My husband Mark and I retired early a little more than a year ago when I was 38 and Mark was 41, after saving aggressively for six years.
Along the way, we made plenty of mistakes, both financial and mental. And if I can spare you a little stress by sharing them, then I’m glad to do it!
If we had it all to do over again, we would slow down just a little and use all of our vacation time along the way, because resting and relaxing are super important.
We were allowed to recount things that had happened and if something was truly egregious, we could complain about that in a very small dose.
Reminding myself of that helped me keep the bad moments in perspective, which made the whole journey more enjoyable.
If we’d gotten wise earlier on, we might have put money into Roths rather than spending that money in our lower earning years.
I learned an important lesson from it all that it’s far better to look for the big opportunities to save money – like by minimizing housing and transportation costs.