Lisbon, Portugal. After a short flight from Raleigh, Lisbon is an easy 7.5 hour overnight flight from Washington, D.C., so our transatlantic flight to Europe was relatively painless. We arrived at 10:30 in the morning the next day. After an arduous journey through the immigration lines, we left the airport by metro for a quick ride to our first (of fourteen) Airbnb apartments that would serve as our homes away from home for the next nine weeks in Europe.
To battle jet lag, I followed the advice to stay awake the whole day of our arrival and DON’T take a nap. We dropped our bags at the airbnb apartment, hooked up to wifi, unpacked a bit, and did a quick inventory of necessities (“Do we have soap, shampoo, conditioner, and breakfast for tomorrow?”), and headed out for an afternoon of exploring downtown Lisbon so we would be forced to stay awake. Easier said than done, we had an overly exhausted five year old that fell asleep on the metro ride back to our apartment, and it’s the first time I’ve nearly fallen asleep while standing up (waiting for the metro).
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This month’s financial update comes to you from Ljubljana, Slovenia – an undiscovered gem in Europe. We are about to head to Lake Bled, Slovenia for some hiking, lake-lounging, and more relaxing. After that we’re on to Austria, Germany, and the Czech Republic for the next month before ending our vacation in Amsterdam. It’s hard to believe we are almost half way through our nine week summer vacation in Europe!
June was another great month financially. Net worth increased $14,000 to $1,842,000. Income was very strong at $7,793 during June, while expenses remained moderate at $2,629. Such a great feeling to watch your assets continue to grow for you while you’re on the other side of the world exploring and relaxing!
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In contrast to early retirement modeling that looks for all the worst cases and failure modes, our actual life the past almost four years illustrates that good things can offset the bad events in life.
Financial planning for early retirement is pretty straightforward. Figure out how much you plan on spending in early retirement then save up till you have between 25 and 33 times your annual expenses in your investment portfolio. We initially planned on spending $32,000 per year plus a large lump sum for the three kids’ college tuition. Using the 33x multiplier (which represents a 3% withdrawal rate), that means we needed $1,056,000 plus another $100,000 to cover tuition, or roughly $1,150,000 in total investments. That’s about what we started with four years ago but now we have a lot more.
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The Root of Good family is ramping up for an epic adventure across Europe during the summer of 2017. The five of us will spend nine weeks traversing an all new (to us) continent by train, plane, bus, car, and foot.
We really struggled to narrow down the itinerary to something feasible for a family with three young children. As a result this trip will NOT include London nor Paris nor a dozen other cities we would have loved to visit. What we will see are museums, parks, castles, palaces, cathedrals, caves, mountains, seas, rivers, lakes, and canyons scattered about the rest of western and central Europe.
Many will view this as a “trip of a lifetime” or a “dream trip” but I choose to view this as just another cool vacation in a series of vacations we have already taken and will continue to take.
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What’s the best way to fight off winter’s chill? Spend a week cruising the Caribbean of course! Right before Christmas the Root of Good family did exactly that. I wanted to share a few pictures from our eight day, seven night cruise aboard the MSC Divina sailing out of Miami, Florida.
After two lazy days at sea, we reached the island of St. Maarten where we watched airplanes zip by just feet off the beach. The next day we docked in San Juan, Puerto Rico where we explored the city and toured the Castillo San Cristobal fort. Then we enjoyed another relaxing day at sea before we reached Nassau, Bahamas. We didn’t get off the boat in Nassau since we seem to visit the island on every cruise we take. Relaxing on the ship while everyone was on shore proved to be the perfect way to spend the last full day of our vacation.
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The Root of Good family made it back from our 3.5 week road trip a couple weeks ago. Here’s an after action battle report on our trip including highlights from all the places we visited plus a complete cost breakdown of our trip budget. Skip to the end for some travel hacking tips to save big bucks on your next epic vacation!
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I dropped some hints about our big summer plans in my last post, and now it’s time to make it official! We’re going on an almost month long road trip to Canada by way of Kentucky and Michigan. For those following along with my early retirement journey for the past few years, you might be experiencing deja vu because doesn’t a month long road trip to Canada sound familiar?
You aren’t experiencing deja vu. In 2014 we did set out on what was supposed to be a month long road trip to Canada that turned into a two and a half week road trip when we came home early. The exhaustion that comes from superintending a rambunctious two year old combined with a disappointingly dirty Airbnb apartment rental persuaded us that it was time to return back home to Raleigh for some true R and R.
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I’m all out money saving cruise tips, so here’s a picture post of the different types of food you can enjoy on board.
We thought the food was pretty good, but not everyone agrees. The food varies from cruise line to cruise line, ship to ship, restaurant to restaurant, and even night to night. It’s possible we’ve had a string of good luck with the food on the five cruises we have taken so far.
We really enjoy the variety of dishes because we get to experience things we don’t routinely cook at home.
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This is part three of my series on cruise vacations. In my first post on cruising I talked about the basics of cruising. In the second post, I showed how to get the best deals when booking a cruise.
In this post I want to cover other ways to save money on cruises while on board and while traveling from your home to the cruise terminal.
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