Route to Retire ...the path to financial independence

Why I Got the Chase Sapphire Reserve… Even With Its $795 Fee

4 Comments / Product and Service Reviews, Here's Why I'm Liking..., Saving, Spending, Travel and Vacation / Jim @ Route To Retire / July 11, 2025

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 […]

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Our Alaska Cruise Was Incredible… But One Thing Left Me Cold

8 Comments / Travel and Vacation, Life in Early Retirement / Jim @ Route To Retire / July 10, 2025

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

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10 Years of Blogging… Time for a Lighter Rhythm

26 Comments / Blogging, Financial Independence / Retire Early (FIRE), General Thoughts, Life in Early Retirement / Jim @ Route To Retire / May 6, 2025

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

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A Fun Collection of Random Thoughts You Didn’t Ask For

14 Comments / General Thoughts, Health and Fitness, Kids, Life in Early Retirement, Spending, Taxes and Financial Planning, Travel and Vacation / Jim @ Route To Retire / April 22, 2025

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

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We Paid $3,200 for an Incredible $25K Europe Trip… Here’s How We Did It

14 Comments / Travel and Vacation, Financial Independence / Retire Early (FIRE), Life in Early Retirement, Spending / Jim @ Route To Retire / April 8, 2025

I’ve been excited to tell you the details of our planned Europe trip for a while now. But I wanted to wait until we had the framework all planned out. We now have 38 nights of fun booked for this fall. This includes flights, lodging, cruises, and a first-class train ride. Now that everything’s in place, I did the math on what this would have cost if we had just booked everything through normal channels (Priceline, Booking.com, airline and cruise

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Cruise Ship Internet Sharing: How I Bypassed the Hotspot Restriction

22 Comments / Travel and Vacation, Life in Early Retirement / Jim @ Route To Retire / March 25, 2025

Another day, another cruise. 🙂 Our year of travel continues! We just got back from another Caribbean cruise. This was a 7-night vacation on MSC Cruises and we were fortunate to be joined by some friends this time. We also had two “free” cabins through the casino from our quest to gain free cruises last year, so we hooked up our Panama friends with one of them. See, I can be nice sometimes! It was a great cruise and we

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Hunting for the Great Deal vs Just Working a Little More

10 Comments / Financial Independence / Retire Early (FIRE), Spending, Travel and Vacation / Jim @ Route To Retire / March 11, 2025

I love a great deal. I imagine most people are like that regardless of how much or how little money they have. There’s something satisfying about the whole idea of getting a bargain – almost as if you somehow won “the game” (whatever that game is). But in most cases, scoring a great deal (particularly online) involves some effort on your part. And sometimes getting that great deal can involve a lot of time and effort. Unfortunately, at times, putting

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My 10-Day Detox Cleanse… Was It Worthwhile?

14 Comments / Health and Fitness, Life in Early Retirement / Jim @ Route To Retire / February 25, 2025

A detox cleanse?? What is this, some sort of health blog now?! Nah, that’s only a small portion of what I like to talk about. However, one of the things I continue to strive for is to better myself. And with that comes improving my health, which really isn’t much fun, to be honest. Who are these people who enjoy working out and eating all the right foods?! Nonetheless, my goal is to live a long and healthy life, and

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The Secret to Scoring the Cheapest Southwest Flights

8 Comments / Travel and Vacation, Saving, Spending / Jim @ Route To Retire / February 11, 2025

Do you believe that decades ago, I used to hate Southwest Airlines? I thought it was just a mess of an airline and way too chaotic. Fast forward to the past decade and it’s my preferred airline to fly. I love how easy it is to cancel or change your flight. I love that they’re still not charging for checked bags (even though we only do carry-on bags nowadays). I love how the flight attendants generally try to put on

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2 Helpful Books That Are Great in Completely Different Ways

Leave a Comment / Here's Why I'm Liking..., Education, Financial Independence / Retire Early (FIRE), General Thoughts, Health and Fitness, Life in Early Retirement, Motivation, Product and Service Reviews / Jim @ Route To Retire / January 28, 2025

I’ve always loved reading ever since I was a kid. I actually had a relatively big toy box that I kept in my bedroom closet. It was obviously meant for storing lots of toys, but I filled it completely with nothing books instead. I read so many books all the time and loved it. Yeah, I’m a nerd, but who cares? Over time though, life got in the way. Once I got to high school and college, reading what I

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