
The last four years have been long ones.
Not bad. Just long. This journey started well before the blog did. Back in the fall of 2014 I was tired, stressed, and felt trapped in a career I had come to depend on for our livelihood. Let’s distract ourselves and learn how to prepare for early retirement.
Talk about first-world problems, right? Luckily I came across some very good writers with blogs that opened my eyes to many new possibilities. Extra luckily, I had already started up a real estate rental side gig to (initially) help us pay for nanny wages. Five houses and four years later, we’ve got a solid foundation of cash-flowing assets.
Things come up of course. Like the new roof, we had to put on our own house earlier this spring. Chalk that one up for $5,750. And before that, one of the rentals decided it needed a new furnace right around the middle of a Minnesotan February. Another $3,000 CHA-CHING! So yeah, best-made plans, right?
My 5 Year Plan to Retire Early
I originally devised a four-to-five-year plan to exit the rat race. I set up my spreadsheet models and went through our spending with a fine-toothed comb.
We changed insurance plans, dumped cable, switched cell phone plans, dumped the Keurig, and started bike commuting a few days a week. Craigslist and minimalism became new norms, and pivotal in our quest to focus less on stuff, and more on relationships and growth.
With my five-year plan, I had to guess about raises and bonuses at work, and the growth of our rental and chiro businesses. Total thumb and saliva. Early retirement expert, right? But all in all, we’ve been pretty much on track since that fateful fall of 2014. Ahh, the good old days… That was the lovely autumn when I hit my wife over the head repeatedly with Mr. Money Mustache… Hoo boy…
I’ve been through three bosses and three work campuses since the journey began. I’ve turned down promotions twice, though I have one likely in the works for later this year. The ability to say no and to take control of our future by saving more income led to more confidence at work.
There’s a lot I’d say I owe to Mr. Money Mustache. It’s probably good he wasn’t home during our recent visit to Longmont, or he’d have experienced an awkward bear-hug from a complete (albeit grateful) stranger.
Why Early Retirement Is Appealing (My Reminder)
The kids are growing up fast. Another reason for staying focused on the mission at hand. Too often we spin our wheels managing dueling careers, only to turn around and see our kids already off to college and moving out of the house (or not moving out of the house and not paying rent). Getting to spend more time with the twins now, during their grade school years, will remove a YUGE potential regret later.
Life is a finite reel-to-reel tape of learning. You can learn a LOT at any stage of life, early retirement expert, or not. Having time back with early retirement allows me to figure out this gardening thing. What a riddle, even with the best manuals on my bookshelf. (I blame the two-week Minnesota growing season.)
Pick up the guitar again? Sure! Maybe master the French language (a life goal I’d abandoned not long after returning from a visit to Paris)? Why not?? Heck, I could even learn how to write!
My health is important not only to me but to my family as well. I want to be the dad who can still chase a ball around the yard, and suffer through a few tackles in the snow. Exercise gets a chunk of my time these days, but I can feel the need for more, as this 40-something body starts to hit those pesky reality checks. Oh, and stress sucks too.
Relationships need constant grooming. My wife, Mrs. Cubert, has been working super hard since before the kids came along, and it’s only picked up more over the years. Price of success? Yeah, her business ROCKS because she ROCKS.
Problem is, there are only so many hours in the day. Between my full-time job, the rentals, and this lovely blog, my ability to take more of the burden off her shoulders is less than. Early-retired Cubert can step in to help take on chef duties, grocery shopping, and kid chauffeuring.
Mrs. Cubert is almost 10 years younger and will have an opportunity to retire early in her mid-40s if she so chooses. For now, she’s pretty content with a 30-hour-a-week gig and part-time hours at the gym she loves.
I imagine it’ll be loads easier once she can rely on me to help with more of the household duties. Don’t assume I’m not pulling my weight – I have lawncare duties! With just one year left until retirement, I feel I’m ready in these departments.

How Much Money Do I Need to Retire at 45?
I’ve got to get hot on this. I know how I can spend a good chunk of my day, with the tasks mentioned above. But there’s a healthy part-time amount of hours, maybe 20 a week, I could put to more productive use. One option that’s a possibility is joining a property management company here in town.
The realtor I use to find investment properties runs quite an empire with three other partners. Flips, rentals, sales, you name it. I might just go gang-buster Bigger Pockets and jump into THAT arena. I do not mind getting my hands dirty.
I won’t go over the ground we’ve covered a few times already here. Suffice it to say, I’m still dead set on making early retirement happen next year. If by some odd chance I’m so happy with my cubicle job that I could do an Irish Jig come next July, well, maybe I will stick around long enough… Long enough to pay off the $60K in student loans we still owe. Even at 2% interest, debt is debt. Right?
