Purple’s Partner Spills All!: Answering Your Questions & Concerns

I have a surprise for y’all today. For several years I’ve been asked questions about my partner and I’ve done my best to answer them after asking him for his opinions. However, after y’all enjoyed when he wrote his first blog post here about making awesome coffee anywhere in the world, I asked him to tackle your questions himself 🙂 . So back by popular demand, here is my partner answering the questions you submitted on Instagram and Twitter. Take it away my dude!

EMOTIONS

[Purple Note: Seems like y’all are stuck on one question in particular 😉 . I won’t say you seem to be leading the witness, buuuut…]

Is there resentment?
How do you deal with jealousy?
Does he deal with FOMO?
Is he jealous?
Do you deal with jealousy or resentment? 
How do you deal with partner envy that Purple is retired and you aren’t?

We both wondered about this before she retired, and so far it hasn’t been a problem, though it seems pretty normal as long as you deal with it healthily.

I also had just spent nine months between jobs, and at least five of those not worrying about job hunting, during which she was really busy at work, so we both got a bit of a view on both sides of it.

I’m mostly very happy for her. It’s been great watching her pick up new hobbies like bird watching and learning Spanish. She’s noticeably less stressed and happier.

There’s definitely envy, like, “I wish I could also stay in bed instead of getting on this vendor call,” but I don’t resent her for that, I just look forward to being able to do it myself.

I think we also benefit from our separate finances here, as well as having made similar incomes and being on similar life paths. I think it would be very emotionally hard for one person to retire early while the other *has* to work until 60 due to their income (or have to live much more frugally).

Are you two happier now that Purple’s not working?

She’s definitely happier, and I’m also happier in general for a number of unrelated reasons, but her happiness and lack of stress definitely is a part of it, as well as being able to travel so much more.

Does it annoy him if you take solo vacation?

She already did that with her mom a bunch, so it’s felt pretty normal, but I’m also working fully remote so I actually end up coming along most of the time these days anyways. We did have to have some boundary setting conversations about exactly how many months on the other side of the planet without me were appropriate, but we got there. I think we compromised on one?

I actually expected her to go exploring alone during the workday a lot more, but she’s been very content, mostly waiting for me to be available, and lounging around the apartments or gardens reading, writing, and video calling with people. I think we’ll probably do a bit more exploring once I’m retired as well, but we’re also pretty homebodyish and happy finding a comfortable balance that might still look pretty lazy.

MENTAL

How do you cope mentally with the monthly change of environment? Does it affect you?

Regarding still working during it: I was concerned about how it’d go while working full time, whether it’d be really distracting or tiring and either really hurt my ability to get work done, or work would ruin my ability to experience the places we were staying. But aiming for a minimum of a month at a time has been going remarkably smoothly in both directions.

Outside of work, I’ve been loving it. I’ve always enjoyed changes of scenery. I liked rearranging furniture just for something new.

DOMESTIC STUFF

Is she expected to pick up more of the household tasks because she has more time now? If you divided tasks while both working has that changed now?

I try to live by the quote, “Do unto others 20% better than you would expect them to do unto you, to correct for subjective error.” (Linus Pauling, apparently) Both people should feel like they’re doing slightly more, and be okay with that.

I can see this being way more of a point of contention with couples that have children, when there’s more work around the house than two people can reasonably do. We’re lucky to get by pretty easily.

Purple definitely does the majority of our travel planning, so, as always, major credit for that. That takes a bunch of work and is definitely a potentially unfair imbalance, but she also wants to go more places right now, while I’m happy bumming about basically wherever. Our trip in the Catskills was a great test of just finding a relatively cheap place in a relatively small town and hanging out. And it was great.

She also does more of the dishes. And I do more of the grocery shopping, cooking, sweeping, laundry, sewing (okay there’s very little sewing, but I do it all), and carrying boxes of seltzer up hills.

RETIREMENT PLANS

Is he working towards the same goal?/Is he planning to retire? When?

Yup! I was the original FIRE aspirer in the relationship, which she’s blogged about at some point in the last eight years. When she gets into things, she dives really deep, and once she sold herself on FIRE, she went all in and became more frugal than I was, and even started a blog about it.

I was raised pretty frugally, and the sudden shift from being an intern to my first real income of about ~$50k was a huge change. It was too sudden for lifestyle inflation to sneak in immediately, and while I knew in general I’d prefer to have a dollar saved than to spend it, I didn’t know anything about the mechanics beyond that point. I dove into reddit r/personalfinance, and from there ran into r/financialindependence and Bogleheads (probably more the philosophy of Bogleheads than the forums specifically). It was pretty easy to make some spreadsheets and a plan, and keep stashing away each raise from then on.

It is nuts to me how quickly it went from the boring middle to suddenly Purple retiring and me being pretty close. I should be able to retire in the next few years, market willing.

