"Retiring early isn’t just about saving up enough money... It’s also a huge emotional and ideological transition."

"One big question I struggled with is, how can I be a feminist and believe we need more women leaders in the workplace, and then retire early and remove myself from my leadership role? But once I started planning to leave, I got much better at helping other women at work because I stopped competing with them.... People will say, 'You write a blog so you’re not retired,' but I’ve made zero dollars from it.... It’s funny — I’ve realized that I actually like working. I’m wired to want to work. I’m just not wired to live in our current work culture where I’m supposed to be excited to be connected at all times.... Another thing I didn’t expect about retirement was that Mark and I had some rocky periods in our relationship in the last year. There’s this idea that work is the villain keeping you from having a good marriage, so if you take work away then your marriage will be perfect. That’s not true. I know some people whose early retirement exposed unfixable problems in their marriage, and made them realize that they wanted to do different things with their lives... [W]e’d always said, 'Our dream is to be able to wake up in the morning and say, "What do we want to do today?"' And it turns out that we both had different interpretations of what that meant. For me, that was very literal — to wake up and say, 'Hey, is it snowing? Is it sunny? What should we do today?' But for Mark, he’s more like, 'What do we want to do this week?' He will fill up his calendar with mountain biking and community stuff, and I felt left out of that. We were each doing what we said we would do, but it turned out that wasn’t the same thing. We’ve been working through that...."

From "Retired at 38. Here’s What I Didn’t Expect" (New York Magazine).