My New Life and Values in Year Three of Early Retirement
May 31, 2020, was my (Jolene’s) last day of work after a 20+ year career in the agriculture industry. Wow, the last three years have flown by, and much has changed!
Since not many people write about “life after FI,” especially the RE (retire early) portion, the three-year mark is a great time to reflect.
The main takeaway is that I’ve rediscovered my values and applied them to day-to-day living in my new life. I am working on a few different passion projects—some on my own and some together with Darren.
And it’s not all work; as you will see, adventure is one of my values. We spend about half of the year traveling, albeit thru-hiking and mid-budget travel, not on the spendy leisure travel circuit. I’ll be crossing Saint Bernard’s Pass on my third-year quit anniversary (31 May 2020), coinciding with my 30-year high school reunion. So, there’s a lot to think back on, and a lot still on the horizon!
About Us
Darren and I are early retirees who left corporate careers in our late 40s. We are nomadic except for three months per year when we spend time in our tiny home in the Great Plains of the United States.
We spend 40-120 days per year thru-hiking in the EU and about 90 days per year in the Caribbean and Central America. This blog documents our journey to nomadic living and financial independence and the adjustments we’ve made to make the lifestyle work.
Our website is ad-free; however, we use Amazon affiliate links for some of our recommendations. We make a small affiliate commission whenever you use these links at no additional cost.
Thanks for supporting our little blog!
Re-Discovering My Values
At first, discovering one’s values sounds like some “woo-woo” activity for an off-site corporate retreat. If you’ve done these settings in a corporate or academic environment, you may have noticed that most people tend to pick the values you are “supposed to” list. You know the list: Achievement, Efficiency, Leadership...
Over the past few years, I’ve learned to redefine this discovery process. Emerging research in psychology shows that a structured approach to discovering your values and developing new goals through “life-crafting” can increase happiness and health for adults. This exercise of discovery is designed to help you look honestly at your passions, social life, and skills. After doing the exercises, many people find that they have been living a life motivated by extrinsic factors (e.g. what they think society demands of them, what their family wants of them, or in response to positive reinforcement).
The framework for life-crafting, as described in Frontiers in Psychology is
Discovering your values and passions,
Reflecting on current and desired competencies and habits,
Reflecting on present and future social life
Reflecting on a possible future career
Writing about the ideal future
Writing down specific goal attainment and “if-then” plans
And making public commitments to the goals set
After going through the process of “life crafting,” I found that my values in no particular order are:
Growth, Wealth, Adventure, Vitality, Simplicity, Curiosity
Bye-Bye Corporate Life, I Choose Growth
While I started my career as a scientist, I quickly found it was easier to gain employment and climb the corporate ladder in agriculture by working in an R&D support function. A support function supports the core functions of a business. Examples of support functions include information technology, quality management, customer service, and communications.
There are some downsides to working in a support function. One is that they are often rife with distractions and disorganized due to decades of mergers and acquisitions. Support functions are commonly nickeled-and-dimed since they are not part of the “core business.” And good work is often rewarded with more work.
Like many other white-collar workers, the pandemic reordered my priorities and showed me what I was missing by spending so much time in the office and not living. By quitting, I increased my time to do activities with a higher payoff. Contrary to what some people probably thought, I was not shutting down and sacrificing everything I’d accomplished, but rather refocusing on myself and interests. Everything I accomplished in the past cannot be changed. The only decision is what to do in the present.
We’re Responsible For Our Wealth
Like many that grow up in a lower or middle-income house, my family did not talk much about money. As a GenX woman, I was also influenced by society to not talk about wealth or investing. In fact, in the US, the first year a woman could not be discriminated against based on sex or race for simply opening a bank account happened in the months before I was born. It wasn’t until I learned about FIRE that I learned it was good to discuss money, investing, and other financial matters. All I learned about money growing up was that you worked for it. And that you should balance your checkbook and not use credit cards too much.
Mainstream media still likes to showcase women as being frivolous or emotional spenders, bad at money and math, and risk-averse. This was never my experience. I was a modest spender, good at investing, great at math, and loved trying new things, like learning how to swim at age 45.
My husband and I are jointly responsible for caring for our savings and investments. This is our responsibility, and we choose to do our financial management because no one else will take as good care of our money as we will. We’ve learned from books and podcasts how to structure and draw down a portfolio that supports 50 more years of living on an upper-middle-class budget. If we have questions about something, we’re connected to many online DIY money resources and can seek out a fee-only project-based financial advisor if needed.
