Six Reflections of a 35-year-old Retiree

Retired life does not mean constant Greek islands, but being a 35-year-old retiree means having more Greek island time than most.

I turned 35 years old this weekend and am officially embarking on the first age in which I will be retired all year long!  As many milestones prompt us to do, I found myself reflecting on my life now and how I got to this point.  Mostly, I am grateful to be here because getting here was difficult.  That said:

1. The journey was as important as the destination.

I do not think I could bask in my early retirement bliss without having first gone through the work to make early retirement possible.  For years, I had a 50% or higher savings rate.  I read books about investments and creating multiple streams of income when I was at the beach.  Podcasts about financial independence were in my ears at all times.  I cycled through annual spending spreadsheets, net worth spreadsheets, and predicted retirement date spreadsheets.  And then I made new spreadsheets because I did not like the spreadsheets I could find.

More importantly, setting an extreme goal and consistently working towards it over years taught me that the best achievements take time and consistency.  They are also the achievements most worth achieving.  This mindset was important when I pushed to create the DC Revolution Rugby Club in 2019 and when I encouraged Patrick to leave his Department of Justice job in 2022 to take his business full-time.  When you show yourself you are persistent enough to achieve difficult goals, you gain confidence in setting more difficult goals.  Less than 13 years after saving half of a $36,000 salary, I am retired.

On an individual financial level, the journey to retire early taught me how to make my life cost less or more money.  I can quickly reduce how much it costs me to exist if needed, and I also know how I would spend money if I received an unexpected windfall.  That information provides powerful resiliency to my life and the confidence needed to weather different economic situations.

In the current economic environment, the journey to retire early has provided me additional peace of mind.  All those books I read on the beach taught me how investing and the stock market works.  Most investors do not understand the market.  They still worry about volatility due to global emergencies that used to impact the U.S. stock market.  They have not pondered how the stock market, particularly index funds, specifically work.  Any index fund based on the S&P 500 regulates itself and lets investors earn more as long as there are 500 companies still trying to build more wealth.  If you have ever complained about multi-millionaires and billionaires, you know they still want to make more money.  If they keep working to make more money, my investments keep going up over time no matter what the price of eggs is or who a volatile president decides to attack.  The major businesses within the United States continue growing regardless of rising prices, economic hardship for average Americans, or global turmoil.  While this is systematically disturbing, it means your money is safe in the long run.

2. Compound interest is amazing.

Compound interest is so amazing that you need to invest in index funds if you want to build wealth.  Patrick and I are both math people, so we knew compound interest was great from teaching students that compound interest was a magical wealth builder.  However, nothing comes close to seeing compound interest work once you have built your wealth.

The first couple years that you invest, compound interest just means earning a few extra dollars.  Then, there is this long middle stretch of wealth building where compound interest starts to work, but is still not life changing.  You will have exciting months where your net worth will go up by $10,000, but you will have other months where it goes down.  Overall, it will feel like an extra thousand dollars here and there.  That is still a huge improvement over the few dollars here and there, but it is not enough to sustain your life in perpetuity.

Finally, once you have built up the kind of wealth that has you wondering if you could live off that wealth forever, it feels like compound interest jumps to another level overnight.  Again, we see this in every compound interest chart ever: The last couple of years account for huge growth in wealth thanks to compounding.

Thank you UCCU for the perfect photo showing the magic of compound interest!

My first sign that we had hit that level of compound interest was after our month-long trip to Sicily last summer.  I was not receiving an income from my 9-to-5 at the time because I took a few months off to recover following my mom’s sudden passing.  Patrick worked about five half-days while we were traveling that month.  We did not earn much money at all, and we spent $10,000 to travel around Sicily.  Despite spending money without earning, our net worth went up during that month.

Compound interest revealed that we could continue living at the lifestyle we were while traveling around Sicily in perpetuity without making any more money!  In reality, that is not completely true because investments experience more growth during some months than others, but the fact that we took our longest and fanciest trip ever and saw our net worth increase over that time was life-changing.

It was what gave me the confidence to retire in December.

To emphasize this point, I looked at our investments from April 2025 to April 2026 to compare our net worth.  More than 25% of our current net worth was not there a year ago.  In that last year, I only worked full-time for four months and part-time for two months.  During the four months I worked full-time, I was contributing aggressively to our investments, but I was not the remainder of the year.  Patrick hired employees for the business during that same time, meaning we have less to contribute to our own investments and mostly just maximize Roth IRAs at this point.  Despite these relatively low contribution rates for us, from April 2025 to April 2026 our net worth grew by more money than we have ever earned in a year when our combined incomes were at their highest.  Our money is literally earning more money than we ever did.

