This as-told-to essay is based on conversations with Katie and Alan Donegan, who retired at 35 and 40, respectively. The couple is originally from the UK and has been nomadic since 2020. The essay has been edited for length and clarity.
Katie: Alan and I retired in 2019 after running our own separate businesses for several years. We heard about financial independence, retire early, after we got married, and wanted that freedom and lifestyle for ourselves. We started our savings and investing journey in 2015.
Alan: I used to daydream of the first day we were at financial independence (FI) and we could just go out for an incredible breakfast, sit there with coffee, lounge all morning, and go: What should we do today? I just had this vision of sitting there with a notebook and drawing a map of where we go around the world.
Katie: Since we quit our jobs, we’ve been nomadic and have been slow traveling around the world. We’ve also started several hobby projects. Our most time-consuming one is the Rebel Finance School — a 10- to 14-week, free course on FI. We’ve got 22,000 people from 48 countries on the course this year. We run live sessions every year, and during those three months, we throw ourselves into it. I work harder on that than I’ve ever worked on many jobs, even when I was in corporate life. This costs us money in software and website fees to run, but people pay to do their hobbies all the time, and we find it incredibly worth it.
Alan: We’re also writing a book on getting to financial freedom and just worked with a team to produce a music album with songs about index funds, compounding, and the 4% FI rule in different music genres.
We don’t always hit a balance, and I have overcommitted us sometimes, but here are three things we do to ensure our retirement remains fun and burnout-free.
1. Does it make us want to say hell yes?
Katie: Our rough rule now is that it’s either a hell yes or it’s a no. If you fill your time with “maybe” then you’ll have a life of maybes.
Alan: We’ve had to learn how to say no, even to big conferences, because we did not think there was room for us to make an impact and drive change.
We had to focus and let go of 10 or 12 different opportunities this year because we are trying to create space for bigger impact commitments that can help more people.
It’s not always impact-related. One of our friends asked to celebrate her birthday in Disney World with us this November, and that was an easy yes.
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2. Are we overcommitting?
Alan: We’ve made the mistake of packing our schedule too tightly before. Recently, we did a speaking tour through the UK, and we booked too many cities in a very short timeframe. It was too intense, and it affected our health. It was so much fun, but we’d do it differently next time.
Katie: We’ve also said no to other FI events that require too much travel. It’s hard to strike a balance because you are making decisions for the future, and you don’t know how you’ll feel when things actually happen.
Still, we are getting stronger on what our values are and what’s important to us. So when someone offers something that in the past, we would’ve bitten their hand off, now we kind of slow down and think, actually, does this fit in?
3. Time-bound projects
Alan: I like projects that are time-bound — things I know will take a set amount of time and we can dedicate ourselves. For example, for writing our book or the speaking tour we did in the UK, we take a couple of months, and then we have time to go back to our travel or other hobbies. Our FI course is also designed to end in three months and give us back our time and independence for the rest of the year.
After a couple of weeks of being free, we start thinking of what fun and crazy thing we could do next.
