Travel and Vacation

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

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

Leave a Comment / Product and Service Reviews, Here's Why I'm Liking..., Saving, Spending, Travel and Vacation / /

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

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

6 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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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

14 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

22 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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Hunting for the Great Deal vs Just Working a Little More

Hunting for the Great Deal vs Just Working a Little More

10 Comments / Financial Independence / Retire Early (FIRE), Spending, Travel and Vacation / /

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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The Secret to Scoring the Cheapest Southwest Flights

The Secret to Scoring the Cheapest Southwest Flights

8 Comments / Travel and Vacation, Saving, Spending / /

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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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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