I have a surprise for y’all today 🙂 . My Partner has popped onto this blog from time to time to answer y’alls questions and talk about hitting his FIRE number and today he’s here to talk about how he retired recently!
- MY PARTNER IS RETIRING!
- My Partner Reached FI! A Q&A
- Purple’s Partner Spills All!: Answering Your Questions & Concerns
I’m so excited for him! So here are all the deets, straight from the man himself.
Hey gang! I’m back, I’m retired, I’m here to talk about it.
The last few months of work.
I gave notice pretty far in advance to give my team time to start hiring a replacement. I didn’t expect to get shown the door early but was okay with the idea if it happened. Just letting them know was a weight off of my shoulders, since my team was pretty small.
I gave a pretty vague explanation of what I would be doing, “taking a bunch of time off to focus on myself”, which hilariously got me a few “Is this a FIRE thing?” direct messages – turns out a lot of people in tech are familiar these days.
The last few months flew by after that. I kept thinking I would have more time to finish small side projects at work, and never got around to them. I felt pretty flighty and distracted as the day approached.
I ended up needing to deal with a big end of the year rush of bugs and support requests one last time, which was actually pretty nice. It was a reminder of some of the stress I was getting away from, but also was a chance to talk to and help out coworkers one last time and dig into a lot of different areas of the code base again.
I made sure I copied all of my performance reviews and feedback, mostly so I can remember nice things people said about me, but also to try to save some context of what I was actually doing as my memories of the day to day of work get further away.
My last day.
It was more bittersweet than I would have predicted. I’m thankful to have worked with some really great people and got a kind send-off. I said goodbye a few too many times before finally signing off of slack for the last time.
Then we had a pizza party with my family.
The first week.
It was pretty surreal? I went into it really curious as to how long it would take to feel different from a regular vacation, but it was immediate. I always spent some portion of vacation aware of how long I had left, similar to my weekends, kind of vaguely concerned that I needed to make sure I was having as much fun and rest as possible (which of course makes fun and rest harder).
That feeling just wasn’t there. The ever-present space that work took in the corner of my brain was just gone.
I’ve really tried to work on that antsy feeling of needing to be having more fun through the years, but was never great at it. Meditation helped, and it varied with how much I had big work projects hanging over my head. Retirement seems to have just solved it. I’m really thankful for that, but I’m also now wondering about what I should have done to fix it if I had to work until 65.
I’ve taken a few naps, which feel like the real indicator that I’m not feeling pressure to use every hour of non work time.
I was excited to ship back my work laptop, which is going to make my backpack significantly lighter while traveling, and I guess I won’t need my split keyboard all the time anymore either. It was fun to drive around doing errands in the middle of a work day without caring about when I needed to be back, and we stopped for birria tacos, subs, and coffee at three of our favorite places.
Since then.
Day to day in December felt a lot like a normal Christmas vacation – spending a lot of time with family and catching a bad cold. So this week in January while writing this is probably a better comparison.
We’ve been lifting heavy three times a week. I bought a squat rack, definitely a real investment, and only moderately botched the math on the height of the ceiling. I asked a brother-in-law to bring over an angle grinder and trim it for us, after confirming with the company’s support. Even though I would like to add running back to my exercise routine, it’s too icy or slushy to run right now.
I gave my last large (10% of income) donation to GiveWell, which came with some surprising emotions. I’m hoping market growth makes more large donations possible in the future, but now I guess I need to grapple with the question I punted in the past, if I should be donating 10% of my withdrawals. Probably on capital gains at least.
I’ve been playing a lot of Replicube, a delightful little programming puzzle game that feels like it took over some of the enjoyment I got out of my job (just some, most of my work was not that kind of micro optimization problem).
I was four weeks behind on updating my YNAB budget, which is out of character for me. Maybe that’s a sign that like Purple I’ll have an easier time spending in retirement and not sweat the details as much. It’s also a lot easier to stay under my discretionary food budget in my small hometown. We’re starting to get some great restaurants, but I can’t just walk to all of them.
