Who We Are and Why We're Doing This
July 1, 2026 · 2,555 days to go
Jeff and I were married in Mexico. A destination wedding just sounded more "us" than any other plan we could have come up with, so that's what we did, and everyone we loved had to get on a plane if they wanted to be there. That's pretty much who we've always been. If something's worth doing, we'd rather do it big and somewhere that means something, not just check the box.
Return to Mexico 2007
Three years later, we went back, this time with eleven family members in tow, on our anniversary. That's just how we operate. When we want something, we make it happen, and we've always done it as a team.
For years that just looked like a few small, family-style vacations here and there. Nothing major. Then I graduated with my bachelor's degree, and we went to Hawaii. That trip was a milestone for me, and looking back, it was really the start of everything. 2015 was the true beginning of what I now call the "pay before you go" plan, even though I didn't have a name for it yet. We saved for it, we paid for it before we ever got on the plane, and we got to just be there, fully, without owing anyone anything when we got home.
After that, we just kept going bigger. Egypt, taking a river boat cruise down the Nile. The Mayan ruins in Belize and Honduras, more than once. The Caribbean, the Mediterranean, and a spontaneous British Isles, Iceland, and Greenland trip we still talk about.
Never Gets Old!
Italy, four times now, touring the major cities by cruise and by land. We've brought friends, family, and neighbors along plenty of those times too. Every single trip, paid for in full before we ever left. That's eleven years of proof that the plan works.
So why am I telling you all of this now, in the open, while we're still in the middle of it?
Because Jeff and I have watched our own parents slowly dwindle away in retirement with no travel left in it. Home a lot more, watching TV, reading, puttering around the house, but not really living the kind of life I'd want to live, and Jeff agrees, this isn't for us. If I'm going to look forward to what's for dinner, it's going to be in a country with food I love. And the reruns are going to be people watching while eating croissants and sipping cappuccino in a romantic cafe somewhere.
That's why I'm building this in public instead of waiting until retirement is a done deal to talk about it. We're seven years out, and instead of keeping the plan to myself, I'm going to show you the savings, the decisions, the trade offs, the setbacks, all of it, while we're still living through it. Not after. I won't be posting our exact numbers, that's not the point, but I will be showing you the shape of it: the percentages, the trends, the tools, so you can run your own version of this with your own numbers if you want to.
Here's the part I want you to walk away with most: it's never too late to start. If you're ten years out from retirement, or even less, and you're just starting to let yourself dream about what that chapter could look like, that dream doesn't have to be fully formed yet. Even a small dream, with the right planning behind it, can grow into a much bigger one. Ours did. It started as one trip to Hawaii. It's now a seven-year plan.
So that's who we are: a couple who got married in Mexico because it felt right, who found our real "why" on a trip to Hawaii in 2015, and who are now counting down seven years to a retirement we've been building toward ever since, debt free, one trip at a time. I'm the one telling you about it here, but Jeff's living every bit of it right alongside me, and you'll hear from him too.
This is us, building it in public. Come along with us .