Here’s what the forecast ledger looks like in retirement. This will be how we live, more or less, until the old man money kicks in at 59.5, in about (gulp) 13.5 years. (For a companion post, I might share our 2018 expenses next week. Stay tuned…)

Now, I’ll be the first to say “What the heck, Cubert! $63K annual living expenses? Really?!?” Yes, yes, it’s awful, I know. But hey, I’ve got bills to pay! Strip out the student loans and we’re at least down to $60K. Not bad, right? Oh, and never mind the $100 weekly dining-out allowance. Remember, we live in the land of milk and mom-and-pop restaurant honey.
Honestly, the forecast is a bit of a wide target still, even with just a single year left in the game plan. In other words, I need to sharpen the pencil some more.
How to Prepare for Early Retirement 101
Time has flown by since I set this early retirement goal back in the fall of 2014, during one of the deepest funks of my career. Preparation is what I need to do, a little over one year before retirement.
The way I look at it, 12 months is the very least amount of runway to start retirement preparation. Considering I’ve been a corporate worker for 23 years now, I could probably use these 12 months to get myself “sorted out.”
Bigger life transitions demand a little preparation. You take the time to plan a wedding and ready yourself for marriage. You get 9 months to plan and prepare for having a child. With retirement, there are some key things to consider.
Heck, in the old days (up until the 1980s or so), men would retire without a clue what to do with themselves and wound up dead of a heart attack within just a few short years of retiring. No wonder pensions were so generous back then!
Just like we got married without a wedding planner, I’m going to do this “early retirement planning thing” solo as well. Specifically, my brain is focused on these 3 objectives:
- Knocking off Big Expenses
- Accounting for Health Insurance
- Avoiding Boredom
Big Expenses Can Hit Harder in Retirement
These are the expenses that surprise you sometimes. And when I say “Big”, I mean over $2,000 BIG. Examples include a new roof on your house (more on that one later), needing to replace a furnace, or needing a new used car.
Just this weekend, I was swimming in a financial stew. I woke up Saturday to a text from one of our tenants that the heat had gone out. They are tough cookies and were sitting through 52 degrees on a -10F sunny day waiting for me to get back to them. Should’ve left my ringer on…
I knew that the furnace at rental C was probably going to be first among our properties needing replacement. I just hadn’t planned on it THIS YEAR.
So I get over there, toting along a couple of space heaters and a few tools. I get the cover off the furnace and run through the restart sequence. It’s not working at all. The old girl just makes a humming noise. It turns out the inducer motor has failed. Dammit.
I got my furnace guy on the phone and luckily he can get the part for the over-20-year-old-beast. Best of all, he can be there by noon.
The problem with my furnace guy is that he’s honest. I knew in my gut what he’d tell a few minutes after he got there: “You should probably replace this thing.”
But, not before we install the new inducer motor, because you can’t just install a new furnace on the spot. It’d be three days before he could return to do that little project. Luckily he only got charged $200 for the part (no labor.) Normally, that part swap would’ve cost $550 with labor.
At the end of the day, I’m looking at a $3,200 expense on my rental ledger to start 2018. Yippee!!! But again, knowing that that furnace was on the brink, and would’ve needed replacing at some point, I can’t get too worked up about it.
Prepare for Retirement 101: Accounting for Health Insurance
Oh, man. I’ve got some homework to do on this one. I’m estimating that we’ll spend $500 per month in premiums for a high deductible plan, and about $1500 per year in out-of-pocket expenses.
We are a healthy-ish bunch here in the Cubert household, so my hope and intent is to avoid health being something that holds us back, but rather an enabler for living a good life. That means lots of exercise, whole foods, limited screen time, and plenty of sleep.
Even with all that noble planning, we can’t avoid health insurance. That’s just too risky. We can, however, mitigate our premium costs in a couple of ways:
- Deduct premiums from our business taxes. This is huge. Having a business allows us to effectively discount our cost of coverage by roughly 33%
- Max out a Health Savings Account. For our family of four, we can put away close to $7,000 per year. The best part? That money gets treated as an extra deduction on our taxes. The second best part? We can use those pre-tax dollars for our out-of-pocket medical costs.
The main thing is, I’m not overly worried about how we’ll manage healthcare costs in early retirement. Factors 1 & 2 above are immensely helpful. We’ll simply have to wait and see if our elected officials are eventually able to extract their heads from their collective a$$es to work together with the industry on cost containment.
