6 Months from Retirement, or: When Will We See These Ornaments Again?
My beautiful nephew is at the age where every discussion ends with a vote: “Raise your hand if you want to get in the hot tub tonight!" Raise your hand if you want an ice cream sandwich! Raise your hand if you want to go on a walk!”
First of all, why do children do this? Is this really as universal as it seems? Second of all, let’s take a vote- raise your hand if your Christmas ornaments are also hilariously wonky and chock-full of memories!
Mine too. (Isn’t it great?)
It’s officially holiday season. I’ve always loved gathering the boxes marked “xmas” from the garage and unloading them all over the living room floor. Our tree, and all of the ornaments on it, always make me laugh- the one-eyed red plastic mouse, the college ornament my mom got me with the incorrect graduation date, the aluminum foil “bell” that I made in elementary school.
It’s all priceless.
What struck me this year as we drank our toddies and decorated the tree was this: if all goes to plan, we won’t be doing this in our own house next year.
We won’t even HAVE a house next year.
After this holiday season, our ornaments will get packed up especially carefully because we won’t know when we will put them up again. Our plan is to start traveling in July- and to keep traveling until we decide we don’t want to anymore, or until something happens that causes us to stop.
Who knows how many years that will be?
What excites me about this as it relates to the holidays, is that our current plan also involves us spending a month in the places where each of our families live. In November next year, we’ll be in Chicago near Ryan’s family. In December, we’ll be in Tennessee with mine.
This seems like an amazing trade off, right? And the red one-eyed mouse will keep.
What We’ve Done & Learned in the Last Month
November was a month of celebrations and of local turmoil and injustice. (You can’t have the light without the shadow, right?)
Ryan turned 50. Wowza! We celebrated with close friends and rekindled some old friendships, which is a real gift. This means that he is now officially able to take his pension. What a milestone!
We also traveled to TN to spend Thanskgiving with my family. Eastern TN is a beautiful, natural place and we loved seeing everyone and going on long hikes in the woods.
It must be said too that Border Patrol invaded our city in November, wreaking havoc on Charlotte’s immigrant population and sowing a lot of fear. I was and continue to be so proud of how Charlotte came together to support our neighbors- it was beautiful to be a part of and witness the myriad of ways organizations and people mobilized so quickly.
Where Our Finances Stand Currently
I mentioned in last month’s post that the percentages were getting a bit ridiculous, so instead of reporting that we are 97 or 98% of the way to our full FIRE number, I’ll just say this: we are very close. In fact, we could hit our FIRE number before I write the next blog post. What could also happen is a drop in stock market- who knows!
Needless to say, it’s exciting times when something we’ve been working hard at attaining for over six years is this close. We’ll need to figure out something to do to celebrate.
Next Steps
December is a time for being with friends and family, and so far we’ve been doing just that. We head to Chicago for the holidays to spend time with Ryan’s family and then my folks will drive through for a weekend before NYE. It has always felt like things would really kick into high gear re: finalizing early retirement in January/February, so stay tuned. It’s getting exciting, friends!
Thanks for being here. See you next month!