Early Retirement Diary: First Six Months of Financial Freedom, Exploration, and Discoveries

Hello from beautiful Northern Thailand. I’m back to where I started my early retirement journey. The last six months feel like three years. They were filled with numerous new experiences, feelings, and life lessons. I lived so many new lives!

“Wait Naz. Retired?”
“Yup! I’m free now!”

A little more context for readers who don't know me; I'm a 32-year-old guy raised in rural Ukraine and educated in the US and Poland. Ever since high school, I've been working towards the goal of financial independence. I've lived a frugal, nomadic lifestyle, saving and investing most of my income as a remote software engineer over the past 13 years.

"Crypto?"
"No, I did not 'invest' in crypto. I pretty much have a boomer portfolio"

A few years ago, the war in my home country set my plans back temporarily. But at the end of 2023, the financial math finally added up again, and I decided to take the plunge - I handed in my resignation and started this new life adventure, freeing myself from the traditional 9-to-5.

The lifestyle change was drastic. In the past decade, my life compass was heavily influenced by work. Without work, the sense of direction changed completely. I was curious where this new path would lead me and how it would change my identity. I was pumped to grow the curiosity spark into a fire, and do it in my unique way.

This post is a compilation of my most memorable diary entries from the last half a year. It’s full of learnings, challenges, and feelings I experienced during the first months of open-ended financial freedom. Surprise-surprise, it’s not all roses and bottomless margaritas. The journey is especially challenging coming out of a work-driven past, fueled by a monthly paycheck addiction 😬

I’ll take you through a six-month journey covering:

• Kicking off the work-free life with a celebration at Wonderfruit Festival, followed by a reflective meditation retreat, and setting life direction for the next year
• Exploring Sri Lankan surf and finding out if it’s a good location for a possible base. Comes with unexpected emotional challenges
• Recovering from burnout and refocusing in Malaysia while binging durian with friends. The chapter goes into the good sides of Kuala Lumpur life
• Planning the settling down experiment in Vietnam. Training BJJ, surfing, and making friends. How I found a new favorite city to visit more
• Planting roots in Thailand. Start of a trip without an end date. Time to experiment with a settled lifestyle and work on deeper personal goals
• Reflections on unexpected challenges I discovered while figuring out early retirement lifestyle
• What's next? Only one way to find out!

⛓️‍💥 The Financial Freedom Journey Begins

Chiang Mai, December 14, 2023 baby!

I kicked off my new life of freedom by celebrating at the 4-day Wonderfruit Festival in Thailand. I came with an old friend and left with a bunch of new ones. Every morning, I went to bed with over 50,000 steps recorded on my watch and countless memories recorded in my brain. If you were to ask me why even go to this festival - it's like a fun mingle with thousands of open-minded humans. Connecting with people who have interesting lives doesn't get any easier than this.

The raving at the festival was BIG FUN. It took me a full week to recover before heading to a 3-day meditation retreat in the Northern Thai mountains.

🧘‍♂️ Adventures in Sitting Still

Right before the year-end, I went to the Pa Pae Meditation Retreat. The idea was to clear the mind before setting intentions for a new life journey for the following year.

For those who have never done a meditation retreat before, here’s what our day at the meditation retreat looked like:

5:15 am - Wake up
5:30 am - Morning meditation
6:30 am - Help monks collect offerings around the village
7:30 am - Breakfast with a great variety of vegetarian and non-vegetarian food
10:00 am - Meditation
11:30 am - The last meal of the day, this time with cake!
12:30 pm - Free time to roam around the retreat property and do your own thing.
5:00 pm - Evening meditation and chanting
7:00 pm - Free time for the rest of the evening

During the retreat, I learned a few new meditation approaches and gained a much deeper understanding of Thai Buddhist tradition. This time was great for deep thinking and daily relaxation. This experience also gave me insight into what meditation retreats look and feel like, getting me ready for a stricter Vipassana retreat in the future.

🤙 2024 New Year Intentions

Traditionally, I sat down to reflect on the past year and dream about the future for a few days after the new year. I was in a drastically different place compared to the past decade full of work obligations. No one will tell me what to do. No one will control my time. I'm completely free to do whateverthefuck and fuckall!