Utilization isn’t the problem. It’s the cost of procedures, pharmaceuticals, and everything else associated with care. But I digress…
A Lot to Look Forward To
These are just the top three on a list floating in my head these days. What did I miss? Well, I’ll need to keep an eye on our Mortgage Pay-off Project. There’s also the notion I have of pre-loading the kids’ 529 plans.
I’ve certainly got my work cut out for me. During the next 18 months, the Airbnb experiment will bring new variables to the mix. Life itself is full of unknowns. Despite the planner in me, I know I need to be ready to accept, adapt, and adjust. For all the knowns, no better time than the present, to PREPARE.
Who knows where the health care insurance system will be by this time in 2019? More than anything, health insurance, and health care out-of-pocket costs are the biggest unknown variables in this entire scheme. Shocker, eh?
If I buckle down, I might be able to make something of this blog and generate some meaningful income. I just need to be mindful of this little project not becoming an anchor, like say, a regular cubicle job. BLECH!!!
I must be doing SOMETHING right if I’m sitting here writing to you about quitting my job at 46. (And honestly, taking hard lessons from my 20s and 30s into account, I’d have been done by 30 with a head, any head, screwed on straight.)
The best-case scenario? The blog ratchets down to a single, solid post per week, and I make a few side hustle bucks from it to donate to good causes. Not a bad retirement hobby. Would you agree, Abandon-Nation?
Join the Legion of Cubicle Doom!
Sign up to have new posts and special updates sent directly to your inbox.
Whoa. Hadn’t realized you were so close to ticking into counting by days instead of years! Big freaking deal. And I have no doubt you aren’t going to be bored 😉
Speaking from experience, 30ish hours a week like your wife is a pretty darn good gig.
Time flies, don’t it?!? I feel like starting the party now, but I have a few big hurdles to clear first. 🙂 Good fodder for upcoming posts.
cubert, man, i gotta tell you i read over this with a fine toothed comb. we’re a little older but doing something similar. mrs. smidlap is older than me so that part is opposite, but her main employment went away in spring of ’17. she has really humped it in life so instead of going back to some crappy job (her previous job was good) in a cube (which we’ve never done) it’s been an experimental year of semi-retirement for her. unlike me, she can stay busy and interested and productive at home. it’s kinda best i stay working at this low impact gig for now as it keeps me off the streets and out of the bars. with no kids i think 45k/year is plenty for us and we would be fine with 40-ish. 25 or 26 is more like the survival number with no joy from money. thanks for the article and the look behind the curtain. count it down, mister!
I wish I still needed a comb… 🙁
Appreciate your perspectives, Freddy. You might be inspired by your better half when the time comes to hang it up? Any shared hobbies or interests you can look forward to? I’ve got a stack of books and a laundry list of remodeling projects to keep me more than engaged. Like I mentioned in the post, maybe a new (used) guitar will get some use?
Amazing. Congrats buddy. Maybe the last year will be more enjoyable than the past ones knowing that it will soon come to an end.
Thanks, Jason! That’s what Tanya suggested (our next life) in a Twitter note. Pretty excited, to say the least!
Looking good, and looking forward to another engineer joining the ranks of the retired “goof-offs.” Or in my case, “semi-retired” as I consider myself (need something challenging to stay engaged.) But as the semi-retired income is not needed, it can all go to fun stuff.
Glad to see you are focusing on what to do next. Life is a journey — enjoy the trip! And enjoy the coffee too 🙂
That you refer to me as an engineer is an honor! I have a lot of that on my dad’s side of the family but wound up in project management. Goof off? Absolutely. To a TEE.
And yes sir, I owe YOU the next TWO coffees now! LOL. 🙂
Congratulations! One year is hardly anything. You will be there soon. And enjoy every bit of it!
Right now we are in the “Total thumb and saliva” state. 5 years away. And that is why we set a date and not an amount.
And I understand when you say that the 4 years were long. I know, it has just been about 8 months for us now, and it has been lo…..ong.
Thank you! Hopefully not premature!
You’ll find these next five years feel slow at the time, then suddenly you look back are like, “Whoah!!”
I remember my first year and ticking down the weeks and then months on my white board. I decided it best to not do that after a while, and let time naturally whittle away.
Getting really close:)
I don’t know if I could set a date but I like knowing I can walk out anytime if I want to.
I noticed you don’t have any dividend income? Do you only invest in real estate? (sorry if you cover it in another post)
Super close!
No dividend income here. I’m a 50-50 guy when it comes to investing. 50% in real estate, and 50% in the market – all index funds. At some point I may explore dividend investing, we’ll see!
Thanks Cubert!
I started focusing on dividend investing last year and it is really starting to pay off (only a portion of my portfolio of course)
Assuming you don’t plan to withdraw from your index fund right away?
