Holidays and retirement are different, and you should refrain yourself from associating these two terms together. Holidays are critical to the success and happiness of your retirement, and should consequently be budgeted for as any other core expense.

Let’s define some terms first

What are Holidays?

We all love to take holidays, but we are probably looking for different experience. The only common trait is a limited stretch of time sandwiched between two long working periods, dedicated to leisure or recreation that we can enjoy at home or travelling. Many people envision to travel overseas where they could explore new experiences such as looking at beautiful scenery or eating local delicacies. Post Covid, staycation emerged as a new trend where people who might not travel far from their home (or even stay at their home), but would simply take time of their work.

What is retirement?

Then we have retirement. It is supposed to be an extended period of time occurring after an overly long work life, which will culminate with your reunification with your ancestors. As members of the larger FIRE community, our aim is to make the work life period shorter than the retirement period. During retirement, people can choose freely how to allocate their time. And it is a sharp contrast with the working life period. Indeed, during your work life, your time was mainly imposed to you: preparing the kids to go to school, going to work, enjoying some gathering with family and resting. Likely your kids won’t need you much nor your colleagues will be expecting you to show up.

So now, you just recover 80% of your awaken time. What are you going to do with it? This is the ultimate question that you should be able to answer if you want to live a happy retirement.

What do we expect in retirement?

When we were in our Accumulation phase, we anticipated the holidays as a Bedouin looks for an oasis in the desert. We were surviving the office grinders by planning and visualizing our next travel. Indeed, most of our holidays were spent on travelling the world. At that time, we didn’t have kids and life was simple. To name a few trips, we skydived in Hawaii, attended an orchestra in Budapest, went canyoning in New Zealand, skied in Niseko, sang along monks in Tibet. I even proposed to Mama FC during a wonderful holiday on Easter Island. All these trips really helped us to recharge.

Thus, after reaching our FI number, we celebrated our new retirement life by going on a cruise with our two kids and Mama FC’s family, followed by a 2-months trip to Kuala Lumpur. RE life could not start any easier. Why Kuala Lumpur? Because we wanted to assess if we would be happy to live there a few years, but Covid changed our plans. Side tracking, we will share our feedback on relocating to Kuala Lumpur in another post.

Naturally, we were expecting retirement to be similar to lifelong holidays. As we experienced trips during holidays, we envisioned many trips during retirement. However, the reality turned out to be quite different.

Be in the present

First, we were still living in an idealised future. We weren’t enjoying the moment nor the place we were. But we were spending a ridiculous amount of time planning for our next trips. How silly it was. It was also very tiring to conduct all this research online. And most of the world, or reality of it is still not online. The world is filled with people and experiences which are not and will remain offline. Sometimes, the best experiences and encounters are the ones which are not planned. It might be because we haven’t built up expectations for a particular activity.

Undeniably, it was very enjoyable to plan and travel, but we were kicking down the road the fact that we would have to settle somewhere. Why settle? Because we have 3 young kids (1, 3 and 5 years-old) who need stable foundations to discover the world. I admire people who travel the world with their children. However, Mama FC and I are perfectly aware that we are unable to manage all three of them all the time. It is simply not us, and not for us.

As we were relocating, we grossly underestimated the workload. I put aside the residency visa which you should manage on your own, and is very specific to the country you are going to. I would encourage you to read our other posts related to residency. The logistic is pretty straightforward. You contact one relocation service company. They will be able to help you with the process.

Build and nourish meaningful social interactions

The social dimension is regrettably underrated, but accounts for a large portion of your happiness. At the core, we, Humans are social animal in need of social interactions with other human beings. We could not stress enough the importance to initiate, cultivate and nourish relationships. On our first relocation, we were totally unprepared. And it was my home country! I guess that after living overseas for many years, we become foreigner to our own home. Separately, other factors (Covid, lockdown, curfew…) didn’t facilitate the integration into our new community. Although, as restrictions slightly lifted up, we signed up for activities but the wrong ones. We ended up with ‘real’ retirees, not FIRE retirees. We did it all wrong. Next time, we will plan for getting a routine asap, home/friends’ trips, sign up for activities we like, attend or create meetups with like-minded people.

Still plan for holidays

For most of our life, we have been accustomed to balance our day-to-day life, with newer experiences like holidays. Our parents are still taking holidays during their retirement, and there might be some wisdom into it. And we, younger FIRE retirees, should also plan for holidays. Beyond the fact that it will bring you lots of joy and happiness with a pinch of stress, holidays need to be planned and budgeted for! When you compute your retirement budget, you should allocate a similar amount of money as you were spending when you were working.

Indeed, our first version of budget was more a lean FIRE lifestyle. Our Withdrawal Rate was highly conservative (in the 2%~2.5% range), and our budget included housing, groceries, education, healthcare and some activities. Soon we realized that this lifestyle wasn’t for us, and we were lacking some activities and social interactions. Additionally, we wanted to offer new experiences to our kids (yoga, skying, zumba…) and also treat ourselves as we have been very frugal on our expenses for years. And of course, we also needed some holidays to visit friends and family who are living overseas. All these activities are not free, and need to be accounted for.

Gladly, our low withdrawal rate enabled us to enjoy some buffer. Thus, we were able to make some adjustments to our lifestyle, and enrich our life with new experiences. Although I have a deep frugal mindset, I acknowledge that these extra spending do contribute to our overall wellbeing. We are now more in the (3%~3.25% WR range). Despite we are very close to the maximum of our SWR, we feel that we have a richer life of experiences while still being very frugal on discretionary expenses.

Retirement isn’t the destination but a journey. What are the critical activities in your Early Retirement? How do they contribute to your overall happiness? Please share your special activities, and inspire our FIRE community.

Happy Fire Cracking!

Source: Image by Arek Socha from Pixabay

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