Changing Priorities

For those who pay particular attention to the blog, you may know that usually the top right hand corner of the blog header looks like this:

You may also know that it doesn’t look like that anymore. It now looks like this:

No More Travel?

We definitely still intend to spend a good portion of our time travelling in early retirement. We love to travel and don’t ever plan to stop.

But, you might remember from very early in this blog, we had intentions of travelling full time for at least a few years. We were inspired by a podcast called The Expat Chat. We were very excited to reach early retirement, sell all of our stuff and head off.

But over the course of the last two years, our priorities have changed.

We have moved a few times in that two year period which made us realise how important it is to us to be settled. We also realised that, because we want the freedom to make adjustments or do renovations, renting is not an option so we plan to buy our retirement home in the next couple of years and have it paid off by the time we retire.

In the last two years, I have also become an aunty twice over. My nephews bring me an enormous amount of joy and I can’t imagine not seeing them on a regular basis. While I don’t live particularly close to one of them now, being overseas for a few years would increase that distance enormously. It is not cheap to fly in and out of Australia, which means we couldn’t come back to visit as much as we’d like. I intend to be very heavily involved in both of their lives as they grow, which means spending at least most of my time living in Australia. One of my nephews will grow up in Newcastle, hopefully in the same suburb as us. I’m working on my sister to try and get my other nephew nearby so that I can see him just as much.

Priorities change, and ours have. We still plan to travel regularly in retirement, aiming for at least one large international trip per year. We plan for this to be slow travel, maybe for two months or so. We can handle being away for two months and given my brother will be living in the same suburb, he will be able to keep an eye on our house (and feed our dog if we ever stop debating what kind to get).

Who wouldn’t want to spend more time with this toilet-paper-pulling gremlin?

But most of our retirement will be spent with our family and friends, here in Australia. It will also be spent gardening, renovating our home and just enjoying being in our home together. We’ll take plenty of mid-week trips locally (avoiding the crowded weekends), satisfying our yearning for travel.

We are pretty happy with this new found plan and believe it suits us much better. We’re not the type (especially me) who can spend too long away from family without missing them immensely.

What do you think of our new retirement plans? Could you spend your retirement permanantly travelling? Share in the comments below!