I’m spending more time than I thought trying to schedule doctor and dental appointments, and signing up for an ACA plan. The paperwork piles up – I’m also switching residency, taking my permit test, transferring my 401k, etc etc.
I reached out to the local government about small potholes on the road to my parents’ place, which feels like classic retiree behavior. And it worked! They never got back to me but it was just fixed one morning a week later.
What I’m planning to do.
I’m still trying to listen to Purple’s advice to give myself time to just rest, but I’m also antsy to start getting into my productivity and “do hard things you value” phase. I haven’t hit some unending well of drive yet (it took a month to naturally start doing personal code projects during my sabbatical six years ago).
I’m really enjoying this comfortable happy ambiguity of not knowing what things are going to look like a day or a week or a year out. It’s totally up to me. When I think about “what do I want to be doing then” it’s fully open.
I’d like to:
- Dive into learning game development, and pick up Aseprite for 2d sprites and Blender for 3d modeling again.
- Play more video games, but fewer hours on time wasters. Probably time to uninstall Brotato, but at least I only play it while listening to podcasts. I made a list and have 30+ games I have already bought and have not played and have good reason to believe I’m going to love. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is next up, since my gaming podcasts are all discussing it right now for game of the year, but maybe after I replay Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom.
- Continue playing games with Purple most days after dinner, usually mystery games. We just played The Roottrees are Dead which was pretty delightful (we enjoyed Tacoma, Obra Dinn and Case of the Golden Idol together in the past, and Roottrees pairs some of the puzzle mechanics of Obra Dinn with a really cool 90s internet search mechanic).
- Read a lot more books. I finished Abundance and Dopamine Nation. Our little local library is cozy to hang out in too.
- Meditate. Go for walks every day (I’ve done more! But again, freezing cold and icy out.)
- Practice being bored and sitting with my thoughts and being present. Isolate scrolling reddit and youtube to an hour or two in the evening.
- Restart my daily spanish vocab in the Anki App (a mostly custom pictures + audio deck based on Fluent Forever’s principles), I fell off of it a few months ago unfortunately. It’s probably time to start doing actual speaking practice though, instead of just vocab, and I’d like to do an in-person language class like Purple and her mom did in Mérida. I’m excited to be off to México for a month and experience travel fully free of work.
- Continue spending more quality time with people. Daily family coffee time has been great. We’re starting to have dinner with friends and family more. I’d like to prepare more meals and bring them with us, which makes it low effort for people with kids and jobs and easier to slot ourselves into their busy lives.
- Really show up for people, which retirement gives you a lot of freedom and time to do. Like helping people move, helping people with website projects, helping people applying for tech jobs.
State of my finances.
I’ve had two years of great growth after first hitting my FIRE number. I was shooting for $27k a year spending on $777k invested for a 3.5% SWR. Since then I’ve upped my spending for inflation to $30k a year, while my assets have grown to $1.163 million, which is a safe withdrawal rate of 2.6%.
For the first five years or so I’m planning on just adjusting that $30k withdrawals for inflation. After that I’m planning to phase in a conservative CAPE based formula to determine when it’s safe to bump my discretionary spending. Per ERN’s Safe Withdrawal Rate Toolbox spreadsheet, I could already be safely spending $40.6k a year instead of $30k.
I’m also glad I have a safe margin to adjust that $30k to account for potentially increased ACA premiums, without needing to cut into my other spending like I might have needed to at my original 3.5% goal.
I spent about $37k last year, which is pretty close to my $30k goal if you amortize or don’t count $7k on a car purchase, $2k on a squat rack and weights, and $600 on an electric scooter (Before we had a car! It’s been super useful!). I’ll be keeping a close eye on how my spending changes in retirement and share an update sometime this year.
Outro.
Retirement so far? A+, would definitely recommend.
