Life in Early Retirement

An Exciting Net Worth Milestone and Some Other Ramblings

An Exciting Net Worth Milestone and Some Other Ramblings

10 Comments / Life in Early Retirement, Blogging, Financial Independence / Retire Early (FIRE), General Thoughts, Investments, Road Trip, Travel and Vacation / /

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 […]

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The Self-Hosting Spark: How Ditching Google Reignited My Tech Obsession

The Self-Hosting Spark: How Ditching Google Reignited My Tech Obsession

9 Comments / Life in Early Retirement, Financial Independence / Retire Early (FIRE), General Thoughts, Here's Why I'm Liking..., Motivation, Product and Service Reviews / /

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

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The 3 Scenes of the Superman Movie I Made It Into

The 3 Scenes of the Superman Movie I Made It Into

4 Comments / Life in Early Retirement, General Thoughts / /

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,

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

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

12 Comments / Travel and Vacation, Life in Early Retirement / /

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

10 Years of Blogging… Time for a Lighter Rhythm

26 Comments / Blogging, Financial Independence / Retire Early (FIRE), General Thoughts, Life in Early Retirement / /

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

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 / /

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

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

16 Comments / Travel and Vacation, Financial Independence / Retire Early (FIRE), Life in Early Retirement, Spending / /

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

Cruise Ship Internet Sharing: How I Bypassed the Hotspot Restriction

28 Comments / Travel and Vacation, Life in Early Retirement / /

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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My 10-Day Detox Cleanse… Was It Worthwhile?

My 10-Day Detox Cleanse… Was It Worthwhile?

14 Comments / Health and Fitness, Life in Early Retirement / /

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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2 Helpful Books That Are Great in Completely Different Ways

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 / /

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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