How We Retired Early On $300,000 & How You Can Too

hey guys welcome back to the channel we are Rob and Ally and today we're sharing with you how we retired on $300,000 yeah we kind of got a late start on our retirement because of some of the jobs we had we worked in some nonprofits and we were pretty dismayed when we got into our mid-30s and we started looking at all the advice out there the financial planners and they're all like you got to have $3 million you got to have $5 million at the minimum you got to have a million dollar and looking at it we're thinking there is no way that we're ever going to get to a million dollars based on what we have what we're bringing in and what we're spending so we knew we had to make a change that's right uh it was kind of overwhelming at first when we started looking at all the numbers and uh you know just who are we going to take advice from as to how much we actually needed in order to be able to retire and we just kind of started thinking maybe we should make our own numbers yeah so the numbers that the financial advisors give you are very inflated and they're inflated for a lot of reasons first of all they don't want you to run out of money because it's going to look bad so they overestimate how much you're actually going to need the second reason they're overinflated is they're assuming in all these projections that you're only going to stay in the same place you were you're going to live the same lifestyle you're going to have two houses three cars two boats and the paying for all this crazy stuff and it's simply not necessary or prudent for most people to do that in retirement because you have to work a lot longer to save up enough money to live that kind of lifestyle and it's just not worth it exactly I think that's the most challenging part to get out of as far like mentally is to realize that I don't have to stay in this one place so the numbers don't have to stay with just I'm living this same exact lifestyle with all the same exact stuff the numbers change drastically when you start pulling out some of those things or all of those things you got a really different Financial picture then yes you can get around this mentality by doing several things by retiring abroad by traveling full-time that's what we do or by just living uh below your means so give you kind of an idea of what we did we have a whole video on our retirement story but this is just the synopsis here uh that we had roughly $250,000 of equity in our house when we did this we then uh had $50,000 of investments in the stock market so we really were only able to invest about $50,000 worth while we were you know working those years because we didn't have any employer matching at any time uh just what we could put in uh then then we did also have an online income of about $44,000 per month so that gave us really $300,000 in cash then we took the next drastic step was to sell everything we had we sold our cars sold all our possessions our computers I think we had a laptop with us but we sold all our furniture with the house and that netted us about another $25,000 mhm yeah it really gave us a a good little little pile of cash to kind of send us off well for all of those initial type costs getting some things set up for moving spending a large portion of our time overseas so for $300,000 for about every 300,000 you have invested you can earn roughly ,000 uh a month in basically dividend income or just income you can take out of the stock market so that's what we did we invested all of our money we had that and we paired it with the $4,000 of online income we were already making that gave us $5,000 a month and so then we just kind of said well we can live on four and be fine but I know what you're thinking that if you only have the 300,000 how does that apply to you it can still be done very easily and that's what gave us the courage to do this is because through our travels we realized that you could easily live in several places for only $1,000 a month exactly uh there are especially now we knew that before because we had traveled abroad quite a bit before we retired um and then we've learned even more since retiring of just so many places that you can um go and stay you can get extended visas and you can stay for a very small budget yeah we were just in juman Thailand and the prices there are incredible now our budget was was a little bit higher because since we did make this move we have earned quite a bit more money but rent starts there at about $177 a month for an apartment which is kind of mindblowing for anybody in the US to think about I think yeah well and and people are thinking okay well that's just going to be like a Hut or something that's not going to be like a nice place how can it be this is like an a resort type Condo building with pools and all those types of things so this isn't just a you know hole in- thewall place for 177 or what is it $177 a month you can live in very comfortably really in a nice place in a nice Community yeah and this was key for us because most of the condos and this type of situation come furnished as you know we sold all of our furniture and everything all our possessions so we we really need things that are furnished uh cuz that's what gave us that extra 25,000 to to be able to invest and so that's what these kind of come with so there's places all over the world where you can do this and I think we have some videos on the channel where we talk about cheap countries cheap cities that you can live in people don't want you to know how inexpensive the rest of the world is because $177 in rent then you start talking about the food you can basically be eating your meals for three four5 a meal you're easily coming in at under $1,000 a month yeah and to think that that $177 a month that's renting a place on Airbnb that's going to include like your utilities it you'll get you know your internet and water and trash and uh electricity and all that kind of stuff included so when you start thinking about the fact that you don't have you pull those utilities out of the monthly that's all included in that 177 it's kind of mindblowing really yeah so the strategy for us was we knew we could do that and then I think