{"id":23180,"date":"2016-08-09T17:19:53","date_gmt":"2016-08-09T16:19:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ourtour.co.uk\/home\/?p=23180"},"modified":"2021-06-14T14:49:56","modified_gmt":"2021-06-14T13:49:56","slug":"freedom-to-travel-financially-independent-at-43","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ourtour.co.uk\/home\/freedom-to-travel-financially-independent-at-43\/","title":{"rendered":"Freedom to Travel, Financially Independent at 43"},"content":{"rendered":"

My wife Julie and I are financially free, aged 43. Our lifestyle now revolves around travel, and we\u2019re currently winding our way slowly across Europe in a motorhome. As I write this we\u2019re on the Lofoten Islands, an incredible Nordic archipelago some way north of\u00a0the Arctic Circle. We have no children, a decision driven by a lack of parental urge. Although I\u2019m sure it\u2019s made our financial situation far simpler to achieve, it certainly wasn\u2019t part of any end game to hit financial independence (FI), since neither of us had even heard of FI before we turned 40.<\/p>\n

\"OurTour

OurTour on Tour!<\/p><\/div>\n

\"The

The Lofotens, where we’re currently sat writing this<\/p><\/div>\n

In our \u2018old lives\u2019, as we refer to life before 40, we worked as salaried employees in the offices of corporations. Both of us had worked our way upwards, slowly, and by the time came to quit, were managing projects and teams, and earning more money than we felt we could easily spend. We can\u2019t claim any valour for quitting work early; I had a work-related breakdown, and initially we stopped in order to take a year out and recover. Things took an interesting twist from that point onwards.<\/p>\n

Before the gap year idea, we lived in a three bedroom detached house on a corner plot with an extended garage, in the English midlands. A hot tub bubbled away in the garden, perpetually heated, dimming house lights as it periodically fired up. The garage and loft were well stuffed with years of accumulated belongings. Counting them up, we were surprised to find we had at least seven computers and two games consoles. Our evenings would be spent sat in front of a wall-mounted plasma TV browsing through the Virgin+ listings with one eye on a tablet. I\u2019d set up a night vision web cam which enabled us to monitor our dog\u2019s sleeping habits over the Internet. We had two cars, a camper van and a motorbike. All fairly standard, middle class behaviour I guess, but we were far from feeling fulfilled.<\/p>\n

\"Our

Our old hot tub – steaming away in a corner of the back garden<\/p><\/div>\n

A TV series about people paying their mortgages off in two years prompted us to attempt the impossible and do the same, albeit over a longer time period. eBay started to clear out our stuff, and as more and more of it went, the more we realised our precious things had precious little value. Our buying slowed down as a result, and all that money previously spent on \u2018stuff\u2019 now went towards paying off the mortgage. Momentum built until one day, amazingly only three years later, the mortgage was gone. We still had a small mortgage on a bungalow we owned, which we\u2019d been renting out for a few years, after we moved out of it and failed to sell it. As the rent was easily covering the mortgage payments, we chose to leave it alone, but purposeful investors, we were not.<\/p>\n

\"Us

Us 10 years ago, when all this started<\/p><\/div>\n

With the house mortgage gone, and our buying habit with it, our savings went ballistic. The faster our savings grew though, the more desperate I became to exit work. I felt the darkness of depression clawing me into what felt like a deep hole in the earth. Ju was in better shape, but wasn\u2019t immune to the stresses of her work environment either. We worked out roughly what a year traveling in a motorhome would cost us, based on previous two week holidays, and as soon as the bank account hit that level, we pulled the trigger, handed in notices and started serious planning for a year on the road. We bought a slightly larger, but still old motorhome and spent the evenings of notice periods sticking \u2018don\u2019t forget to go here\u2019 post-it notes on a map of Europe. Moving our remaining belongings into the house\u2019s loft and a storage facility, we let the place out.<\/p>\n

\"Saying

Saying goodbye to great mates back home in 2011<\/p><\/div>\n

\"Loading

Loading up a storage facility before leaving (it turns out we’d have been far better off selling our stuff!)<\/p><\/div>\n

