Welcome to our Journey!

Hi everyone! We’re Gaby and Jay and we’re excited to share our journey to early retirement with you!

So we set this goal for ourselves after a lot of talking with each other about what we want out of life and how we want to go about it.

First, who we are:

We live in Texas; Jay is originally from Chicago and moved to Texas about 15 years ago. He has family all over the country! Gaby is from Peru and Venezuela; she came to Texas about 11 years ago. Her family is very close even though they are geographically distant.

Jay is a computer nerd, he has been doing it a very long time. Gaby is an educator; she has a very cool job. In her own words: “I work with school leaders and teachers who are innovating to reimagine what the school experience can be in order to really prepare students for their future. It’s a really cool job, sometimes challenging, never boring, and incredibly rewarding!”

We have been extremely fortunate that we have not (yet!) been impacted by any layoffs or furloughs and that we can both work from home.

Next: what we’re about

We realized early in our relationship that we love nothing more than traveling and seeing all the amazing places in the world.  So far we have been to Mexico, Peru, Brazil, Thailand, Spain, Portugal and Canada. We’ll start planning our next adventure soon!

We also realized that we want to be young enough to enjoy all the travel we want to do and all the places we want to see.  The primary way we’ll get to those goals is to be financially independent or “retired” within the next 6-8 years. 2026 is the goal!

We want to spend the rest of our lives traveling.  In order to do so; we want to retire not to one place, but to all of the places where the cost of living is low and the value of the dollar is high (we know that’s up in the air right now, but we have faith!). We already have a few places that we want to spend 2-5 years living and exploring the areas around before we move on to other locations. Almost like a home base in each part of the world.

The world is large and beautiful and amazing, and we want to see it all!

To make this happen, we have to answer some challenging questions and make some real changes in our lives:

• Financial – How do you save enough to have the retirement you want while still enjoying life now?
• Downsizing – When you want to move around as much as we want to, everything you own needs to have a purpose and be important to you.
• We want to be better travelers.
• We have to be in better health for the lifestyle we want. 
• And more!

We’ve been thinking about starting this for a while, and now with everything going on in the world and having to stay at home, we figured it was a good time to start.

Finale

This is us.  This is our Journey.  

We hope to take you with us and that you’ll find something we’re saying or doing helpful.  

If you want to know more about anything, please leave a comment or email.

We’ll include helpful links and contact information soon.

Thanks to everyone who reads this!