Super exciting changes! Congratulations to both of you. I am having a bit of a challenge with how to think about large one-off expenses, I have a few coming up this year and I know I need to keep the average inside my planned budget, tools like a sinking fund seem like too much work?
(Maple here) Thank you!
I have the same issue. I run into it from two sides – I try to build up savings over multiple years in ynab categories to pay for my next replacement computer or car, but after making a purchase, I also want to amortize the cost across multiple years when doing my year end spending analysis to get a better sense for what my average spending is without giant spikes. That works well enough but feels slightly like cheating this year since I hadn’t expected to buy a car and raised my ynab budget for the year to pay for it.
Congratulations to your partner. It’s great reading their perspective on early retirement. You are definitely the early retirement power couple 😊
Hi!
Savings rate of only 2,6%. Thats really surprisingly low. Do you ever listen to Risk parity radio. Frank has great insides to not die with the most money possible.
Regards Niek
(Maple here): 2.6% is definitely more cautious than I’d originally planned. I think the better way to think of it is that I locked in my spending based on a safe withdrawal rate of 3.5% two years ago when I hit my FIRE number, and have only inflation adjusted my spending since then, so it’s now equal to only 2.6% of my investments. This is kind of the paradox of the simple 4% rule, it’s arbitrary based on when exactly you start it, and also why I’ll switch to using CAPE based spending rules in the future to adjust to be less cautious based on the market.
I haven’t listened to Risk parity radio, I’ll check it out, thanks!
Congrats Purple Partner! I retired in November, and it’s been a dream. Can confirm that not having to take a work laptop everywhere lightens the load in more ways than one. The feeling that I had on that first Monday morning was priceless. Oh, and I got sick for a good long stretch in the first month as well.
I’m never going to do anything crazy spending wise, but I’ve been much more comfortable spending money in retirement than I thought that I would be.
Congratulations Partner of Purple! Super happy for you! 🎉🙌 I really enjoyed reading your post about how retirement has been going so far. Love that you no longer have to spend mental energy on getting the most out of your vacation time. You have all the time you need now. Wishing you and Purple more days filled with delight now that you both are FIRE! 🔥
Wow congratulations!!! Curious if you responded “yes” to those “is this FIRE?” DMs or kept that to yourself.
Given the impressive SWR you’re at with expected spending, I would nudge you to keep donating those withdrawals and/or gains! I also give 10%+ right now and know I won’t want to stop giving in retirement (early or otherwise), though 10% of withdrawals would be less of a dollar amount than 10% of income of course. I imagine it would feel strange to go from donating huge sums to almost nothing at all – especially since the needs are still there, and it feels good to be generous!
(Maple here): Hahaha yes, I was pretty open with my details with coworkers who figured it out and were curious about it. I think there’s a ton of overlap too in startup product and engineering folks, not everybody feels drawn to retire as early as possible, but the FIRE mindset around figuring out where your money actually makes you happy, and saving it effectively (in low cost index funds) seems pretty widespread these days.
I ended up just saying “retiring” in group conversations by the end since it felt less evasive than “indefinitely taking time off to focus on myself and my family.”
And thanks for the encouragement on donating! It is interesting to now be in a place where the donations will be much smaller but also have a larger risk on my long term withdrawal strategy. Time to figure that out before I have to take my first withdrawals.
Congratulations! I’m so happy for you (both)!
Regarding giving, I was also a 10%+ charitable giver pre-early-retirement and found the transition to giving a lower DOLLAR amount post-early-retirement emotionally- fraught, challenging, and ultimately interesting. As post-FIRE net worth has grown, I am now giving a larger PERCENTAGE than I used to and have also enjoyed adding donating TIME/volunteering to the mix, which was less doable during the work phase.
As an early retiree working with a larger FI Number and lower withdrawal rate than you originally planned for, it will be interesting to see if/how your own feelings evolve around this too. I will love to hear about it in a future update if you’d like to share.