\"We

We dreaded having to come back and empty the attic of all of our old stuff!<\/p><\/div>\n

\"About

About to set off in Dave on a cold wet and grey UK day<\/p><\/div>\n

The trip was intended to give us space to find new vocations, a mid-life crisis of sorts. We\u2019d worked hard in our current roles to be able to take this once-in-a-lifetime adventure, and had every intention of returning to our home and work, of some sort, after the year was up. Of course neither of us knew it, but this act of travelling would eventually set us on the path to FI. The travel proved we could thrive on limited resources, since everything is limited in a motorhome; space, weight, electricity, water, gas, diesel, even the capacity of the loo! It proved we could happily live together, in a very small space, 24\/7. It proved once and for all we valued experiences over possessions. It proved that around \u00a315,000 a year was sufficient for us to live a great life (we\u2019ve met people who are comfortable on far less). And, most importantly, fellow travellers we met introduced us to the \u2018pre-retirement\u2019 FI concept, such an outlandish idea we\u2019d possibly have never been exposed to otherwise. The gap year continued beyond 12 months as we found ways to stretch our time on the road by reducing our costs, but eventually we spent all but our emergency fund, and needed to head home and find work.<\/p>\n

\"Pisa,

Pisa, Italy<\/p><\/div>\n

\"The

The Jungfrau, Eiger and Monch, Switzerland<\/p><\/div>\n

\"Ait

Ait Ben Haddou, Morocco<\/p><\/div>\n

At this point we\u2019d been free for two years. This kind of freedom was something neither of us had experienced in the past. No deadlines. No commutes. No pointless slide packs. No 6am flights. No bosses. No reorganisations. No petty politics. No fighting over days off. No performance reviews. All of it gone, leaving just us to decide where we went, what we did. Most of the time I didn\u2019t know which day it was, as we moved gradually from country to country.<\/p>\n

\"Acropolis,

Acropolis, Athens, Greece<\/p><\/div>\n

The most formative experiences for me were probably in the financially poorer countries, Morocco, Tunisia and Ukraine, where we realised that even on our self-constrained budget, we lived a life of kings. One day walking a market near the Libyan border, a local tried to buy our dog. On reflection we realised this was quite a reasonable thing or him to do, since we were leading an animal around a market on what looked like a piece of string. Attempting to explain we couldn\u2019t sell him as he was part of our family yielded a very confused Arab, and drove home to me just how luxurious a life we lead.<\/p>\n

\"Erg

Erg Chebbi, Sahara, Morocco with Our Hymer Motorhome<\/p><\/div>\n

At the end of all of this, as our wheels touched the earth at Dover, I burst into tears like a child. The burning desire to re-attain freedom, what I referred to as our \u2018blinding light\u2019, was ablaze. Nothing would stop us getting that freedom back.<\/p>\n

Only now did we start to truly pursue FI. A friend we met on the road introduced us to Robert Kiyosaki\u2019s Rich Dad Poor Dad<\/a>, which shifted our consciousness sideways. Although it stated what seemed quite obvious, none of the ideas Robert discussed came naturally to me. I rummaged around the Internet looking for inspiration, finding the outstanding Early Retirement Extreme<\/a> and Mr Money Moustache<\/a> blogs, and devouring them, among many others. Realising my basic financial knowledge was lacking, I found the Meaningful Money<\/a> website and enjoyed learning from Pete\u2019s videos, as he stood in relaxed locations around south-east England.<\/p>\n

We dusted off our personal pension plan statements, something we\u2019d never looked at previously, to discover we\u2019d been investing in them for 18 years. Combined and compounded, they\u2019d grown to a sizeable investment. Since we were too young to access them though, we needed an alternative approach, and set about finding the best ways for us to achieve a residual income. Going back to corporate life to earn the money for our investments, we set up our own business and worked as consultants in our chosen fields. We bought and renovated another property to rent out and also started a \u2018trial investment\u2019 in Vanguard ETFs, since neither of us had directly invested in the stock market before, and were nervous of it. We had solar arrays fitted to two of our properties, which the government pays us for the energy we generate and export, and also established some other smaller passive income streams.<\/p>\n

