FIRE Goals Update: 1 year of Early Retirement

A year ago I early retired from my insane job as a cop. Before I left, I had high hopes, set goals, and prepared to fucking dominate my hard won freedom. How did it go? Did I achieve enlightenment or crash and burn? Read on to find out!

Back when I was plugging away at financial independence, I would daydream about all of the stuff I would do when I finally left work and did this whole early retirement thing. As my last day drew nearer, I started planning in earnest. I wanted to do All. Of. The. Things. Climb some more mountains, travel constantly, get back into fighting, put solar panels on our roof, start a PhD program….And then I caught myself.

Having read plenty of other people’s chronicles of their lives immediately post retirement, I knew there was a tendency to try to squeeze too much in, too soon. This led to many being more stressed in retirement than when they were working.

This tendency is understandable, as if you’re on the path to achieving financial independence, you’re the type of person who is driven, motivated, and can fucking crush goals like a frat boy crushes inevitable liver failure.

I realized that I was about to fall into the same trap. So I dialed it back quite a bit, and set the following goals for my first year of retirement:

1. Support my wife as she increases her workload. 
2. Sleep better.
3. Decompress.
4. Do the 60 for 60 meditation thing.
5. Experiment with less child care
6. Maintain my workout stuff.
7. Mountain bike a little bit more.

Here’s how that shit went.

Support my wife as she increases her work load

Much of my police career was spent on the SWAT team working batshit crazy hours. Even when I left the tactical team after burning out, I still worked high pressure cop jobs. To keep things running on the home front, my wife reduced her hours at work and did most of the childcare stuff. Due to her going to 20 hours a week, she was relegated to simple yet monotonous grunt work at her engineering job. Though this type of work was easy to juggle with taking care of the kids, she missed the intellectual stimulation of more complex work. So my primary goal this past year was to pay my wife back. I would take care of the child and home stuff so she could get back to doing the work she wanted to.

It should be known that I’m writing this post in a coffee house right now. My wife is sitting next to me working on her engineery stuff. I just asked her “hey, did I support you this past year as you increased your work load?”

Her exact words were “yeahhhuup”-which to my ears means fucking success.

Further discourse: accomplishing this was more challenging than I thought. The kids are wonderful, yes. But even just getting them to and from their schools is some crazytown insanity. And I’m pretty spent after carting them around, cooking their dinners, making sure they have snacks, getting them dressed, grocery shopping, cleaning…all that domestic shit. Apparently being a homemaker is a fuck ton of work. A friend of mine was joking about how easy it was to be a stay at home mom, laughing as he quoted some comedian who said “any job you can do in your pajamas is NOT a difficult job!” I had to restrain myself from gouging out his eyes.

To say I have a greater appreciation for stay at home parents out there is an understatement.

The shift in my identity has been weird too. I’ve spent most of my adult life being The Man. The last half of my time in the Army I was in charge of stuff. As a cop, I was always in charge. I made shit happen, and other people supported me. Their schedules and workloads were bent to priorities I set. Now my wife’s job is the primary guide of our family dynamic, and I’m here to support it. I’d love to say I’m some enlightened uber feminist dude that has taken the shift in stride. Alas, I’m not.

To say the least, it’s been weird. And I must constantly fight my urge to set off on new challenges, as I have to temper my ambitions with the knowledge that they have to take a back seat to my domestic support role. I’m still trying to figure out this balance.

Sleep Better

I spent most of my cop years on ever changing shift work. The last year I worked my shift started at 6pm, and ended at 4am. I would try to sleep until noon, but even when I did I still felt like crap. I was also on call for most of my career, so it was common for me to be woken up up in the middle of my sleep cycle to go back to work. With retirement, I finally was able to get on a normal person schedule. I go to bed around 9:15 pm, and get up at 6am so I have a few minutes to myself before the kids get up. I’ve also implemented everything that Huberman guy has said about sleep.

Overall, my sleep is way better, and I feel way better. It’s not perfect-occasionally one of our kids will wake me up. I still wake up to PTSD induced nightmares a few times a week, and it can take hours to get back to sleep. That’s fine, I chalk this up to the price I paid for getting to do some badass shit. Despite these sleep interruptions, I have to say I’m doing way better in the sleep realm now that I’m not working. Success!

Decompress

TL:DR on this one-I’m still working on this. As I look, I’m for sure more decompressed than I was a year ago. But I know I’ve got a long way to go. Which is fine. I’ve survived some tough shit: I’ve had about a dozen people try to kill me. Been shot at a bunch. Been shot once. Had people try to stab me. Watched as kids and adults died due to serious trauma, been helpless to stop other kids from being trafficked. Seen plenty of recently dead people. Watched people kill themselves after I’ve been unable to stop them. Attended far too many friends and co-workers funerals. Look-I know I chose that life, and that’s fine. Going back, I would not change anything, and I’m proud that I always tried to do what I could to help other people. And I’m Just Some Dude-I was unable to save everyone I encountered. To think that I’d be completely decrompressed by now is straight ridiclous. But things are better than they were, and I think they’ll conitue to get better. We’ll just call this a work in progress.

