For more than 15 years, our 7,500-square-foot home in Arizona was the center of our family’s life. It’s where we raised four daughters, celebrated birthdays, hosted big family Thanksgivings, and somehow managed to fill every room with memories.
My husband and I had good careers, a family we adored, a home we loved, and enough stuff to fill every closet and corner. We’d spent decades building the life we wanted, and we loved that chapter of our lives.
But after our daughters left for college and started families of their own, the house started to feel different. We were spending more time taking care of it than actually living in it.
Then, a health scare forced us to ask a question we’d managed to avoid for years.
A diagnosis changed how we thought about ‘someday’
In 2021, my doctor found a concerning mass in my uterus. Suddenly, the future that I’d always taken for granted felt much less certain. I spent weeks waiting, worrying, and wondering what would happen next.
Thankfully, after surgery, we learned the mass was benign. I was incredibly relieved, but I didn’t come out of the experience thinking about my future the same way.
Until then, I figured we’d work hard, retire in our mid-60s, and finally start taking the trips we’d talked about for years. Those weeks of uncertainty, though, made me realize that “later” isn’t necessarily guaranteed.
I started thinking about my mom, who died just months before she was supposed to retire. She and my dad had spent years working hard and planning a future they never got to enjoy. I didn’t want that to happen to us.
Once I was physically healthy again, my husband and I started talking about what we actually wanted retirement to look like. We’d always loved to travel, but selling almost everything and traveling full-time had never been part of the plan.
However, the more we discussed it, the more we realized we didn’t want to spend our retirement maintaining a big house and squeezing travel into just a few weeks a year.
We started asking ourselves: What if travel wasn’t something we took a break from our lives to do? What if it could actually be our life?
At 53 and 56, we retired early and sold our house
Shelly Peterson
At first, we worried about telling our daughters.
We lived close by and were incredibly involved in their lives: We watched the grandkids, met up for Target runs and park playdates, and rarely needed much of an excuse to turn an ordinary evening into a family dinner.
I worried our daughters would feel like we were abandoning them. Instead, they could not have been more supportive. They encouraged us to go while we were young and healthy enough to have these adventures and reminded us that they were busy building lives and families of their own.
By late 2022, our idea had started to sound doable, and we began putting the pieces together to make an early retirement happen. My husband’s physical therapy business was listed with a broker. In early 2023, we put our home on the market, and it sold the first weekend.
Once the sale of both the business and home closed in mid-2023, there wasn’t much holding us back. We sold our cars and sold, donated, or packed away our possessions.
Then we packed a few suitcases, bought one-way tickets to Bali, and left our old life behind.
We ended up buying a condo to use as a home base between trips
Shelly Peterson
Since leaving Arizona in 2023, we’ve spent long stretches of time living and traveling around the world.
I lived out a longtime dream of living in Paris, and we spent two months learning to surf in Sri Lanka. We’ve snorkeled in Australia, driven a campervan through Spain, and cruised Ha Long Bay in Vietnam.
One of the things I’ve loved most about this chapter is having the freedom to stay somewhere for weeks or months instead of squeezing a trip into a week or two of vacation. We’ve had more adventures in the past three years than I ever imagined we would.
We’ve also learned that full-time travel doesn’t mean we never go home.
When we came back for Christmas in 2023, we rented an Airbnb for two months. It cost so much that we started wondering whether owning a small place would make more financial sense.
We ended up buying a condo in Arizona to use as a home base between trips. Now, we rent it out on Airbnb when we’re traveling, which helps subsidize our travels.
It’s tough being away from family, but we’re glad we took the leap
Shelly Peterson
The condo gives us somewhere to come home to, but it hasn’t solved the thing I miss most: having our loved ones nearby.
Our family has joined us on some adventures, and we still fly home several times a year and FaceTime often — but a video call isn’t the same as a hug from one of my grandkids.
On the plus side, though, we have a lot of freedom. We can stay somewhere longer when we love it, change our plans when an unexpected opportunity comes along, or fly home when our family needs us.
Most importantly, we now have something we rarely had during our working years: control over our time.
I think about our old house fondly. It was exactly where we wanted to be while we were raising our daughters. I loved that chapter of our lives, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything.
Looking back, though, I don’t think deciding to sell our house was the biggest decision we made. Deciding not to wait was.
