Today, I celebrate my 6-year anniversary of leaving my CEO gig to retire early!!! Another year of early retirement has flown by. I am still shocked that we are at 6 years. My kids can barely even remember me working in an office or running a company. So it’s strange that they won’t even remember that, even though it was such a large part of my world for so long. And yet, I don’t regret ANYTHING. I’ve been able to travel so much more over the past 6 years than I would have if I were working. And more importantly, I’ve been able to focus on my health by working out more and going out on solo hikes at least once a week. Of course it is not all seamless, and I still have plenty of things to keep me busy, investments to maintain, and an affiliate website to run, plus new side projects I’ve taken on….But overall I can’t complain one bit! 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 even after another year, I am running too many side hustles! So while early retirement 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, Year 5 Review), I’ll go in-depth here on the same benchmarks: Happiness Health Wealth Work Fun Goals Early Retirement: Year 6 Review Alright, it’s the end of Year 6. What a number – > let’s 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 number of bad days while at the same time increasing the number of good days. YET – I don’t really feel any happier than I have ever been. In fact, in many ways, I feel just as burned out sometimes and as tired as before. Life tends to do that to you. I think the key difference in my happiness has been the ability to take even more vacations, be available for fun activities when my kids are home from school, and focus more on the now. I still have stress, mostly self-imposed from trying to run side-hustles or support my family… however, the results are clear: retirement is good for your happiness. Or at least for mine! Health I continue to try to make fitness and health a core priority. No matter what I do in a given day, I try to

Ever since becoming parents, our routine has revolved around being stuck at playgrounds, obsessing over nap times, stopping our kid from eating food off the floor, toilet training, and then coping with all the exhaustion by stuffing our faces with junk food every night. Working out was so low on the priority list it was collecting cobwebs. So, when my friend, Emman, suggested we climb a mountain together, I thought he was nuts. “Um, so […]