\"The

The kitchen part-way through renovation – we lived in the house while all the work was done – not a good idea!<\/p><\/div>\n

\"The

The finished kitchen<\/p><\/div>\n

\"The

The lounge after we’d stripped it ready for re-plastering<\/p><\/div>\n

\"Lounge

Lounge after we’d finished<\/p><\/div>\n

After only two years at home, we\u2019d hit balance point \u2013 we now have enough coming in residually to cover our outgoings, which we constantly track. In retrospect, we did it too quickly, and this time Ju suffered depression as we pushed too hard. But we can\u2019t step backwards, Ju recovered with help from the fabulous NHS, and we\u2019re now free.<\/p>\n

Freedom for us, for the moment at least, means we\u2019ve re-joined a huge community of people from all walks of life who travel for various lengths of time in a motorhome. Airline pilots, builders, doctors, business owners, paramedics, teachers, policemen, lawyers, you name it, they\u2019re all out on the road wandering. Europe is far more geared up for his kind of community than the UK, and many countries have hundreds or even thousands of low-cost or free official or semi-official overnight stopovers available.<\/p>\n

Many people opt to overwinter somewhere warm in Greece, Spain, Portugal, Sicily or Morocco, and campsites there will charge as little as \u20ac6 a night for the privilege. Our wanderings haven\u2019t seen us stay still for long, and we tend to move every day or two, which makes it difficult to become bored. Our time is spent on research, driving, planning, walking, taking photographs, swimming, updating this\u00a0blog, writing, reading and whatever else takes our fancy. We’ve even written and self-published books, which we enjoyed massively, not least because it helped prove to us we could earn from sources other than a salary. Boredom does remain an ongoing risk though, as we\u2019re effectively flooded with free time. We continue to keep an eye out for it, and we have other options up our sleeve in the event it becomes anything but a temporary problem.<\/p>\n

Our goal this year was to head through\u00a0the Arctic in the summer months and reach the North Cape in Norway<\/a> (which we did on 15 July 2016) , and now we are exploring the islands and fjords and working our way back to the UK via Sweden and Denmark. By the time we arrive back in the UK in the autumn we\u2019ll have spent three years on the road, and slept in (and written blog posts from) around 750 different places<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"We

We made it. the North Cape in the Norwegian Arctic. Yeah baby!<\/p><\/div>\n

\"Ticking

Ticking off a bucket list item – the midnight sun in Arctic Norway, 2016<\/p><\/div>\n

We still have a base in the UK (which we call ‘The Cooler’), since we\u2019ve only let out some of the bedrooms in one of our properties, again through our management agent. Our remaining belongings are at home, and we have storage for the motorhome at a nearby farm, so we could opt to come back at any time, if we decide to do more paid work or want to be near family for example. The idea was to maintain a good level of flexibility to suit whatever circumstance arises in the future.<\/p>\n

\"The

Outside\u00a0‘The Cooler’ before renovation<\/p><\/div>\n

\"Outside

Outside ‘The Cooler’ after renovation<\/p><\/div>\n

\"Inside

Inside ‘The Cooler’ before renovation<\/p><\/div>\n

\"Inside

Inside ‘The Cooler’ after renovation<\/p><\/div>\n

Life has taken some twists and turns for us. We\u2019re both from hard working families. I\u2019m especially proud of my father\u2019s long years he worked the coal face, although I wish he\u2019d been able to support his family without wrecking his health. We worked hard too, but working hard wasn\u2019t fulfilling our basic need to be happy, something had to change. As smiling Moroccan\u2019s would tell us as they attempted to sell us everything under the sun: \u201cyou Europeans may have watches, but we Moroccans have time!\u201d<\/p>\n

Now neither Ju nor I wear a watch. Given a choice between a watch and an unforgettable local meal out, we\u2019d choose the experience every time. Nope, no watches, but we most certainly have time.<\/p>\n

Cheers, Jason<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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