Retire Early
Lifestyle
Retirement; like your parents, but way cooler
In 1991 Billy and Akaisha Kaderli retired at the age
of 38. Now, into their 4th decade of this
financially independent lifestyle, they invite you
to take advantage of their wisdom and experience. |
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Transitioning to Retirement
A Remarkable Story
Billy and Akaisha Kaderli
(Click here to read
Part 2,
Part 3)
Has your transition to retirement gone
smoothly? Did you meet unexpected obstacles along the way? If so, how did
you handle those? Did you move through them, take a different turn, or stop?
Our first days into retirement absolutely
did NOT go smoothly. But now it's a remarkable story we tell to others along
that same path. Enjoy our narrative below of
Our First 200 Days
Billy and Akaisha in Thailand
enjoying their freedom
Retire Early?
It was January, 1991, the Gulf War had just started and there was
no word for what
we were planning to do. In fact, the road we were taking was a
barely visible, unmarked trail. Some
people thought we were crazy to put our financial and social lives in danger
like this. Others just looked at us with pity, knowing we’d be back in a few
months from our vacation with our tails between our legs, begging for
re-entry into the world we seemed so willing to chuck for the
sake
of adventure.
Even though Billy and I both had trepidation over this decision to leave the
conventional working world, and venture out on
a lifestyle of travel, we had
taken 2 years to plan this out. We had to be ready. And if we
weren’t, well, we’d figure it out somehow along the way.
We had been defying convention all our lives - from purchasing our restaurant
with no money down to Billy becoming a stockbroker - people told us “It
can’t be done.” It wasn’t so much that we were trying to prove them wrong,
but looking back, it did add to the fun of it.
How it all started
Let me back up a bit.
Billy was a trained French Chef and he and I owned a successful
California-French restaurant in
Central
California for a decade. It was
located near the yacht harbor, minutes from the beach and
at the time, was considered to be one of the finest in our tourist beach
town.
We were so successful that 5 years into our ownership of this culinary
enterprise, my business-minded husband was recruited by a financial
brokerage house and offered a job he could not refuse. We decided that he
would become a fully vested member of Wall Street and I would run the
restaurant in his absence.
Our career choices were never easy, but now, with Billy’s days tied to the
New York Stock Exchange, my schedule was at 180 degrees from his. I worked
nights, weekends and holidays, and due to the 3 hour time difference from
New York to California, he was off at 1:00 PM in the afternoon and worked
Monday through Friday.
Trouble in paradise
The long and short of it – Stress became super stress and we were like
passing ships in the night.
Something had to
change.
Billy has always been a numbers guy, and he came to me one day with this
outrageous plan. We’d quit our jobs and travel the world!
Um. Yeah.
No, really, he insisted.
But what about our house? My family? What would we do for money? How could
we afford it? (And what about the life I had been planning – it surely
wasn’t this!)
So what’s the plan, Stan?
Billy had it all organized. His idea was that we would take 2 years to
track
what we were spending on ourselves – minus the
cost of
working. We
would subtract the expenses of dry cleaning, lunches out, high priced
vacations, our gardening and maid services, the price of work clothing and
other employment
costs.
He looked at what we were spending for the past few years and said if
we could live comfortably on this amount for the next 2 years – while
we were still employed – then we could do it for real.
Or something
like that.
Whaaat?
We were 36 years old and I figured this plan would buy us 2 more years
and besides, maybe he would forget about it.
We sold the restaurant and I took a day job – an attempt to revitalize
romance and place me on the same working schedule as he was. Then we fired
our lawn and housecleaning services and we started to do our own laundry,
mow the lawn and clean our own house again. We packed our lunches and eased
up on expensive wines and lattes. Could we be comfortable in this sort of
lifestyle long term?
In the old days…
The most difficult part of this whole process was that there was
no support system in place for “professional vagabonds.” The words “Location
Independent Living” hadn’t been invented yet, nor had email, electronic bank
transfers,
safe withdrawal rates, downloadable books or music.
I mean, think about it.
When we finally cut loose and began to travel, we wrote letters to family
from countries abroad in long hand, addressed them, put a stamp on them and
dropped them inside the nearest dusty post office. A month or two later, our
family received them. Phone calls cost $2 a minute from Mexico and a quick
half-an hour chat cost $60 bucks.
Hefty price to say hello.
We prepaid our credit cards in advance so that we could use them at all…
no point in trying to receive our statements in St. Somewhere. We were
“forced” to return to the States during tax
time (there was no e-filing at that point), or have our accountant be our
proxy and sign for us.
Our camera was an old Nikon SLR camera with interchangeable lenses, all of
which weighed a TON. Books and magazines in English were worth their weight
in gold and I found myself hungry for copies of Cosmopolitan or Vanity Fair
that were 2 and 3 years old!
These days
That was almost three decades ago,
and today the choice to become
financially independent and live a lifestyle
of travel is So. Much. Easier. We utilize email, Skype and
social media to
keep in touch with friends and family. Photos are digital and are kept on a
hard drive or up in the cloud. Ninety-nine percent of our bills and
financial transactions are done online with the click of a key. The
rest we can view digitally
from anywhere in the world. We can get
our news in an instant with 24/7 worldwide coverage. We download movies,
take online courses, and order music or books from Amazon or from hundreds
of businesses who offer what we are looking for.
Our first computer to run our restaurant was an Apple 2e, cost nearly
$4,000, had 64kb of memory on a floppy disc and took over the
entire desk. Today we each have our netbooks for a fraction of that cost,
with Gigabytes worth of memory and they fit into our day pack.
Would you like to live a traveling lifestyle like this?
We’ll tell you how in our next chapter…
(to read Part 2,
click here)
What's Your Number? - How much money do you need to retire?
Retire
Early Lifestyle appeals to a different
kind of person – the person who prizes their
independence, values their time, and who doesn’t
want to mindlessly follow the crowd.
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