When I lose a habit, do I ever lose it! The upheaval and new routines of the past couple of years completely shook my blog. It affected our early retirement plan, too. I will say, though, that our finances did not go quite so far off the rails as my writing did. Given our long absence, it makes more sense to restart rather than catch up. You can expect some updates in the coming weeks to projects that were in progress when we last posted regularly. But overall, I am viewing this as reintroduction and reset. 

You can read about who we were when we launched this website here. Our financial life has subsequently become more complex. We own two residential properties. One is our primary residence. The other is currently a rental, our former home, a few hours’ drive from our current home. Once again, we have found ourselves to be accidental landlords. Given recent inflation, the purchase of a second property now seems inspired. More to come on the financials of these properties.

Our pet situation, together with the long slog of the pandemic, has clipped our wings. One of our cats was diagnosed with a chronic illness requiring twice daily medication. The other cat recently turned 20 years old! The expense and challenge of finding reliable care for the pets when we travel has limited how often we leave home for prolonged trips. 

Another major event we experienced was a serious medical injury for me. This will not be news to those who follow us on Instagram. I slipped on ice and fell during my daily run in January 2022, causing multiple fractures in my lower tibia and fibula. I underwent surgery to implant stabilizing hardware a week later. Months of recovery and rehabilitation followed. I posted regular updates on our Instagram page if you’d like to see how recovery went for me. Now, more than a year later, I consider myself fully healed, at least in terms of a return to normal function. I celebrated recovery by running a couple of races in the fall of 2022–a 5k and a half marathon.

We remain in pursuit of financial independence and early retirement. At this point we are at least partially “work optional.” Our expenses have changed, our dreams and plans have become less clear. For now, we continue to invest and work our 9-5 careers. Going forward, we will use this space largely as we did before. We will post progress updates (we are closer to, but have not quite yet hit the numbers we initially set for our early retirement). We will write about how we live with intention and focus. We will also share with you our visions and plans for retirement. My plan is to resume a weekly posting schedule going forward, with new posts on Mondays to start your week.