ONL makes bigger bucks, but I earn miles like a boss. Because we all know that’s the number that really matters.) (Though let’s do take a moment and recognize who will be contributing more air miles to our retirement. We started this early retirement journey together, and we want to end it together. This is a team effort, and though we haven’t contributed equally in terms of dollars (#wagegap), we both think it’s important to contribute an equal amount of time worked toward the goal. It’s for entirely emotional reasons, not rational ones, namely that we’re each so eager to retire that the one stuck at work while the other retires would feel resentful, and that’s not something we want to invite into our marriage. The answer is that we agreed right at the start of our FIRE journey that we’d retire together. One question that we get often – and that I suspect is in some of your minds after reading my anxiety confession – is: why don’t we retire at different times? (And to those of you who’ve suggested I quit first, I love you forever. Today: the story of our great flip-flop, and how we traded places on our preferred retirement timing. But what’s most interesting isn’t where we are now, it’s where we started: in the exact opposite spots. So that’s where we are now: I want out, and Mr. We simply are not made to go at this pace, and we all know it. Maybe I’m a first world dilettante who can’t hang, but I suspect it has more to do with the ever-increasing pressure, especially among publicly-traded companies, to continue increasing productivity. Though I still feel extremely thankful for and fortunate to have my job at a company whose leaders I deeply respect, I don’t know if I can make it through another year. I feel like I’m drowning, and like every day is a new battle. I spent the entire flight to my company headquarters for my review feeling dizzy and nauseous at the prospect of having to defend my year. I’ve felt more anxiety this year than I ever have in my life, and I’m feeling its effects every day. Meanwhile I feel – and I know this sounds completely dramatic, but it’s true – that work is killing me, and not slowly. We both have completely legit reasons: he wants to put us in as good of shape as possible financially for our early retirement, which I appreciate deeply, and I know that his desire is borne from his wish to put my mind at ease, in light of my financially conservative nature. ONL wants to stick it out all the way to the end of 2017, as we’ve long planned to do, and regardless of whether we hit our magic numbers many months earlier. ONL, rather than you hearing from him directly, I probably over-represent the collective desire to leave our careers because it’s all I can think about some days. And because I write the blog and only talk about Mr. If you’ve been reading here, you may have noticed a theme: I want to quit as soon as humanly possible (and I won’t shut up about it). For now, it’s enough to say that I feel relieved that that milestone is behind me. ONL has had his review and we know our numbers. My bonus was more or less in line with what I was expecting, but we’ll talk about all of this in two weeks after Mr. Ha.) Regardless of when next year we end up calling it quits, there’s no scenario in which we won’t have given notice by December 2017. (Thanks to everyone who tweeted words of support beforehand, even those of you encouraging me to quit. It still hasn’t sunk in that, yesterday, I had my last ever review at work.
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