I was going to call this post  ‘Episode IV-A New Hope’ but I didn’t want to deal with lawyers, soooo…

Affordable Nomadic Retirement Adventure – Part 2

Scrolling through retirement blogs, we stumbled upon a question that hit us like a ton of bricks: “Do we want to have a home or do we want to have a life?” It got us thinking. How much cash would we really need to retire right now and enjoy life before Social Security kicks in (which, for us, is still 90 months away)?

$4,000 per month means we’d have to have $360k in the bank. Hmmm, that’s a lot

If we set our sights on retiring in June – which would make the selling of the house happen on a much more tolerable timeline for me – then it’s 83 months to SS so we’re down to $332,000.

Okay, what if we could live on $3,000 per month? Now we only need $249,000 to retire early. That’s not as big a number as it sounds, though. I mean, it’s a bunch of money but it’s not out of reach – if we sold the house.

We had also just switched brokerages to work directly with a friend of ours and Sandra reminded me that we had committed to a year with Christina. So that means starting this grand adventure more like November/December. Which then means the window to collecting SS payments is 78 months and the required capital is down to $234k.

Hmmmmm. We had some money saved and we’ll get a decent chunk from selling the house so retiring early is suddenly looking like a pretty doable plan.

The big question was, could we swing this financially on $3,000 a month? Traditional retirement wisdom tells us that you need a “small” fortune saved up. But what if we could create a fulfilling retirement experience without needing a mountain of money?