I think I'm a normal kind of guy, although I've perhaps had a slightly non-typical life in some respects.  I'm from the UK, 48 years old, married to Sally and we have two children, Rebecca and Sam.  Rebecca finished university and started her first job in mid 2017, at which time Sam started university.  Sally's a teacher and I'm an accountant, or at least I used to be.

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I decided to retire early, and stopped working at the end of 2016, when I was 47.  I'd been unhappy with my job for a while, reached a tipping point and decided it wasn't smart to keep on doing something I didn't enjoy.  I figured that life is for living and, if it turned out that quitting my job was a mistake, I could always fix that later.

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Although I latterly stopped enjoying my job, that wasn't always the case, and my work has opened up some fantastic opportunities for us.  I started at the bottom, didn't go to university and got my first job as an accounts clerk.  My professional accounting qualifications were done on day release and evening courses.  Aged 24, I took a transfer to a job in Jamaica, where we stayed for four years.  Since then, we've lived and worked in the UK, Hong Kong, South Africa and the United Arab Emirates, where I was finance director for a construction company.  I'm a big believer that you make your own luck - although we were fortunate to get the first opportunity in Jamaica, it was up to us to decide to accept it (when many others wouldn't) and to then work hard to make a success of it.  Working away from familiar surroundings, family and friends isn't always easy, but it opened up a some wonderful experiences and new friendships for us.

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We are still living in Dubai.  Sally works as a primary school teacher, and I'm not working.  The idea for this blog came from my research to find out what "not working" meant, what would I do, would I be bored, how much would it cost, would we run out of money?  I couldn't find the answers, and thought that there may be other people searching for the same information.  Although our circumstances won't exactly match, this blog will give my real life answers to these questions so that they can help you in your thoughts about early retirement.  I plan to post an analysis of what I spend each month, my cost to retire, and some of the things that I do.  I hope that it is interesting and useful and would love to hear your feedback, suggestions and questions.

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