The numbers.
No, they haven’t arrived yet. I’m just like those Lost people, waiting with my future tied to a string of mysterious numbers. But I’m not actually stressed about it. It’s been a week since Josh was “offered” the job, and I did think that we would have a paper offer by now, but in the grand scheme of things, the numbers either work out for us to stay or they don’t. Either way, we’ll be fine.
One of the reasons that this transition to retirement isn’t stressing me out is because we’ve been preparing for it for years. I’m no math wiz, but I’m a money/numbers nerd and I listen to financial podcasts for fun. About 10 years ago we became debt free by following Dave Ramsey’s plan (Total Money Makeover). We cancelled all of our credit cards and slashed all of our expenses to make it happen. We even dropped a home phone before it was cool and suffered through the early days of VoIP that made everyone sound like they were talking underwater. That might not seem worth it to save $30 a month, but all the little things we did combined added up over time.
Once we eliminated our debt we set goals for future savings — like buying a house. Someday when we grow up we’ll finally own a home and I want to be prepared when the time comes. We wanted to travel during our time overseas so we started funneling the money that would have gone to college savings for the kids into our family travel fund. That’s not the choice everyone would have made, but I joked that I was giving the kids their education now, through seeing the world, and we’ll do college on the cheap later (as Calvin is doing currently at community college — no regrets). The point is that we have a finite amount of money coming in so we choose some things and sacrifice other things.
Now with retirement coming up, that house fund that has been growing over the years can double as an emergency fund if this job doesn’t end up working out. I figure we can last at least a year by drawing on that money carefully and that will be plenty of time for Josh to figure out what we’re going to do next. And yes, that’s how our partnership works best. I am agreeable to going anywhere in the world and Josh will do the work once we get there. Then I make the money that he earns go further. Win. Win. Win.