Life in Early Retirement

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

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

Leave a Comment / 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

12 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

18 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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3 Powerful Keys to Living a Healthier, Wealthier, Happier Life

3 Powerful Keys to Living a Healthier, Wealthier, Happier Life

8 Comments / Motivation, Financial Independence / Retire Early (FIRE), Health and Fitness, Life in Early Retirement, Taxes and Financial Planning, Travel and Vacation / /

In 2018, we finally told our family and friends that we were moving to Boquete, Panama in 2019. That was a mixed bag of support and in some cases a big old dumpster fire. Obviously, there was some sadness that we were moving away to another country. But what was more interesting was that a lot of the feedback we got was about how dangerous it would be with drug cartels, human trafficking, and excessive violence. Here’s a little secret…

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6 Years of Early Retirement: What I've Learned About Life, Money, and Happiness

6 Years of Early Retirement: What I’ve Learned About Life, Money, and Happiness

16 Comments / Life in Early Retirement, Blogging, Financial Independence / Retire Early (FIRE), General Thoughts, Health and Fitness, Motivation, Panama, Spending, Travel and Vacation / /

Today is the anniversary of my last day of work six years ago. At the end of the workday on December 31, 2018, I became free in a sense. That was the day my early retirement began. If you’ve dreamed about early retirement for a while like I did leading up to this, there’s a little surprise in store that you might not know… It’s not going to be exactly the way you envisioned. That’s because when we daydream or

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Traveling the World: 121 Days, 9 Big Adventures, and 6 Cruises Throughout the Globe

Traveling the World: 121 Days, 9 Big Adventures, and 6 Cruises Throughout the Globe

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

Things certainly have escalated quickly at the Route to Retire household! We started with the plan to take a couple of vacations over the next year and suddenly we’re traveling the world for 121 days! We seem to have this problem – almost a sickness – where we get an idea and tend to go overboard with it. Instead of visiting the country of Panama for a month or two, we lived there for three years (so worth it!)! The

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Free Cruises with Just a Little Leg Work… Living Like Rock Stars!

Free Cruises with Just a Little Leg Work… Living Like Rock Stars!

14 Comments / Travel and Vacation, Life in Early Retirement, Saving, Spending / /

Back in May, I wrote a post called The Next Mission… Free Cruises Through Casino Status Matches! It was all about how we stumbled upon a way to get free cruises and what we planned to do to make it happen. Well, here we are several months later and I realized it’s time to update you on how it’s going and what’s next. It’s actually been a cool little adventure figuring out what we need to do and then taking

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Beating Seasonal Depression: 4 Simple Yet Powerful Strategies I'm Using This Winter

Beating Seasonal Depression: 4 Simple Yet Powerful Strategies I’m Using This Winter

26 Comments / Health and Fitness, General Thoughts, Life in Early Retirement, Travel and Vacation / /

Ugh, summer’s officially over. I do love the fall here in Ohio – the changing of the colors makes everything beautiful outside. However, that means it’s time for the weather to begin shifting, which always gives me that looming feeling that winter is right around the corner. And that leads to the winter blues…. seasonal depression… or the more technical term, seasonal affective disorder (SAD). Whatever you want to call it, I’ve learned that I have an extremely hard time

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