As we’ve met more and more people on our continuing journey, the one question that pops up without fail is “what do you do?” People ask in a variety of ways, some cautiously dancing around the issue, others boldly inquiring in no uncertain terms, but what people really want to know is how do we earn money to live if we’re traveling full-time. Our not so simple answer is to reply that we’re retired, which of course leads to more questions and sometimes disbelief.

Before we dive into the murky waters of early retirement, I’d like to first clarify a few things and shed some perspective on our personal situation. First off, we’re definitely not “rich” by the common American definition. Ashley and I were both raised in supportive middle-class families and always had food to eat and roofs over our heads, which are necessities often taken for granted that many in our country and around the world don’t get to experience. We both attended college and found solid jobs within a few years of graduating, which is another privilege we both enjoyed that gave us a head-start on the road to early retirement. Secondly, we never won the lottery nor received huge trust funds to pay for our lifestyle. We reached early retirement through the boring method of working and saving – sorry, no exciting stories of winning a sweepstakes or inheriting a fortune from a long-lost uncle who made millions diving for gold around the Caribbean.

So after nearly a year of answering this question in various forms, I thought it was time to write this entry and share this part of our story with anyone interested enough to read it. If you’ve come here looking for (mildly) interesting photos and stories of our recent travels, you’ll have to come back next week or read some of the older articles for that. For anyone who wants to learn more about early retirement, financial independence, and our personal journey along this path, then let’s get started.

While it may not be common, we are far from unique in our early retirement story. Various websites and social media accounts feature early retirees, some even traveling full-time, which are easy to find and follow. My biggest influence in following this path is the well-known early retirement blogger Mr. Money Mustache. I’ll refer to some of his articles throughout our story which greatly impacted our decision to leave the traditional workforce and change our lifestyle. Other big influences include Jacob from Early Retirement Extreme and Nate and Liz, the couple behind Frugalwoods. These three bodies of work share similar concepts and values which resonate with us, specifically the promotion of living simply and frugally while avoiding the prevalent mindset of conspicuous consumption. I highly recommend any or all three of those resources for anyone interested in learning more – they’ve dedicated their entire websites to this topic, not just one article.

The simple answer to how we support our daily living is that during the course of our working years, we saved a pool of money, invested the results, and now attempt to live off of the resulting earnings. I should also point out that “early retirement” doesn’t necessarily equate to “never working again.” While I think both of us would avoid typical 9 to 5 office jobs in the future, we still have interests and hobbies that could produce income and we’re both willing and able (for now) to return to the traditional workforce in some capacity should our situation drastically change. Money Mustache devoted an article to the idea of first retiring and then getting rich, which was life-altering once I allowed the concept to stew in my brain.

But how did we save money and how much do you need to retire? Ashley and I started our married life together in the fairly typical trajectory of two working adults, two cars, a house, outings with friends, vacations, and going to the office every week. While we weren’t focusing on early retirement at the time, we still lived within our means and maintained a positive savings rate throughout the years while actively paying down student and car loans, and not racking up consumer debt. We luckily avoided expensive medical bills or costly major home repairs, and I realize many things can affect a specific financial situation. We don’t have any children, but both Mr. Money Mustache and the Frugalwoods prove that you can still achieve financial independence while raising kids, not to mention the multiple guest posts on the Frugalwoods site. Had we been seeking early retirement from the beginning of our relationship, we would’ve made different choices at the time to reach this stage even earlier (essentially by reducing unnecessary expenses and shifting our perspective from acquiring to creating).

After years of growing steadily unhappy in an office environment and beginning to understand the very basics of financial independence, we decided we wanted to change our lifestyle but didn’t have a plan to do so. On a trip with a group of friends, I spoke with one of them and through a series of conversations and visits we decided to form a business partnership and turn his food truck catering business into a brick and mortar restaurant (a traditional wood-fired pizza place). The year-long planning stage of this process forced Ashley and me to shed unnecessary expenses and really examine our financial plan. I was leaving a cushy office job to move to another state and drop money into a new restaurant with potentially no monetary returns in the foreseeable future, while Ashley stayed in Pennsylvania and continued working in her job until we had the restaurant ready and open for business. After about eight months of living in different states, Ashley also left her job to join me and work full-time at the pizza shop.

