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And yes, I am completely serious. My new aspiration is to become a part-time explorer/part-time putterer within the next 3-5 years. Funnily enough, that’s pretty much the same thing I did as a young child: explore the neighborhoods (or wherever I was) and putter around doing things. Yeesh, it only took me decades to figure out that I wanted to be right back where I started.

Can you tell that I’ve been reading Cashing in on the American Dream: How to Retire at 35 by Paul Terhorst? When I saw that Madison recommended it in her post on the 29 steps she took to leave the workforce at age 29, and that her other favorite book was MY favorite book (Your Money or Your Life) I had to go and check it out. Literally. I was happy to see that our library had a copy on the shelf, so I snapped it up. So what if I’m past 35? I still have time to retire young.

While some of the information in the book is outdated, much of it still applies. You CAN retire on relatively little if you are willing to cut your infrastructure and reduce your required expenditures. I’ve been working on doing those two things for a while now, along with increasing my income. I just never had it spelled out so clearly that doing this can equal doing my favorite things — wandering around the world poking into things with my family. And doing all the other random stuff that I enjoy: writing, building things, creating artwork, photography, helping people, etc.

So I decided to start with the short version of how to retire early from Cashing In:

Do your arithmetic
Do some soul-searching
Do what you want

I’ve already done most of the arithmetic (although of course I will triple check when the time gets closer) so I moved on to “Do some soul-searching”. Surprisingly that was a whole lot easier than I thought it would be: It took me about 10 minutes. It’s not that I don’t have a very deep soul either; it’s just that I think that this book came into my life at exactly the right time. I’ve BEEN soul searching for years. I’ve been analyzing, simplifying, prioritizing and daydreaming. I just needed that final push to arrive at the 10 minute summary and to recognize what I really want to go for.

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