Does he have plans to retire soon? And if he does, what’s on his bucket list to do?

I’d love to take a month or two to decompress and fully unplug, and stay in a cabin in the woods (or airbnb on the beach near a nice coffeeshop) with no internet and a lot of books, and really try to rebuild my attention span and slow down the pace of my life. I’d like to take time to just read and meditate and run and face reality. I think the no internet might be key there.

After that I’d love to keep traveling. There’s so much of the US that seems fun to try out to me, while Purple leans more international, but we’ve had good luck picking from both so far.

We’ve already done a much better job of traveling to be near friends and family. I definitely think you need to be around people longer than just a week here and there on vacations and Christmas to actually build and cherish those relationships, and I want to do even more of that.

I also enjoy programming and still expect to do a fair bit of it as a hobby. I think it’d be really fun to finally complete a little hobby video game project.

And lately I’ve been really into youtube videos on building small homes, and installing solar panels or mini hydro dams, so that’s a fun daydream.

Similarities and differences on the amount of safety net needed for retirement/retirement plans?

I actually re-evaluated my risk appetite and spending recently for a number of reasons: to adjust for inflation, my latest years of data on spending habits, how things seem much more real with my original number rapidly approaching, a higher level of happiness at my job, and hitting probably my highest earning years.

I bumped my safe withdrawal rate down from 4% to 3.5%. The yearly budget itself actually stayed pretty level after testing things out with full time travel, no longer paying Seattle rent, and our ability to easily adjust our biggest spending categories (rent, food, and travel) as necessary to target a certain budget.

Does your partner’s early retirement increase your motivation to retire as well?

I think it’s actually made me *less* anxious to retire, because her quitting freed us up to travel full time and start living more of the retirement life together immediately.

Along with my higher level of happiness at work, and a lot of steps I’ve taken towards better mental health, I’ve been thinking more about what I want to retire *to*, instead of just wanting really badly to escape from work. I never believed retirement would immediately solve all of my problems, but watching Purple in retirement has helped me think more clearly about positively building happiness instead of just avoiding things that make me unhappy, and where I want to find fulfillment from. I think she’s naturally more content and better than I am at filling her free time with things she enjoys, and that’s something I can practice even while working.

OPINIONS

Do you worry it won’t work out ($$$) for Purple? 

Not really, no. She’s made very reasonable choices balancing risk, in my opinion. We do quibble about asset allocations and safe withdrawal rates. I definitely think it’s possible we run into scenarios well outside of the datasets we’re basing our analysis on, and let’s be honest, it would suck if we have to significantly cut our budgets, or go back to work at an older age.

But I think there’s an important difference between accepting the existence of a reasonable amount of risk, and needing to spend time *worrying* about it. I worry about plenty of things, but I try to worry usefully. (I also worry about worrying too much.)

SPENDING

What is his budget like?

I’m pretty frugal too. Last I checked I spend maybe 30% more than Purple. I spend a fair bit more on food, half due to being 50% larger than her, and half because I like coffee and snacks out a lot more than her. I’ve got a larger hobbies budget for gaming pcs, bicycles, running watches, etc.

I definitely try to put money only where I think it’ll actually improve my life and happiness. I actually want to make a crowdsourced website to draw charts of the marginal returns on spending more on a hobby or experience, like, “if you like wine, the $30 bottle is definitely worth trying but the $60 bottle isn’t twice as good.”

How do you budget time and money to travel with your retired partner?

No longer paying Seattle rent goes a surprisingly long way in the rest of the country and the rest of the world. Both that Seattle is expensive, but also that we’re not doubling up on rent by paying for a home base while also traveling. Rent is our biggest expense, and we just plan travel around our budget, fitting in some above average-cost stays with some cheaper ones. Month long airbnb discounts also help relative to regular vacations costs.

JOB

How does he structure his days?

I’d hoped to be much less structured, fitting work around our adventures, but my role has shifted to more meetings and more expectations of availability, so I’ve been pretty 9 to 5 lately. Or 7 to 3 on the west coast, or 4pm to midnight in Thailand, which I don’t recommend.

If you didn’t work in the industry you’re in, what would be your top job choice? Both for FI and for pleasure, if the answers are different.

I’ve really been enjoying carpentry videos on youtube lately. There’s a meme or joke about programmers always wanting to quit to go into woodworking, which I really get – something about making something more permanent and real with your hands.

But also I’ve done some physical labor and there’s a biiig difference between hobbyist building or woodwork and doing it 40 hours a week.

CONCLUSION

And that’s all he wrote! I hope it was helpful to hear straight from my partner’s perspective about early retirement, our nomad travel lifestyle and everything in between. Let us know if you have any other questions below! 

Do you have any other questions for my partner?