I love the income from my rental properties but some days I just want to sell them all!
Very nice! I think it’d be fun to track those equities, having dabbled in individual stocks years back…
No plans as yet to withdraw from the index funds, though it is an option if I can’t muster a bigger buffer in our income/expense plan.
You seem very prepared. Our experience, having been retired for 7 almost 8 years now, is that every year is a bit different on the expense ledger. It is partly that we try to use our large nest egg to get savings on high-deductible insurance and such, so you win a lot and lose sometimes. The same is true for our rental properties. We have 2 and there are great times and then wham! You get hit by repairs and vacancies. You really have to be ready for the fluctuations. And don’t even get me started about how the stock market has been way, way past it’s long term averages for years now and that will probably revert to the mean. Brace yourself, but remember that your talent at minimalism will help you to solve these things. Quit anyway!
I sure hope I am!
I expect we’ll similarly look for high deductible plans ourselves, with the HSA to fund future health care needs. The volatility and “what ifs” make it important to have a good safety margin, which I still need to feather in.
Great point on the market too. That’s why I’m more of a cash flow freak and will continue to look for expenses to scrape and new income streams. If nothing else, I can’t have any doubts about the numbers come this time next year.
The blind leading the blind thru the health care debacle (thanks for the shout-out). Congrats on being just one year from joining the circus, my friend! I’m 60 days in, and it’s better than I could have possibly imagined. I’ll be waiting for you at the door.
Speaking of blind, I’m STILL waiting for my right eye to get to 20/20 since the laser eye surgery. So I reckon that’s appropriate, Fritz!
Appreciate wholeheartedly your support and guidance this past year. I’m fortunate (as are many) to have trailblazers like you, Carl, and Tanja to show the way!
Blek, healthcare is the biggest unknown with early retirement. We’re on my wife’s plan for now, but that will change at some point. Anyway, just one year left for you. That’s not long at all. Just kick back and enjoy it. 🙂
Thanks Joe! I’m also nervous about bonus time. Those dollars could impact whether I stay another 2 or 3 or 4 months longer. Time to perform!
Came across your blog through other sources. Have been enjoying reading it. A year will go by fast. Mrs. r2e and I recently put a 5 year timeline on our retirement. I semi-retired through a company reorganization, which landed me at a great new role with a not for profit youth organization. Enjoying it tremendously. Don’t worry what others think of your annual spending – each of us are in our own unique circumstances. The great thing about being FI is that FI is defined by you! My wife and I decided to work a little longer to increase our annual spending in retirement.
Hey there, Road! Thanks for stopping by. I appreciate greatly hearing from those who have downshifted a bit in anticipation of early retirement. I often consider checking out early in order to find something part time and more engaging.
I hope your next five years are rewarding and you reach your goals at the end of that time frame!
Stay on your toes and be ready, at our age those 365 days will go super-fast and be here before you know it. It’s coming!
Hey man! I’m with you there! Time flies way too quick anymore. I think a post about slowing down the clock in early retirement is in order? Might need help from a certain Mad Fientist on that one…
Congratulations, can’t wait till I get that close also. I know retirement in itself is a reward but do you plan on doing anything special to celebrate all your hard work and planning when you finally hand in your notice?
Thank you, Kale! I haven’t thought that far ahead, honestly. I may have a celebration of reaching FI or a full blow retirement extravaganza… Too soon to say, but I do like a good party!
I bet you can pull some more money out of that budget pretty easily. My interest in eating out has dropped since FIRE, and my interest in cooking from basic ingredients has increased-if it’s the same for you that $100/week dining budget will get cut to some extent, and groceries might fall too. 4k is a great travel budget, but when you’re RE you’ll find a lot more time to do the rewards card shuffle as well. RootofGood has done some impressive stuff there.
Hey Mr. PoP! That’s wonderful advice. I really do need to re-examine some of these items, dining out in particular. Honestly, we should have more energy to prepare our own food so the excuse of “wanting a break” should melt away.
Definitely going to check into what Justin has cooking with respect to the churning hobby.
Thanks for stopping by (and great to meet you at Carl’s last month!)
The last year! I have a feeling that could impact job satisfaction (in a positive way) with the right outlook. I have a feeling it could mean looking at things in a more nostalgic outlook than otherwise. “This is the last time I’ll…” Even for things that you don’t look forward to, knowing it’s the last time could give it a sense of relief each time.
Hey Adam! Thanks for stopping by!
I’ve actually thought about writing a post on nostalgia in general. Appreciate your comment. I think there’ll be some healthy “pause” before I commit to letting go.