Our experience at the restaurant pushed us deeper into the frugal mindset, and our far-off goal of early retirement quickly advanced faster than we thought possible. I want to emphasize that this happened more through efficient, frugal daily living than through increasing our income – we were making far less working (more than) full-time at the restaurant than we were while sitting in our office jobs, yet we were saving more of our income. We weren’t planning to reach our goal within a few years, but that’s exactly what happened through efficient spending and aggressive saving. As the early retirement target loomed on the horizon, I spoke with my business partner and discussed leaving the partnership in about a year.

Sure enough, roughly a year after that conversation, we completed the final paperwork and Ashley and I departed the restaurant business for the new adventure of a nomadic life on the road. Our monetary goal is based on the concept of the Safe Withdrawal Rate, or the 4% Rule. The basic principle is that you can spend four percent annually from a pool of money invested in the US stock market and that pool of money should theoretically last forever, replenishing itself with returns and dividends while being impacted by inflation. An easy calculation to determine the size of your pool of money is to figure out how much you want to spend annually in your retired life and multiply that by 25.  For example – if you want to spend $20,000 a year, you need a pool of $500,000 invested to safely withdraw four percent. This isn’t considering any Social Security income you may receive in the future, or any income you might have in your new “retired” life. Money Mustache and the Mad Fientist both have excellent articles on this particular topic and write better than I can, so please check out their work for more information.

This article barely scratches the surface and it might seem as though we easily reached our goal, but that’s not the case. We worked over the years to steadily decrease our recurring expenses. We broke our habit of watching television by canceling cable, then cutting away at Netflix, Hulu, etc., while saving the money previously spent on those subscriptions. We canceled gym memberships we weren’t using and started working out at home and adopting a generally more active lifestyle. We eventually sold one of our cars because our commute to the pizza shop involved simply walking down the stairs from our apartment. Honestly, we should have sold a car while working in the office because we both could have carpooled or better yet, should have ridden our bikes to work, because we were a short five miles away and we worked at the same place. That kind of wasteful behavior would earn a trademark Money Mustache “face punch” at this point in our lives. We sold our house and steadily chipped away at our bloated stash of belongings, eventually selling, donating, or giving away those things we weren’t using or couldn’t use in the RV.

While I speak of living frugally, I don’t mean living a deprived life (see this MMM article for his take on the subject). We eat well, mostly because I really enjoy cooking, but also because a healthy diet leads to more energy, a smaller waistline, and hopefully fewer medical issues as we age. That doesn’t mean we live on rice and lentils (although we do enjoy and eat a lot of both of those things), but if that helps you achieve your financial goals then do what works best for you. I certainly enjoy going out to eat and sampling beers from local breweries (as most readers already know), but we attempt to do those things occasionally rather than regularly, to varying degrees of success. And our current method of living certainly isn’t efficient from a fuel perspective – the RV averages ten miles a gallon, which is pathetic, but we try to offset that waste by driving a limited amount of miles every year (less than half of what a single average American driver racks up per year according to the Federal Highway Administration).

Pursuing a financially independent lifestyle or seeking the goal of early retirement may not be for everyone, and I’m certainly not pushing our decisions on other people. But I would encourage anyone interested in living more efficiently to read more from any of the sources I mentioned in this article, or even commenting or sending us an email through our contact form on the About Us page if you have any questions. Also, it certainly helps that both Ashley and I agree on our chosen lifestyle and both of us wanted to work toward this financial goal.  Trying to convince your partner to not buy something or save money could be an effort in futility and add a layer of tension to any relationship, and we certainly worked through financial issues over the years.

So there you have the basics of our story – after ten years in an office and four years with a restaurant, we “retired” in our mid-thirties and moved into an RV to pursue long-term travel. I have more to share on frugal living, early retirement, and minimal living so this may evolve into a series of articles over time. Unless it becomes too boring – I’ll let my Grandma be the judge of that.