Today, I celebrate my 5-year anniversary of leaving my CEO gig to retire early!!! Wow. Nuts. Insane. Just a few words that come to mind. Of course, my early retirement at times hasn’t FELT like retirement…especially during the many times when I’ve managed to overextend myself with side hustles. But then I go on a four-week trip, FORGET about everything, let automations do their thing, and all is well again… And that is exactly what I want to continue to do more of as I head into my 6th year of retirement. I need to get back to the early retirement basics. I want to remove myself from most of my side hustles, de-stress my life, and spend less time on this computer. That’s the dream right?!? So let’s take a look back at the past year, the ups, the downs, goals for Year 5 of early retirement, and everything in between: Is Early Retirement Worth it? Why is this even a question? YES, it is worth it! However, early retirement is NOT without its stressors…life still goes on, parenting is tiring, and well I am running too many side husttles! So while early retirment has surely been better than working my corporate job it still has its own issues. Anyways, following the same format of the last two years (Year 1 Review, Year 2 Review, Year 3 Review, Year 4 Review), I’ll go in-depth here on the same benchmarks: Happiness Health Wealth Work Fun Goals Early Retirement: Year 5 Review Alright, it’s the end of Year 5. What a number – > lets dive in! Happiness As you can see, my happiness really shot up as soon as I retired, but then you pretty much settle into early retirement and things dipped down a bit in Year 2. However, each year since then, I find myself tweaking things and making day-to-day improvements to my overall happiness. Again, this doesn’t mean that I don’t have bad days, because I certainly do, but I have found many ways to reduce the amount of bad days while at the same time increasing the amount of good days. BUT – I don’t really feel any happier than I have ever been. In fact in many ways, I feel more burned out and tired than ever. I think the key difference to my happiness has been in the ability to take even more vacations, be available for fun activities when my kids are home from school, and just try to focus on the now. I still have stress, mostly self-imposed from trying to run side-hustles. However, the results are clear, retirement is good for your happiness. Or at least for mine! Health Heading into this year, I have continued to make fitness and health a core priority. I’ve been hiking more, walking more, lifting weights again, etc. And you can see it reflected in my steps: Steps Another big surge in steps this year for me. Some