I had an interesting conversation in my head today. I was wrapping up some things I was working on and thought, “Wow, that’s really starting to fall into place… we’re pretty lucky.” Then I started thinking, “Ya know, the far majority of the time, things consistently do fall into place with what we’re doing.” Then that really got my mind going – is it that we really are just lucky, or is it something else? And that’s when my brain […]
Well, our big Europe trip is officially over… and it was truly awesome. We spent time in a ton of cities and countries throughout, but somehow we still have so many more we want to visit! Nothing’s ever perfect, but this trip was pretty darn close, and it checked all the boxes of a fantastic experience for our first time on the continent. All the cards just seemed to fall into place, making for an amazing time. With this being
How Our 38-Day Europe Trip Took an Unexpected Turn (And Why It Was the Best Part) Read More »
It’s been a few weeks since my last post. I think I’m starting to get into a nice cadence that I’m enjoying a little more. I still really love writing for Route to Retire, but after 10 years, I decided earlier this year that it was time for a lighter rhythm. It didn’t make sense to keep holding myself to some self-imposed, arbitrary schedule, especially with all the other fun things I’ve been keeping myself busy with lately. So although
An Exciting Net Worth Milestone and Some Other Ramblings Read More »
I’ve been talking about a project that I’ve been working on for several months now, which has kept me pretty busy. It’s time I fill you in that it’s been all about self-hosting (I’ll explain that soon). What was not expected was how this project sparked a renewed interest in technology for me. The feeling of fun I’ve had with this stuff hasn’t been there since the early days of my IT career, which started back in 1999. Yeah, I’m
The Self-Hosting Spark: How Ditching Google Reignited My Tech Obsession Read More »
Last summer, I wrote the post “Lights, Camera, Exhaustion: I Worked as a Movie Extra for 6 Grueling Yet Awesome Days” about the opportunity I had to be an extra in a movie. It was so cool to get the chance to do this and see how the sausage is made. It was also grueling with a lot of long days in the hot sun. At the time, I wasn’t allowed to reveal the movie that they were filming. However,
The 3 Scenes of the Superman Movie I Made It Into Read More »
Updated: 08/27/25 We’re closing in on the end of my 7th year of early retirement. I was fortunate enough to run my last day on the hamster wheel on December 31, 2018. At the time, I had a plan and was confident it would work (though there’s always that tiny bit of self-doubt!). Fortunately, it’s worked better than we could have expected, thanks in part to retiring at a time when the stock market has continued to climb with only
Long-time readers know that we’ve been playing the credit cards travel rewards game for several years now. The more we learn how to play the game more efficiently, the further the rewards have taken us. Without a doubt, credit card travel rewards have easily saved us tens of thousands of dollars on travel and helped us vacation in some amazing places. Regardless, we’re still pretty judicious about which cards we apply for. Just because a bonus is good, if it
Why I Got the Chase Sapphire Reserve… Even With Its $795 Fee Read More »
Haha, one of the AI tools helped me generate that title about our Alaska Cruise, and I chuckled when I saw it, so I went with it! 🙂 Anyway, it’s been a long time, friends! I haven’t written a post for a couple of months now. I said I was going to scale back and, boy, did I! I’ve been super busy with a bunch of things (travel included), so it was nice not putting pressure on myself, feeling obligated
Our Alaska Cruise Was Incredible… But One Thing Left Me Cold Read More »
10 years ago, on May 6, 2015, I published my first blog post (Are You Ready to Retire Early?). At just over 800 words, it was definitely not as long-winded as I tend to be nowadays! 😂 It wasn’t much – just a sort of intro as I tried to figure out what I wanted my blogging life to be about. Route to Retire has changed a lot since then (hopefully for the better!) and it’s funny to read my
I was trying to decide what to focus on in this post because I’ve had several random thoughts spending some quality time in my mind lately. Sometimes my brain just has stuff bouncing all over the place. So I decided, why not just touch on a bunch of them? So here we are with a mish-mosh of random thoughts all crammed into one delightful mess of a blog post! Between the action-packed stock market real-life movie so many of us
A Fun Collection of Random Thoughts You Didn’t Ask For Read More »
