A taste of early retirement

The sun, white sand, blue sea, great food, no watch around my wrist because my belly could do a better job at monitoring time.

Ahhhhh! 🙂

Yep! I just came back from vacation. I went to Riviera Maya to an all-inclusive resort where I asked my girlfriend to become my fiancé and the mother of my future kids. And she said… yes!

Staying at an all-inclusive resort is like day dreaming. Free food, free beer and wine, someone is always cleaning after you… It’s like pretending that you are billionaire for a short moment of time… A very short moment of time. And then it’s gone and you’re left with your memories until your employer allows you to take another week of vacation.

And then you come back to the hard reality… You realize that you are not rich. The trip costed you 1500$ (added to your credit card balance) and you have to get back to the 9 to 5 wishing you could win lottery to stop that never-ending cycle once and for all.

Having all the time in the world to think can sometime make you realize how different your life could be if you would be courageous enough to make some changes to it. And during that week I had a lot of time to think about my life.

Jason Fieber from www.dividendmantra.com announced on his blog that he would quit his job by the end of may. In fact, he already drove back to Michigan!!! He left his 9 to 5 job after only 4 years of dividend investing and extreme frugality. He will try to live from his dividend income and also from his online income (approximately 17,000$ US as we speak if I’m not mistaken). He’s 32 years old! So am I… I read that while I was checking my emails at the resort. It striked me! This guy is living my dream… It confirmed to me that it is something achievable! It extra motivated me to follow my strategy and to keep on investing and writing (mainly in french). I’d like to retire early from the rat race too. I’d like to live from my writing income and my dividend income too.

During the first few days there, I was so happy. Moments were magical with my fiancé. But I was also very tired. I slept on the beach, went to bed very early at night.

I realized that my job was draining all my energy. I make a very decent salary, nearly a 100,000$ per year, but at what price? I’m always under huge stress, I’m always tired and I run all the time like a rat in a cage. I can only have a rest two or three weeks per year. I usually go to an all-inclusive because I’m too tired to plan a “real” trip. And this is not going to get any better… Unless I follow my plan and keep on writing and investing!

Every time someone quits the company they just split his job to the others. They don’t hire anymore…. They call that “attrition”… It’s a new term in vogue to tell us “You’re lucky man we don’t fire you so shut up and work twice as much for the same salary”.

Nowadays, with the aging baby-boomers, there are people leaving the company every months… That’s a lot of job that keeps adding up on my desk… Someday, it will be too much and the company will burst…

It’s okay, I don’t really complain. This is the new reality of our society. Work more and more, be more productive and don’t expect anything in return. You have a job. That is a lot more than many many folks on this planet. But I wish I could say someday that “enough is enough”. But this is only achievable if I’m not dependant of a salaried income anymore.

I had the time to discuss with my fiancé about our future and to make sure we have the same goals and the same view about financial freedom.

We want to clear the mortgage in seven years. Being mortgage free will be a great kicker and will make us less dependant of a full-time job. We could sell and rent but since we want to raise kids an apartment downtown wouldn’t do. I own a nice piece of land and a simple house in a great neighbourhood and we have decided to raise our children there. It’s close to my parent’s house so my kids will be educated mostly by us and our family. We don’t want them to be raised by strangers.

We want to be financially free by 45 years old… 50 at the most… And we have decided that the best gift we could give to our kids will be the education on how to become financially free. We will kickstart them as soon as they are born and we will teach them the value of money and all the money concepts we would have loved our parents to teach us. I’d like to see them with the possibility to be financially free in their high thirties or low forties. But, I don’t want to do the job for them… I truly believe that in order to fully enjoy what you have, you have to have suffered at least a little to get it. If you didn’t, then it doesn’t have the same value!

I’m now back to reality, back to being stuck three or four hours a day in my car just to go to work and come back… I didn’t miss that part… And what’s wrong with the market? Why is it so expensive right now? I want to buy stocks to continue creating a nice stream of increasing dividend income.

What about you? Do you like to go to Mexico or other nice places to enjoy the blue sea? What are your thoughts about all-inclusive resorts?

Image courtesy of lkunl / FreeDigitalPhotos.net