The Self-Hosting Spark: How Ditching Google Reignited My Tech Obsession

The Self-Hosting Spark: How Ditching Google Reignited My Tech Obsession

6 Comments / Life in Early Retirement, Financial Independence / Retire Early (FIRE), General Thoughts, Here's Why I'm Liking..., Motivation, Product and Service Reviews / /

I’ve been talking about a project that I’ve been working on for several months now, which has kept me pretty busy. It’s time I fill you in that it’s been all about self-hosting (I’ll explain that soon). What was not expected was how this project sparked a renewed interest in technology for me. The feeling of fun I’ve had with this stuff hasn’t been there since the early days of my IT career, which started back in 1999. Yeah, I’m […]

The Self-Hosting Spark: How Ditching Google Reignited My Tech Obsession Read More »

The 3 Scenes of the Superman Movie I Made It Into

The 3 Scenes of the Superman Movie I Made It Into

4 Comments / Life in Early Retirement, General Thoughts / /

Last summer, I wrote the post “Lights, Camera, Exhaustion: I Worked as a Movie Extra for 6 Grueling Yet Awesome Days” about the opportunity I had to be an extra in a movie. It was so cool to get the chance to do this and see how the sausage is made. It was also grueling with a lot of long days in the hot sun. At the time, I wasn’t allowed to reveal the movie that they were filming. However,

The 3 Scenes of the Superman Movie I Made It Into Read More »

The Surprising FAFSA/SAI and Roth IRA Conflict that Almost Sabotaged Our Financial Aid Plan

The Surprising FAFSA/SAI and Roth IRA Conflict that Almost Sabotaged Our Financial Aid Plan

20 Comments / Taxes and Financial Planning, Education, Financial Independence / Retire Early (FIRE), Investments, Kids / /

Updated: 08/27/25 We’re closing in on the end of my 7th year of early retirement. I was fortunate enough to run my last day on the hamster wheel on December 31, 2018. At the time, I had a plan and was confident it would work (though there’s always that tiny bit of self-doubt!). Fortunately, it’s worked better than we could have expected, thanks in part to retiring at a time when the stock market has continued to climb with only

The Surprising FAFSA/SAI and Roth IRA Conflict that Almost Sabotaged Our Financial Aid Plan Read More »

Why I Got the Chase Sapphire Reserve… Even With Its $795 Fee

Why I Got the Chase Sapphire Reserve… Even With Its $795 Fee

6 Comments / Product and Service Reviews, Here's Why I'm Liking..., Saving, Spending, Travel and Vacation / /

Long-time readers know that we’ve been playing the credit cards travel rewards game for several years now. The more we learn how to play the game more efficiently, the further the rewards have taken us. Without a doubt, credit card travel rewards have easily saved us tens of thousands of dollars on travel and helped us vacation in some amazing places. Regardless, we’re still pretty judicious about which cards we apply for. Just because a bonus is good, if it

Why I Got the Chase Sapphire Reserve… Even With Its $795 Fee Read More »

Our Alaska Cruise Was Incredible… But One Thing Left Me Cold

Our Alaska Cruise Was Incredible… But One Thing Left Me Cold

12 Comments / Travel and Vacation, Life in Early Retirement / /

Haha, one of the AI tools helped me generate that title about our Alaska Cruise, and I chuckled when I saw it, so I went with it! 🙂 Anyway, it’s been a long time, friends! I haven’t written a post for a couple of months now. I said I was going to scale back and, boy, did I! I’ve been super busy with a bunch of things (travel included), so it was nice not putting pressure on myself, feeling obligated

Our Alaska Cruise Was Incredible… But One Thing Left Me Cold Read More »

10 Years of Blogging… Time for a Lighter Rhythm

10 Years of Blogging… Time for a Lighter Rhythm

26 Comments / Blogging, Financial Independence / Retire Early (FIRE), General Thoughts, Life in Early Retirement / /

10 years ago, on May 6, 2015, I published my first blog post (Are You Ready to Retire Early?). At just over 800 words, it was definitely not as long-winded as I tend to be nowadays! 😂 It wasn’t much – just a sort of intro as I tried to figure out what I wanted my blogging life to be about. Route to Retire has changed a lot since then (hopefully for the better!) and it’s funny to read my

10 Years of Blogging… Time for a Lighter Rhythm Read More »

A Fun Collection of Random Thoughts You Didn't Ask For

A Fun Collection of Random Thoughts You Didn’t Ask For

14 Comments / General Thoughts, Health and Fitness, Kids, Life in Early Retirement, Spending, Taxes and Financial Planning, Travel and Vacation / /

I was trying to decide what to focus on in this post because I’ve had several random thoughts spending some quality time in my mind lately. Sometimes my brain just has stuff bouncing all over the place. So I decided, why not just touch on a bunch of them? So here we are with a mish-mosh of random thoughts all crammed into one delightful mess of a blog post! Between the action-packed stock market real-life movie so many of us

A Fun Collection of Random Thoughts You Didn’t Ask For Read More »

We Paid $3,200 for an Incredible $25K Europe Trip… Here’s How We Did It

We Paid $3,200 for an Incredible $25K Europe Trip… Here’s How We Did It

14 Comments / Travel and Vacation, Financial Independence / Retire Early (FIRE), Life in Early Retirement, Spending / /

I’ve been excited to tell you the details of our planned Europe trip for a while now. But I wanted to wait until we had the framework all planned out. We now have 38 nights of fun booked for this fall. This includes flights, lodging, cruises, and a first-class train ride. Now that everything’s in place, I did the math on what this would have cost if we had just booked everything through normal channels (Priceline, Booking.com, airline and cruise

We Paid $3,200 for an Incredible $25K Europe Trip… Here’s How We Did It Read More »

Cruise Ship Internet Sharing: How I Bypassed the Hotspot Restriction

Cruise Ship Internet Sharing: How I Bypassed the Hotspot Restriction

28 Comments / Travel and Vacation, Life in Early Retirement / /

Another day, another cruise. 🙂 Our year of travel continues! We just got back from another Caribbean cruise. This was a 7-night vacation on MSC Cruises and we were fortunate to be joined by some friends this time. We also had two “free” cabins through the casino from our quest to gain free cruises last year, so we hooked up our Panama friends with one of them. See, I can be nice sometimes! It was a great cruise and we

Cruise Ship Internet Sharing: How I Bypassed the Hotspot Restriction Read More »

Hunting for the Great Deal vs Just Working a Little More

Hunting for the Great Deal vs Just Working a Little More

10 Comments / Financial Independence / Retire Early (FIRE), Spending, Travel and Vacation / /

I love a great deal. I imagine most people are like that regardless of how much or how little money they have. There’s something satisfying about the whole idea of getting a bargain – almost as if you somehow won “the game” (whatever that game is). But in most cases, scoring a great deal (particularly online) involves some effort on your part. And sometimes getting that great deal can involve a lot of time and effort. Unfortunately, at times, putting

Hunting for the Great Deal vs Just Working a Little More Read More »