Do the 60 for 60 meditation thing

I’ve been meditating for years, but no more than 20 minutes at a time. It’s helped me chill a bit, and live more in the moment. Years ago I heard about an extended meditation protocol which that Naval Ravikant guy popularized. You do 60 minutes of meditation every day for 60 days. According to the internets, this has helped people improve their mental well being and assisted them with making major life decisions. This sounded great to me, but I never had time to dedicate to such a practice. Retirement changed that, so I gave it a try. I documented my experience with the exetend meditation thing over the past year:

• Meditation, Fuck Yeah
• The Art of Not Doing Shit

To sum up: yes, I meditated for an hour a day for 60 days straight. It didn’t really do much for me. Oh well, glad I tried it.

Experiment with less child care

I definitely experimented with this. Way more than I expected or wanted. And I learned a lot about myself, our culture, and the world.

Last year I set the goal of spending one day a week with each of our two kids, and I planned on taking one out of daycare at a time so we could spend the day together before our oldest started kindergarten this past fall. I planned on starting this a few months after I retired, so I could first flip my sleep schedule and be awake when our kiddos are. I hoped that I’d enjoy this, as I’d previously loved spending the full 12 weeks of FMLA with our kids after they were born. I figured I might eventually take the youngest kid down to part time daycare, or maybe even take her out completely.

Then our daycare pulled some shady stuff which resulted in us starting a child services investigation. Thanks to my new found freedom we were able to immediately take our kids out of that situation, despite there being a six month wait list for all the other day cares in our area. Instead of slowly becoming a part time stay at home dad (SAHD), I plunged into the full time SAHD role literally overnight.

It did not go well.

Ubiquitous obligatory disclaimer: I love my kids more than I knew was capable of. Still, it sucked.

Those months of full time SAHD were some of the most stressed I’ve ever been. Much more stressed than my time in Afghanistan. More stressed than the sleep deprived years I spent ping-ponging from one critical incident to another as a cop. My anxiety and depression reached levels that I had previously not experienced. Apparently being a full time SAHD is not for me.

Our oldest started kindergarten, and we got our youngest in a much better daycare three days a week. The stress still lingered, so a few months ago our youngest began going five days a week, 7 hours a day. The stress dissipated. She seems happier, as does our oldest. I think they both enjoy spending some time with a happier dad instead of lots of time with stressed out dad. I know I enjoy our time together a lot more too.

This one feels like a failure, but I have to constantly remind myself to reframe it as a learning experience. I know more about myself and my limits. I sure as hell appreciate all the stay at home parents out there, and have learned a lot more about our culture and gender roles. Nothing to do but move forward.

Maintain my workout stuff

Before retiring I was working out six days a week, and was in fairly decent shape. Despite this, I was tempted to set some major fitness goals which I could use my newfound time to help achieve. Having had plenty of injuries, many of which were due to overtraining, I dialed this back. Instead, I wanted to maintain my schedule, and continue to incrementally improve my fitness. This was a success. I’ve changed stuff up a bit-I now lift three days a week instead of two, I still do one day of yoga, and I’ve maintained at least 2 days of some sort of cardio. Working out has always been an anchor in my life, and helped me to reduce stress. It sure as hell helped as I dealt with the previous goal, and I’m glad I built the habit a few decades ago.

Mountain bike a little bit more

Before retiring, I got out to the local trails about once a week. I’d also hit the epic trails an hour away maybe once a month. Every ride was amazing, but generally rushed as I had to squeeze it in between more pressing responsibilities. I hoped this past year would allow me to get out some more and not be as rushed. And I did.

I used to try and get as much riding in as I could in the 45 minutes I had scraped out. This was a great workout, but not always enjoyable. After bouncing from the job, I now take my time and enjoy the ride. Sometimes I ride for a couple of hours, but most of the time I stick to around an hour. After learning about the zone 2 training thing (so hot right now) , I stopped worrying about trying to go as fast as possible. Most times I even drive the slightly longer route to the trails which avoids the highway, and relax while listening to a podcast in the car. It’s nice.

I hit the more distant epic trails less than I did working, mostly because of my full time SAHD responsibilities. Maybe this year I’ll get there more. Maybe not. I’m really loving the goal of just enjoying the ride, instead of trying to win at strava and instagram.

I set goals a year ago for this retirement thing, and overall I’d say it went well. I’m glad I didn’t overextending myself trying to crush arbitrary goals that matter little in the grand scheme of things. Lowering the bar, and setting achievable goals that would generally improve my life resulted in an enjoyable year despite the challenges. I’ll try to remember to continue to dial back my overachieverness so I don’t turn into a giant stress ball.

You’ve probably noticed some stuff missing from this post:

• I sprinkled in some of my thoughts about this past year, but didn’t really discuss what I now think about the whole retirement thing.
• I also haven’t mentioned what my goals, if any, are for next year.

I’d love to write more about both those points, and who knows, maybe I will! But right now we’re at like 2200 words and I feel that I’ve dragged you on enough. I’ll say this-it was a good year, I think next year will be even better, and I enjoy most days post-retirement way more than I did when I’m working. I hope you’re in the same boat, and if not, you get there sooner than later.

Let me know in the comments if there’s anything else you’re wondering about; be it about last year, the present, or what’s to come. 🙂