Here’s what I promised myself:

1. Reconnect to and give more respect to my mind and body. After the festival and the meditation retreat, I still felt disconnected from myself. I wanted to rebuild a strong foundation by focusing on my physical and mental wellbeing.

2. Create and nurture meaningful connections. People bring a lot of meaning to my life. I want to be more intentional about building deep connections with more time available. This was an area I had neglected too much in the past!

3. My calendar will be open for hell yeah experiences only. My past actions and decisions were motivated to achieve financial freedom. This often meant sacrificing a little bit of Soul to get rewarded. There’s no more reason to dedicate my time to things that don’t light my fire. Optimize for joy. Wooo!

4. I will not plan too far ahead! The new time wealthy lifestyle is uncharted territory. I’ll explore what feels most exciting first and will exploit later (yet another book ref from Naz, cough-cough 😄)

These intentions felt solid to guide me through the next chapter. I was both excited and anxious about the future. I knew I had unlimited time to figure it all out with self-awareness and intention.

The rest of the Thailand trip was lots of hanging with friends. The highlight was going go-karting. It was wicked fun. Here’s a video of us racing on the track:

Life in Chiang Mai was fun, but my Soul wanted to be by the Ocean again.  I missed her deeply. I booked the flights to Sri Lanka to pick up my surfboard, Pinky. I felt excited to connect with the waves again!

🦚 Surfside Sanctuary in Sri Lanka?

Ahangama, Sri Lanka, January 22, 2024

After almost two decades of country hopping, I started to develop a longing for something more permanent. A lack of a home was beginning to wear on me, physically and emotionally. As I boarded the plane back to Sri Lanka, I wondered if my destination could be a place to stay longer, even just seasonally. I wanted to keep exploring, especially with this new life I just started. At the same time, I felt like having a more permanent place to store big toys like surfboards and jiu-jitsu kimonos. I’d be most pleased though, to finally stop having to cut my fruit with always dull Airbnb knives!

Having a home nest would potentially give me that sense of deeper connection I wanted to develop. Would small surf village life on the coast give me the sense of belonging I craved or would it disappoint me? Will I call Sri Lanka my second home? I was about to find out.

🥥 Island Life: Surf, Sleep, Repeat

Upon landing, I went straight down South to see friends and take Pinky for a ride in the ocean. It felt like a dream. I was living in a cute house next to my favorite surf break. I woke up hearing birds singing, seeing monkeys hopping across rooftops, and feeling the salty breeze of the Ocean.

The first couple of weeks in Ahangama were filled with joy. I lived my perfect life. Surfed almost daily. Worked out in the gym regularly. And most of all, I had good friends nearby.

One thing I appreciated a lot at this time was not having a morning agenda. Most days, I woke up to brew my aeropress coffee with the delicious Northern Thai beans I had brought along. Coffee always comes with a good read.

The book of the season was Courage To Be Disliked. I was rereading it a second time! I find it hard to read psychology and philosophy. Usually, those are not the kinds of books you'd inhale in one sitting. I was revisiting the book at a chapter-a-day pace and reflected as long as I felt Ichiro's masterpiece deserved.

Another book that accompanied most of my mornings was Paul Millerd’s Pathless Path. This one resonated loads with the recent work-life changes. We approached reaching the point of total independence differently.

And to finish the book recommendation detour, I revisited my 2022 favorite - How To Not Die Alone. This time around, I was in the space of becoming close to a new human I met on the waves. It felt like some of the chapters towards the end of the book were great to process more intentionally. The book is great. I wish more people would read it!

Apart from reading, I established a very solid workout habit. I naturally had a lot of HIIT workouts while surfing and followed Huberman’s Foundational Fitness Protocol for the rest of my fitness routines. Having time to work out without rushing has been awesome. I could finally spend a good 2 hours at the gym watching as many science-based workout videos as I felt like.

I also worked on establishing a habit of napping during the day. I started with 10 minutes and slowly increased to 20-30 minutes of yoga nidra (or NSDR for a more scientific term). If you’ve never done it before, here’s a bookmarked yoga Nidra session I come back to most often:

A few weeks into the visit, I thought it would be nice to give back to the local nomadic community. At the same time, by putting my thoughts onto paper, I’d investigate my quest for a second home much more in-depth. After two weeks of gathering information, interviewing people, and writing, I published an extensive post about nomadic living in South Lanka. The result? I knew for certain, this would be my last long visit to the island. The ugly parts of life here were too ugly to live with. There was no more question about making the place even a temporary home. The burglary that followed a week after publishing solidified this thought even more.

