How This Couple Retired In Their 30s To Travel The World

How This Couple Retired In Their 30s To Travel The World

Jeremy graduated from college on a Friday, started working on cell phone design at Motorola on a Monday and worked 80 hours a week for the next four or five years. What fueled his work ethic was $40,000 in debt — $35,000 from student loans and $5,000 in credit card debt for food and other essentials.

But his desire to keep up with his peers led him, on his $40,000 salary, to buy a new car and a three-bedroom house, which turned his previous bike ride to work into a 40-minute commute. The added debt got him to focus on his finances, so he began making models of how he could pay it off, mapped out his trajectory to retirement at 65 and began investing. He then used credit card checks charging 0% interest for 12 months to pay big chunks of his mortgage, his student loan and car loan.

When he started working at Microsoft and moved from Chicago to Seattle, getting a salary bump up to $85,000, he made many of the same decisions (which he now calls mistakes) again: buying a house, having a long commute, and not taking a vacation. Three years in, a girlfriend convinced him to take his first real, multi-week vacation — to the Philippines. He spent the first week thinking about work, checking email. But the scuba diving, mangoes and and tropical drinks began to have an effect, and by the third week, he was wondering how he could live like this every day.

He sold his house, began renting close to work and biking to the office. With his costs slashed, he was able to save. At a conference in Beijing, he met his future wife, Winnie, who is from Taiwan and had been saving 50% of her salary in order to travel. Now, Jeremy, 40, and Winnie, 36, are financially independent, travel the world and blog about their envious lifestyle on GoCurryCracker.com. (The site is named for their rallying cry derived from their favorite snack on their honeymoon hiking Mt. Rainier in Washington, during which they endured bone-soaking rain and encountered mosquitoes as big as bats.)

Here’s the story of how they saved enough to retire in their 30s — Jeremy at 38 and Winnie at 33 — and how they’ve been spending their money and time since.

How did you achieve your early retirement?

J: While I was at Motorola, pretty much every penny of income went toward paying off my $40,000 in debt. If I had $10 at the end of the month, I paid an extra $10 to the student loan. I did contribute to my 401(k) but I took out a loan on it to buy a house and when I sold that house to move to Seattle, I had to pay that back.

By the time I changed jobs, I didn’t have much savings per se. But I was close to being debt free. At Microsoft, I started out at a high savings rate — I was contributing to my 401(k), maxing that out and saving more on the side. After I met Winnie and we decided to retire early, we started reading books like “Your Money or Your Life” and improved on that until we were saving upwards of 70% of income. My last two years working, we were depositing pretty much my entire paycheck into my brokerage account, because we were living off dividends and interest.

We lived close to the university and could walk everywhere, so we didn’t have a car. I was commuting by bicycle — 8 to 20 miles every day. We got most of our food at a farmer’s market and CSA. The biggest part of your income is housing, transportation and food, and those three things were cut really aggressively, so our monthly spend was less than $2,000 a month at the end.

I probably worked three years too long, or we saved too much. The goal was always that we wanted to travel, and once we quit, there was a year and a half of bouncing through Mexico and Central America, and then we came to Taiwan to have the baby.
(Courtesy of Go Curry Cracker)

How much were you earning?

Jeremy: When I started out of college, I was making about $40,000 a year, and that went up to more than $50,000 by the time I left. At Microsoft, I started at $85,000 a year and by the end of my 12 years there, I was at around $140,000.

Winnie: I worked in the same industry — phones and computers, and my last job was project manager at Dell. I was making about $32,000 in Taiwan.

Jeremy: We got married five years ago, so Winnie quit when we got married and moved to Seattle, so the last three or four years before we retried, when my salary was at its highest, she wasn’t working.

Winnie: I was a freeloader.

Winnie, when you were working for Dell in Taipei, what were your savings habits?

Winnie: The living cost here is quite cheap if you want to live cheaply, so I could save at least half of my income.

Just in a savings account?

We have something like a 401(k) but it’s run by the government, so I also maximized it, and the rest went to my personal savings account and my brokerage account.

Cr.Forbes