Traditional Retirement is Only an Insurance Policy

Some argue that working for 50 years of your life to retire at 68 is no goal to look forward to. Standard retirement should be considered more like a “last case scenario” type of thing. In case everything else fails.

Photo by ozeias - http://www.flickr.com/photos/ozeias/4245488294/

You’ll spent the best 40 or 50 years of your life working at least five days per week, vacationing two weeks per year. Too little. You retire when you are old and tired and hope that you saved enough to survive the next 10 to 20 years. Regardless of where you are in life, one thing is for sure. Life is short. Life is to be enjoyed. You only live once.

The Decision

The wife and I decided we wanted to take close to a year off as soon as we could to travel the world. We both share the same passion for travel. So we created a plan to save, rid ourselves of all our expandable possessions and take as much time off as possible. The initial decision took a bit of time to sink in. A couple weeks went by and we just couldn’t stop talking about it. We started to execute the plan shortly thereafter.

We made a list of all that had to happen in order for this 9-12 month journey around the world to become reality. We needed to sell our condo and most of our stuff, return the leases, and save money. We also had to learn a lot about other cultures, camping, long-time travel, hostels, and basic survival skills. All this took about 10 months.

We realized how radical this change would be, both for our relationship and our future. We are young and have no kids. I am not sure we would have been able to do this had we had children. We’ve been married over 4 years and now felt like the perfect time. The world as we know may also come to an end in 2012 :-).

It may seem as if making and executing on our decision was easy, it wasn’t. I did spend a bunch of sleepless nights thinking about the future. I finally figured out that the experiences gained will far outweighs any downsides such as loss of financial stability or lack of stuff.

People say you should concentrate on the present, that the future will come before you know and the past is out of your control.

This is obviously easier said then done. Eventually I came to terms with the fact that life was short and traveling the world would be an eye-opening, once in a lifetime experience.