Again, so many congratulations! Your particular journey(s) have been especially inspiring to me and I am OVERJOYED for your success(es)! Endless thank yous for sharing the journey with us!
(Maple here): Thanks, and thanks for sharing your experience!
After my previous post on how I ramped up locking myself into giving 10%, I probably should have locked myself in ahead of time on donations before I retired.
So much of our planning for FIRE is about avoiding the 10% of possibilities where we get really bad sequence of returns luck, and risk running out of money, but the larger majority of time we’re likely to end up with a lot of excess growth. I am very hopeful that my ability to donate will grow with that.
I’m definitely burnt out on commitments for a bit but would love to eventually donate my time as well. I’m wondering if there will be useful places I could donate my programming skills, which feels like the highest leverage way to help out, or if that’d be too much like work and I’ll rather volunteer in other ways.
Exciting, and congratulations!
I’m curious how you chose your timing – did you fall victim to One More Year/Quarter/Month or was it easy to make the call to actually retire?
Thank you! My Partner talked about why he was waiting for two years in a previous post – here’s what he said and a link to it in context:
“I committed to two more years of working to let my investments grow, and to divert all of my savings towards helping some people I love with their own retirement (not Purple, she still gets nothing).” https://apurplelife.com/2025/09/09/partner-retiring/
(Maple here): Thanks! And yep, as Purple said, I’d committed to saving to help with some other people’s retirements while at the peak of my earnings potential. But having two extra years to watch my savings grow absolutely helped me feel more confident in my plan and kept me mentally locked into the end date I’d set, so it was mentally very easy by the end to pull the trigger. The only waffling I did was on whether to finish out December or not.
Congrats, Mr. Purple! You have a pretty well-thought-out list of goals. That’s a good sign that you’re going to enjoy your retirement.
Personally, I only needed a short period of decompression after I quit my job, and then I started wanting to dive into my hobbies and check things off my bucket list. I haven’t been bored at all. In fact, it wasn’t long before I wondered how I’d ever had time to work!
My advice, which I think I’ve written elsewhere, is to aim to accomplish one or at most two things each day. I’ve found that to be a rule that keeps me from getting bored, but also stops me from feeling overscheduled and stressing myself out.
(Maple here): Thanks! I like your rule. I can definitely feel it already, I’ll sit down and finally bang out a call to the dentist and a credit card application and then feel like “welp, that’s enough for one day” haha. I’m curious how it’ll feel once I try fitting in 4-5 hours of programming a video game soon.
Congratulations!! This is such amazing news, and very happy for you both. Do you have a mix of tax deferred, Roth and brokerage accounts to generate income for ACA and do Roth conversions?
Out of curiosity, why such a low SWR? Just to give yourself more cushion for growth? Also, in an alternate world, if Mr. Purple were single, what would their expenses and SWR be?
All the best and looking forward to reading more about your adventures!
(Maple here): Thanks!
I’m relatively heavy in brokerage accounts but have plenty in traditional IRAs and will be doing a roth conversion ladder.
Regarding the low SWR, I probably should have clarified it more in the post. The way I think of it is that I locked in 3.5% as my SWR two years ago when I hit my FIRE number, and because my assets have continued to grow that’s now equivalent to 2.6%. Resetting my spending at a higher rate would also reset my sequence of returns risk.
Single spending is an interesting thought experiment – I’d likely double my rent costs, but our rent is extremely cheap in my hometown, and double my (very new) car costs. On the flip side, I would likely travel much less on my own. Beyond that, Purple and I have very few shared expenses. I guess dating can be expensive though. So overall I think it’d be pretty equivalent.
Congrats!! So exciting! 😀
Congrats on pulling the cord. Most people wait for good weather to start out but maybe you enjoy the cold :). Anyways hard to finally make the decision so enjoy all of your hard work to get there
Congratulations!!! That’s so exciting – and inspiring for those of us still making our way towards FIRE.