Adventure - Playing Offense Instead of Defense
After 20+ years doing the same type of work in the same industry, I’d run out of new challenges to tackle. After solving the same problem more than once in a large organization, solving it a another time was fundamentally not rewarding.
I learned from entrepreneurs Alan and Katie Donagen that If you want an Extraordinary Life, you must build it. No one is handing out Extraordinary Lives.
Once Darren quit also and the world started to open up from the pandemic, we were ready to go and have our adventures, starting with the Camino Frances in September 2021. It was during this walk—a full year after I’d left corporate, that I really began to appreciate the value of time and the opportunity cost if I had continued to work longer.
Since our first Camino, we’ve traveled to several other places we like, including Portugal and its islands, Panama, Bonaire, Belgium, and Germany. Soon we'll be walking from Hoek van Holland, Netherlands to Aosta, Italy.
When we are not traveling, we are experiencing the adventure of remodeling a 117-year-old tiny house in North Central Kansas—learning new skills everyday.
Thinking about all the possible versions of me that can exist is exciting. Quitting my corporate gig allowed me to speed up and get to a future that was more in line with my values. I simply would not have had the time to be me if I had stayed on the corporate track.
Simplicity
The first six months of early retirement were slow, as Darren was still working and most travel was restricted due to Covid. I was focusing on downsizing all our things. It was still 2020, and a lot of people we knew were getting very sick from Covid, so there wasn’t a lot to do except to focus on our fitness, get rid of most of our things, and improve home cooking and puzzle-making skills.
In downsizing and striving for simplicity, I could see the opportunity cost of having money tied up in things. Each thing we owned represented hours or days of working time and life. In addition to the purchase cost of each of these things there are also other costs that are often not as apparent. Those things took up space both physical space and mental. I needed to clean these things, maintain them when they broke, and dispose of them when they were no longer needed or working. The complete opposite of Adventure!
After reading 4000 Weeks, I learned that it's not only physical items that distract us from living a more adventurous life. Recognizing this I’ve removed a lot of distractions from my life, including magazines, cable television, and people who gossip or worry about petty shit.
We’ve also focused on simplifying our financial affairs by consolidating all our accounts and trusts in one bank and keeping a minimum number of credit cards.
Another unexpected upside to leaving the corporate world is that I don’t need to perform success and leadership every day. This has allowed us to simplify our wardrobe as we don’t need to get dressed up to impress colleagues and customers. It has also simplified our schedules which we now determine on our own rather than balancing our free time and interests with work schedules and commitments.
Prioritizing Vitality
In addition to being mutually responsible for my wealth, I’m also responsible for my health.
Unfortunately, careers in middle management are often sedentary and stressful. Many cope with a stressful situation by overeating comfort food, overspending, drinking too much alcohol, and decompressing with passive activities like television and doom-scrolling on social media.
Using a physical trainer in the first year of early retirement helped me to understand that I need to focus on healthy eating and core activities for stability, like walking and weight-bearing agility exercises. We learned that hiking with a backpack is a great way to combine aerobic exercise and resistance training. We enjoy it so much that we spend about four months per year thru-hiking.
Curiosity
While I spent a lot of time in the office or doing corporate travel, I did build a life outside of work with many interests, like fishing, travel, cooking, wine education, and entrepreneurship. Through those interests and through my post-career adventures, I’ve learned I can try new things and fail because no one is watching. This is great, as my curiosity style is the process of doing something, not the accomplishment. Once I’ve learned as much as I want to learn, it’s easy for me to move on.
No one is measuring my success except for myself. There won’t be a performance review on my upcoming kitchen cabinet build. If it’s a new hobby I lose interest in, I can simply sell the items on eBay or Facebook Marketplace and move onto my next interest.
Being curious also means putting myself out there and meeting new like-minded people. We’re members of several online communities of unconventional people and meet up with new people in far-flung places. Being curious and trying new things helps answer the Western World’s question, “What do you do for a living?” Now I can say I am into hiking and personal finance.
Post-Career Summary
In a nutshell, excluding the few months during the pandemic lockdown, the last three years have been exciting and better than expected. I believe this is due to uncovering my values and filling my days with activities that align with them.
I have never missed my corporate identity. I struggled more with tampering down my high achiever tendencies in other areas. It’s taken almost three years for me to decide to take on new challenges as projects and not as a means to make money.
Now that I know what values are important to me in this phase of my life, I look forward to meeting more unconventional people who share the same values. This includes going to and organizing meet-ups, attending conferences, and reaching out to people with similar interests on social media.
