Oops, I'm late with my post. It's almost halfway through August and I'm only now getting to publish my July early retirement costs.
That reminds me of another reason why I like my early retired life, there's no boss to tell me I've missed a deadline. Happy days.
To be honest, the costs are moving into a less relevant phase for the next six months while we're travelling in Australia and Asia and then take possession of our new apartment in the French Alps. Our costs are not going to be "normal" during this period.
I have to pinch myself when I type sentences like that. It's hard to believe that not that long ago I was an accountant doing the daily job grind, and now I'm travelling the world and about to relocate to another foreign country. My mid life crisis is clearly in full swing 😜
Anyway, for what they're worth, here are the costs for July - there is a table in USD and another table in GBP (the same information just in different currency), so just click left or right to get to the currency you prefer.
Looking at the bottom line total costs, it seems like we're way over budget. But I'm not worried about it, that bottom section includes our Round the World trip (phase 1) costs, which are not normal.
Instead I tend to look at the cost total that has the red line around it. So long as that's sufficiently under budget to let me take a vacation or two, then I'm relaxed about our costs.
In fact, our passive income to July is more than our total spend, so that definitely means things are OK. For some reason, which I can't explain (probably me just being ultra cautious), the budget I've set is quite a bit below our expected passive income level, so we have a good amount of wiggle room on our spending.
July consisted of leaving Dubai, our home for the last 13 years, a family trip to Switzerland to visit our daughter, then to the UK for more family visits, before we departed for four months of travelling on 16 July.
That makes the costs a bit of a mess. Lots of eating out (paying for a family of four rather than two), some weird grocery shopping, and a big amount lumped together under the heading of Round the World Trip, which I'll break down in a separate post.
I suspect that makes this cost information less than useful for potential early retirees, although I suppose it's possible that one or two others may be following the same mid life crisis plan as me, in which case, this post is for you.
What I am interested to find out is how much we spend on our travels. So far we've eaten out a lot, and that's going to add up, so we are going to have to figure out how to prepare our own food more often.
I find it fun figuring out how to change things to fit our new circumstances, whether that's how to fill the time that work used to occupy, or how to be a middle aged guy travelling routes more commonly the preserve of recent school or university graduates. I'm sure these things are helping me enjoy my early retirement.
I'm going to leave this post now, and concentrate on today's other job, catching the bus from Brisbane to Byron Bay on Australia's East coast. It's not a bad life😀