Living Stories

Retired At 51!

I have been a part time low income earner all my life, mainly by choice as I enjoyed 4 days off per week. As a happily, single woman, I knew that the only thing I would ever own was my small house and car. So I lived week to week with just enough money to scrape by. I always bought bargains and second hand items and clothing and never lived on credit. I often wished I would win a million dollars so I could put it in the bank and live off the interest and never have to work in the job that I now hated. I had even filled out The Secret Cheque from the Universe some months before and writing it out for 1.4 million dollars.

While we knew that my father had a bit of money behind him and lots of kids but no one ever knew how much because he was extremely secretive. Also he was naive and lost a lot of money to scammers and he owed thousands to the taxman who would send threatening letters regularly. So it was never even a concept that I could rely on much of an inheritance. And as for retiring and leaving a toxic job, that was just a pipe dream!

I had watched The Secret movie years before and read The Power and The Magic but nothing much had changed in my life.
So two years ago on my day off, as I sat in a new local cafe and read the newspaper, I said to myself, “This would be wonderful to be able to sit here whenever I liked, to be free of work and just enjoy relaxing or using a laptop and watching the world go by.”.
I remember imagining as I sat there that it would feel so good to never have to go to work, get up early, struggle through the heavy traffic and pay car parking in the city while facing an unreasonable boss. I found myself thinking about this regularly whenever I sat in the cafe.

My father passed away some months later and I was left with a messy Estate to work my way through financially, along with a hoarders house. It took over a year to clean and get rid of all those items! I won’t lie, it was at times soul destroying, stressful and lonely when family refuses to help much and you are faced with the overwhelm of the hundreds of papers and items that needed to be sifted through. But now as I write this and the Estate is finalised, it seems unimaginable to me that I have close to a million dollars in the bank and if I add the value of my house, it equates to around 1.4 million!

I resigned December after taking a year off work and I now do whatever I want, whenever I want and because I already own everything that I need, I certainly can live off the interest for years to come. If anyone had told me 2 years ago that my wishes would come true, I don’t think that I would have believed them. It certainly feels like I’ve won the lottery!

Thank you, thank you, thank you!