Early Retirees Learned How to Communicate About FIRE, Spending

This as-told-to essay is based on conversations with Katie and Alan Donegan, who retired at the ages of 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.

Alan: When I was growing up in the nineties, my dad went bankrupt for 5 million pounds and gambled away our family home. The years we spent fighting in court to keep a roof over my family’s head taught me that I never wanted to be financially insecure.

As an adult, someone bought me a self-development book that eventually led to more resources about personal finance. I was married to Katie by then, and we came across a Tony Robbins book about index funds.

Katie: It was the first time we learned about investing and setting an early retirement target. It all sounded really good at first, but then I got weird about it. I started feeling a sense of guilt and thought, “Why do I deserve this?”

I spent years reading blogs about financial independence (FI) and in 2015 concluded that I would be a fool not to pursue this. Alan didn’t need all that time — he understood it right away.

Alan: The years that Katie was not fully on board were quite painful. Life as a couple is terrible when you are rowing in opposite directions. Katie would say she wanted to pursue FI, but then go on a different route and distract us.

Even when we got on the same page about FI, things did not automatically fall into place. Some of our biggest disagreements were over purchases. Katie was frugal to a different level, and I occasionally wanted to buy stuff that I thought would improve our lives.

There was one incident when I wanted to buy us Fitbits because I thought they would inspire us to walk more and track our heart rates. Katie thought it was an unnecessary purchase, and it led to a huge argument in the middle of a store in Nebraska during a trip to the US. My thinking was that we’re worth hundreds of thousands of pounds, and you won’t spend 150 bucks on a Fitbit?

Katie: Since we retired in 2019, we run a free 10-week course on FI every year and get tons of questions from couples working on FI. Here’s how we communicated with each other through our journey to early retirement and how we stay on the same page since quitting our jobs.

Don’t start with the details

Katie: We tell couples not to start thinking about the details and things like tracking their spending or immediately becoming frugal. Instead, start by thinking of the life you want. Rather than going to your partner and saying, “We have to cut back all our spending and downsize our house,” you can say, “What vision of life do you want to build toward?” And then think about what you need to do financially to make that happen.

Alan: Find common ground and a joint vision — like, would it not be cool to have the time freedom to walk the kids to school or go traveling? 90% of the FI movement is still people running away from what they hate and not imagining what they want to do in retirement.

Work on your own happiness

Alan: We always say that FI is not a magic pill for solving all your problems. Once you’ve sorted the money aspect, you have endless time, which can actually expand your problems.

This is when you get articles in the papers that say FI didn’t work for me. What happened was you had endless time, and you didn’t think about what to do with that freedom.

The most important thing you can do is work on self-development and confidence on the journey to FI so that when you get there, you’re happy, confident, and excited.

Working on yourself is also the biggest gift you can give your partner. I want to hang out with a happy, confident Katie, but I can’t force her to be happy and confident.

Tell each other what you want

Katie: We have been nomadic for over five years, which means we spend 24/7 together. We live and travel together, we run our projects together, and we have the same group of friends.

Our lives almost completely overlap, which can lead to annoyances from time to time. We’re still working on this — we could have a bit more balance and time apart.

Alan: The biggest thing is to communicate honestly about what you feel. Katie and a lot of other people have been taught to always keep the peace and avoid saying what they feel.

So we keep repeating the same message: You have to say what you want. No one else is a mind reader. If you don’t like something, tell me. You have to be open about what you want to do and where you want to go, especially when you have complete time freedom.