I did feel strong disappointment initially. But hey, at least now I knew the answer and could set my eye on the next promising place to explore. Taiwan came up a few times in the past, so I started researching surf life on this other island nation 🤗

The surf and nature were still amazing in Sri Lanka, so I kept surfing and planned adventures deeper inland. You’ve probably heard about gorgeous Sri Lankan mountains full of tea plantations, eh?

🐒 Water & Land Adventures

Apart from my favorite Marshmallow, I had been visiting another spot a lot, next to where my buddy Sander lived. It’s called The Cove. It eventually became my favorite as Marshmallow started to get overrun with people even as early as 6 am.

My board Pinky kept having issues with its tail, and I became a soft-top repair master.

There was one specific session at the South Beach - an unforgettable morning I wish could live rent-free in my head forever. This spot, known for crocodile visits, was blissfully uncrowded most days. Typically, only two surf schools showed up at around 7:30 am, but I would start at dawn, having the break all to myself for about an hour. On my last day in Ahangama, all of my close surf friends showed up at the break! It was a glassy morning, with a slight offshore breeze and shoulder-to-head high waves. Everyone seemed to have loads of fun. On the last ever wave I took with Pinky, my buddy Sander dropped on me with a massive grin - we surfed tandem all the way to the beach. I waved goodbye from the water and left the village for inland adventures.

In the last few weeks on the island, I went on a super-touristy trip around the mainland. The route went from the South village of Ahangama, where I stayed most of the trip, to the mountain village of Ella, looping to Nawura Elia via a train ride, a few days in Kandy, and a couple of days in the ancient Sigiriya area, before heading to Negombo to catch a flight to the next country.

When I was in Ella, I meditated at the temple up high in the hills a few times. The views from the top were gorgeous. During the first visit, I met a guy helping around the temple. He wasn’t a monk, just a Westerner living a monk’s life and showing the foreigners around. We started chatting about consciousness and he shared an insightful question:

“Is this my thought?”

I think it’s a helpful question to ask yourself when you notice a thought that doesn’t sit right. The question can be applied in a few contexts. As an example, when a judgemental thought comes through you could check if it’s something based on your experience or facts, or if it’s someone else's information that has entered your brain via confirmation bias.

Instead of telling more stories, here are a few pics from the adventures and friends that made the journey memorable.

🌪️ An Emotional Storm

Here’s a music video to accompany the rest of the section. The lyrics hit differently after my Sri Lankan experiences and a new realization about myself. Put it on play at 30% volume and enjoy, even if you don’t speak a word of Polish.

Around two weeks before leaving Sri Lanka, a whole storm of emotions was bothering my consciousness. I had a sudden change of plans - the European 🌊 & ❤️‍🔥 adventure was canceled out of the blue. My Soul was deeply unsettled.

I was going through all sorts of emotions. In recent years, I haven’t struggled this much mentally. In a way, the canceled flights to Europe invited a different kind of adventure - an emotional one. Initially, I thought it was heartbreak. It definitely contributed, but surely not to this level? Then, I suspected it was a fear. A fear of losing my father in a shitty imperialistic conflict? Or maybe… it was my lifelong anxiety over uncertainty? But even after weeks of processing these events, something kept me deeply immersed in a pit of despair. Life was drained out of me, even though I was mostly functional and was experiencing new, exciting distractions every single day.

So… here I was, seeing my therapist again after a two-year break.

The Polish music is still playing in the background, Naz! What is it all about, what happened? And since when were you planning to visit Europe again? I thought you were going to Taiwan, eh?

Okay. You need some more context. Prepare for a surf love story.

🔥 Boy Meets Girl 🧊

One early morning session at Marshmallow, I met a girl. We caught two tandem waves and chatted curiously between sets. We hit it off. In the following weeks, there were countless surf chats and dates. Sparks and literal fireworks were in the air. I felt like I finally found a person who was on a similar path to mine. Could she be a person to walk through life in parallel with? Fast forward to one month of dating and vibing later, the girl had a flight to catch back to Europe. We kissed goodbye and gave each other a week of a break.