the strategy for a lot of other people that do this on 300,000 is they go live there for a year two years three years there's a lot of different places you can move around to even and do that but once you're there you're going to be free because you're free of your job you have all the free time in the world and if you want to sort of ramp yourself up and get to a $2,000 month budget you can spend some of your time working uh either as like an English teacher or an online job or part-time job even Consulting from your past job and all the money that you make goes back into your nest EG so what we've learned over the years is that by leaving the rat race by retiring early and reducing your expenses you can add to your nest DEC a lot more than trying to work a highp paying job in America where you're basically spending everything you've made right right and I think that's the challenge for people mentally making that jump they're like 300,000 I'm going to run out of money I'm going to run out of money like really fast if I'm because you're thinking to yourself I'm spending like that you're going to be spending the same amount that you are now but that's not the case there's lots of options to spend way less so you don't have to uh you know you can spread that money out for a lot longer because you don't have to really dip into it and especially if you start doing you know consulting jobs or teaching jobs or start a YouTube or different things like that you can extend that way farther which is what happened to us yeah there's there's actually ways to even make that $177 zero which is you know a lot of people in our friend group that do house sitting and that's a way where you can basically stay for free they just go from house sit to house sit travel the world and they stay for free they eat cheaply and and it's pretty good for them we've never done that because it's just not our thing but there are ways that you can mitigate and there's there's a lot of fall back plans but I think the best thing to do is to get into that lifestyle start to build up maybe a little bit more income if you want it if you're fine with that income then that's fine but if you want to build it up you definitely have the time to do that which you don't have if you're working a job and just doing it uh so our portfolio we invested the whole 300,000 it went up right away and then it came of course down in 2020 and it didn't really affect us we weren't really stressed about it because we were invested in pretty safe companies and that's a a key think you want to be invested in safe companies where you know you're going to get that dividend uh and and you're just you're taking a lot of the stress out of that situation yeah exactly plus just kind of knowing that you can go sit you know in places for uh not that much inexpensive places and uh you can always also just like buy a house in like an affordable place you can you can buy houses very cheaply in places like Italy and different places where they're just houses are selling for not very much now you're not going to be in the center of Rome but there is always a way to make it work and I think that's what a financial adviser will never tell you they'll tell you there is no way to make that work the truth is there is always a way to make it work if you're willing to make the proper compromise to make that work and for most of us for a lot of people people if they knew what those compromises were would you rather at 50 work a job that you hate for the next 20 years and maybe be able to enjoy a few years after you are done working or would you rather go now and be able to do anything you want have all the free time be able to do all these things while you're healthy possibly even live on the beach or in a nice resort complex uh just in in another country and I think given that choice a lot of people would take the second one yeah it's um it's just one of those things where you have to uh be able I wouldn't even call them a compromise I would call them more of like an adjustment rather than a compromise because like you said it ends up not being a compromise like a bad thing it ends up being just an adjustment that gets you something really good at the end of the day yeah exactly we've built ours up now to the point where we could go back and live uh how we were before uh fine but we're still living this way because we just like it more and it's just a better way to live and we just enjoy it we're still living uh below our means we've built it up to now our budget is about $4,000 uh dollars a month and it's fine we just do whatever we want and it's it's such a great way to live that had we not taken the risk I think of where we would have been the risk to do this I think we would be in a much worse situation today yeah and I think the financial freedom from that is a great feeling but more so than that is just having that margin um with your life to be able to come and go and to go do the things that you want to do to go explore to um you know have the experiences that you've always wanted to have um before those experiences go away or before you're able to you know even make it to those things so a lot of the content on this channel is surrounded around retir M and retiring on a budget retiring on a budget of you know $4,000 that's our budget so you can move that up and down to you know accommodate what you're looking at but we're going to be giving a lot of content on that if that's what you're interested in uh hit the Subscribe button and stay with us because it's such an amazing life out there for people and we want to let people know that they're missing out if they don't come do this with us absolutely guys if you have questions leave those for us down in the comments and we'll see you next time

Channel: Grounded Life Finances

Views: 99,062

Keywords: early retirement, full time travel, thailand, Italy, usa, vietnam, colombia, budget, retirement budget, retirement tips, how to retire early, should I retire early, is early retirement an option, how much do I need to retire early, how early can you retire, how to retire in your 40s

Id: CWBjCDBQtQs

Length: 13min 3sec (783 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 27 2024