afterFI/RE Life after FI/RE
People
Selected life timeline 2016—2020

Travel opened the world. Deciding where home belonged proved harder.

David found room for long trips, sport and blogging after an expatriate career. His and Sally’s retirement plans did not initially match, and years later they were still experimenting with where to settle.

Finances
Net worth at retirement2016 · Household
$4,100,000

The author converted his GBP figures to USD at £1 = $1.31 for this interview; includes rental properties, investments and cash.

Source
Posts2
2016
Post 01Recalled in 2021

Making room for travel

“Somehow we’d got our wires crossed and that wasn’t her plan, she wanted to keep working.”

David · I Retired YoungRead original post (opens in a new tab)

Life at the time

  • A long holiday marked the opening stretch.
  • Lists, routines and meeting people helped after the holiday feeling faded.

How it felt

  • Work worries stopped following him home. “disappearance of stress”
  • He discovered he and Sally had assumed different retirement plans. “got our wires crossed”
TravelHomePartners
David · I Retired Young (opens in a new tab)
Notes

Earlier period recalled in the account published 2021-03-03; this is not a separately published contemporary update. The earlier year is approximate.

Retirement life / personal reflection; exact short excerpt: disappearance of stress

Retirement life / personal reflection; exact short excerpt: got our wires crossed

Editorial summaries with short, attributed quotations. The original contains the full story.

2020Year 4
Post 02

Working out where home belongs

“I’m having difficulty figuring out where home is or should be.”

David · I Retired YoungRead original post (opens in a new tab)

Life at the time

  • Travel, skiing, cycling and blogging widened his interests.
  • They were testing a split between France and the UK.

How it felt

  • He enjoyed becoming more willing to try things. “a new mindset”
  • A settled sense of home remained elusive. “where home is or should be”
TravelHomePartners
David · I Retired Young (opens in a new tab)
Notes

Dated first-person reflection; the observation date follows the interview month where stated, which can precede publication.

Retirement life / personal reflection; exact short excerpt: a new mindset

Retirement life / personal reflection; exact short excerpt: where home is or should be

Retirement overview and reported duration.

Editorial summaries with short, attributed quotations. The original contains the full story.

See how these posts compare with other people’s experiences.

Research

Last checked Sep 2026. The accounts are self-reported. This timeline follows selected accounts, including recollections where labeled; it is not a complete archive.

  • These are selected first-person accounts, not a complete life history. Later circumstances may differ.
  • Financial figures and household circumstances are self-reported and are not independently verified.
  • The first moment is a retrospective account of an earlier period, except where explicitly identified as a reproduced journal entry.

Privacy & analytics

AfterFire uses Google Analytics only if you accept. It helps us understand visits, referral sources, pages and chapters people open, filter use, and clicks to original sources.

After acceptance, Google receives page titles and addresses without query strings, content and chapter IDs, filter names (not selected values or search terms), campaign source/medium/name tags from shared links, original-source domains, referring sites, approximate location and browser/device information. Analytics cookies distinguish browsers and visits. Campaign labels are stored in this tab only after acceptance and expire after 30 minutes without activity. We do not enable advertising personalization or Google Signals, or send your name, email address or account identifier to Analytics.

Declining sends no Analytics data to Google. Accepting starts with the page currently open; we do not replay earlier browsing. Withdrawing consent stops tracking, clears this site's Analytics cookies and reloads the page. It does not delete measurements already received by Google.

We remember your choice on this browser for up to six months. Detailed Analytics data is retained for up to 14 months; aggregated reports can remain longer. Site hosting still processes requests needed to serve these pages.

Read Google's privacy policy and how Google uses information from sites.