When I first started writing this blog, I asked myself what does early retirement mean to me? It has different meanings depending who you ask. In my About page I wrote that early retirement doesn’t mean that I stop working. Rather it allows me to explore other opportunities without causing a financial burden to myself and my family. One amazing accomplishment is that we are half way there to achieving early retirement.

As the title of this post states, my family and I are half way there. My wife achieved early retirement! She quit her federal job and we are half way there. You might be asking why give up a stable federal job? As I wrote in the About page, one of the goals my wife any I have is to get away from the traditional 9 to 5 job but still continue to work other ways. I’m going to go over what some of the questions, concerns, workarounds, and reasons how we ultimately came to this decision.

It’s A Family Decision

If you have a family, early retirement is not a solo decision. It is a family decision. My wife wouldn’t have considered this unless we had things in place. It was a tough and scary decision but everything lined up for us. Consider all factors, all perspectives, and from all angles. If your children are old enough to understand, ask them also. We included our kids and they were very supportive.

Set Realistic Goals

We knew that to even consider early retirement, we needed to ensure that we would be ok financially. We set goals early to make this happen like investing in real estate, investing in 401K retirement accounts, investing in the stock market, and continually watch our spending. Keep in mind that these do not happen overnight. These are long term goals. We’ve been able to position ourselves to have that financial confidence.

Find Other Income Sources

Like I stated above, early retirement for us isn’t about sitting at home. My wife explored other income sources over the past couple of years, one of which is affiliated marketing. She loves doing this and is passionate about it. One of the keys to early retirement is to be able to sustain yourself with other income sources. Start now to build one. It’s not easy and it’s going to take time and effort. Trust me, my wife used to get 4 or 5 hours of sleep a night. But her hard work allowed her to reach early retirement and she’s now doing something she loves.

Will We Make Enough Income

A question we had before we decided for her to retire early is will we make enough income going from a duel income family to one. With her affiliated marketing business, it is producing income so we weren’t going from 2 incomes to 1. We also trained ourselves to be financially savvy and living within our means.  This has helped us quite a bit and allowed us this opportunity. If the affiliated marketing grows more, that helps create more income.

No More Retirement Contributions

Without a full time position, yes we do lose any future retirement contributions. We did consider this however it’s ok. My wife has been contributing to retirement for a number of years. I’m still debating whether to roll it over into a Rollover IRA or keep it where it’s at. TBD.

We Still Have Health Insurance

My wife was our primary health carrier however this was considered a life changing event and I was able to enroll in health insurance through my employer no problem. This would have been a huge factor if we couldn’t afford health insurance. Luckily, it all worked out. Hence, we are only half way to early retirement.

Bottom line is that you have to position yourself to retire early. This means that you have to set goals and work towards those goals. Finances is the driving factor and if you can take control of your finances, you can work towards positioning yourself to make decisions like we did. Working towards retiring early isn’t a one solution idea. You have to work towards many goals that I’ve been writing about and it takes sacrifice. You won’t see yourself splurging on things like you used to. We’re half way there to early retirement and I’m so glad we were able to accomplish that. This gives us the confidence that we’re going in the right direction. If you are interested in following my journey, email subscribe to get alerts of latest posts or follow me on Facebook.