3. People’s reactions to my retirement vary significantly.

Since most people hit that incredible compound interest reality later in life, it is difficult for them to understand how I retired so early.  People who do not know me well are either shocked or simply do not comprehend that I am retired.  Since we have the tax business and I do help with it, a lot of individuals just assume I am an entrepreneur now.  They do not understand that none of my tax business responsibilities directly lead to income generation.  It is easier for someone to think I just moved fully into entrepreneurship than retired at age 34.

Those who have known me for a long time are not surprised and overwhelmingly supportive.  It has been a relief to have such an accepting community of people around me who watched me slowly move from an unsustainable grind to fully retired.  I know many early retirees do not have such a supportive community, and I am grateful for the easy acceptance and having so many friends and family members who are unquestionably happy for me.

Finally, there are unsurprisingly a few people who openly envy where I am right now but are unwilling to be where I was at 22 years old.  This is the “it must be nice” crowd.  I have noticed that most individuals who fall into the “it must be nice” crowd have or had incomes that could have easily brought them to this same place, often more quickly than I was able to get here.  To these people: It is okay if you do not want to follow the path I chose.  It is okay to earn six figures and decide you would rather work until age 60 or 65 so you can keep enjoying some luxury spending.  If you ever change your mind, I am happy to help you follow my path, but I have no desire to judge your path in the interim.

4. Energy is everything.

I can refrain from judging not because I am an exceptionally good person but because another key nugget of wisdom from this journey has been the importance of my energy.  My previous 9-to-5 diminished my energy constantly, and that pushed me to retire more than its hold on my time.  I realized that was the sticking point because the contract I worked on before my last one was actually enjoyable.  At times, I would get annoyed at its control over my time, but I actually enjoyed the work rather than feeling depleted by it.  My last contract depleted me, partially because of the work and partially because of the leadership.  The combined energy depletion meant I had to go.

Now, I get to focus on bringing my best energy to the events that matter to me the most.  I tinker with habits to see what lets me show up to events at different times of the day with as much energy as possible.  While I am far from perfect so far, I think this has already made me a better rugby coach and increased my efficiency in multiple areas.  I am just embarking on my first full offseason as a retiree, and I am looking forward to all I learn about my own energy management with the additional control over my own time and energy that the offseason brings.

5. Retiring does not solve everything.

While retiring has done wonders for my energy management, it still takes effort to live my best life.  There are also some things we simply cannot change, retired or not.

I pictured my early retirement years as a time when I would get to spend more time with my parents, but my mom passed away suddenly when I was 33 years old.  Spending time with them was part of my “why” for early retirement, and a key piece of that was taken from me before I retired early.  Patrick and I are about to embark on another month-long travel adventure to Europe this summer, but I know that my mom and dad would be joining at least part of it if my mom were still alive.  My dad is not as motivated to travel as my mom and prefers smaller trips.  We will get to see him and make memories with him this summer, but we still will not get to make memories like when the four of us went to Crete for two weeks in 2022.  Even when many pieces of my motivation to retire early still exist, it is consistently challenging to accept that I will miss key experiences I dreamt of having.

Retiring early also forces you to reflect on your priorities and how you spend your time.  If you are retiring to something like I did, this should not be difficult initially.  Without my job, I still wore many hats.  But for those who are consumed by their jobs, this transition will be much more difficult.  I also know that my time allocation was not perfect during these first few months of early retirement, and I plan to reflect more on that going forward during the next couple months.  The freedom to decide is a luxury of early retirement, but it does demand a decision.

Finally, the world will keep operating as normal even though you retired early.  I have noticed that individuals seem to have less respect for other people’s time in recent years.  It is probably the added stress of the times, but it is a practice that simply spreads stress to more individuals.  While we experience this phenomenon everywhere, certainly in tax business communications and rugby coordination, it is more pronounced when you are an early retiree.  Other people assume you have an abundance of time because you lack a 9-to-5.  It turns out that is the biggest misperception of all.

6. There still is not enough time.

I do not have enough time for all my priorities.  To travel everywhere.  To support each person I want to support.  To embark on every innovative idea I have.  There is not enough time!

My new theory is that nobody feels like they have enough time because if I feel like there is not enough time as a 35-year-old retiree, who could possibly have enough time?  Despite that feeling, the reality that I now control my time is refreshing.  I choose what is important enough to receive my time rather than having an employer dictate how the little time I have is spent.  That comes as a huge relief and continues to be something I appreciate every day, five months into retirement.

Not having enough time also gives me two key areas of growth for retirement.  The first is accepting that there is not enough time for any of us.  While I have certainly improved my mindset around this point by accepting I will not make it to every inhabited Greek island in my lifetime, I still have room for improvement.  The second area of growth is spending more time contemplating how I want to spend my time going forward.  Our time is so restricted and mapped out for us that we rarely spend time deciding how we want to spend time!  I have the freedom for that contemplation, and now it is my responsibility to do something with that freedom.  There may never be enough time, but I can still use retirement to figure out how best to spend mine.