After the emotions had cooled down, we decided to meet and surf the northern swells of Spain together. We both wanted to see where the romance takes us next. Before seeing each other again, we stayed apart for about a month. I was surfing at South Beach and she was snowboarding in the French Alps. We kept in touch over video calls and voice messages. I felt beyond excited counting the days to explore the Basque swells, food, and her jolly soul.

A week before my flight to join the girl in Spain, I received a call. It still feels painful to remember these cold words: “Sorry, I’m emotionally unavailable. I just don’t feel it.”

The end.

☠️ Post Mortem

Of course, there’s much more detail to the story. I simplified. Hey, I’m no Shakespeare and you are probably not here to read a 500-page romance.

I felt rejected, confused, ignored, betrayed, and a whole bingo card of unpleasant emotions.

I wasn’t in control of any of this, so why bother? Humans are messy after all. Oh, how I wish the emotional part of me was in sync with the rational bits 😅 Processing this experience took some time. I did learn lots of new things about myself and human relationships in the process. A few main lessons were about the types of attachments we develop in early childhood and learning healthier communication of boundaries to keep my anxious attachment at bay.

On top of these happenings, all sorts of bad news was coming out of Ukraine. My father received and was endorsed for the military draft at the age of 58. I was feeling helpless in this situation. The war is not ending anytime soon, unless a lucky meteor were to strike putin’s head and takes out all his cronies with him. I was at peace not seeing my aged grandma ever again. Having a solid chance of not ever seeing my father was too hard to process emotionally.

Here you go. I’m not used to sharing such intimate details on the internet. It’s been some time since then, and writing them brought slight relief and emotional closure. Hopefully, it provides enough context to explain the sudden jump from jolly adventures to deep, sad vibes.

And then...

Something great happened!

I had a call with a close friend, who could have become a great therapist in another life. He guided me to the real answer as to why my Soul didn’t feel any better with time. You see, I have created a dream in my head. The dream was about settling down, a dream about having a home again, a dream of a calm house by the water. Now that the plan to go to Europe had suddenly evaporated, the shattered dream had unsettled my Soul. Bingo!

Are you still hearing the lyrics of the Polish song from the beginning of the chapter?

“chciałbym wiedzieć jak to jest w końcu mieć dom…”

These lyrics roughly translate to “I'd like to know what it feels like to finally have a home”. The song goes deep into the emotional state of belonging and security, which I’ve been experiencing acutely.

The dreams don’t have to die! Now that I knew what my Soul wanted, I booked a ticket to Kuala Lumpur. My Malaysian man cave was a perfect place to reflect, recover, and make the plan for that dream to happen.

🦄 The Durian Cure

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, April 8, 2024

I arrived in Malaysia feeling there was about 4.2% left in my life battery. The last week in Sri Lanka was full of exploration, but also pretty hectic. The combo of hot, uncomfortable adventuring and struggling emotionally drained me completely.

The beautiful thing about life in a big city - it’s full of comfort. The coffee doesn't taste like an ashtray and my place finally had central AC, blackout curtains, a cold pool, and a treadmill with a view. Sleeping felt like entering the land of unicorns!

There wasn’t much adventuring in Kuala Lumpur. I fully concentrated on getting myself back to 100% and figuring out where to go next. Even though Taiwan was in my thoughts, it was too short notice to prepare for life in Taipei. If you haven’t heard, good housing in Taiwan is hard to find, even months in advance. In addition, a series of damaging earthquakes shook the island at the time, which convinced me to look for a different destination.

I looked up my dream destinations list. It was an easy choice. I settled on Da Nang. The city has been on my to-visit list since pre-pandemic times. A few of my friends were already there. There was an ocean with surf, a great jiu-jitsu academy, and the seaside neighborhoods looked like they had a lively, close-knit nomad community. I booked the flights. Exciting!

Most of the week was my usual big city routine with workouts, shopping, and eating in every Malay mamak I could find. The most memorable adventure was a foodie tour I gave to my boys before flying out. We ate soooo much durian!

🌴 Operation Domestication

Da Nang, Vietnam, April 13, 2024

Arriving in Da Nang created a space for me to think about the next move and how to approach this home feeling my Soul has been craving.

🥢 Life & Adventures

My general feeling about Vietnam - I’ll come back for more! It was better than what I expected. The food was delicious and one of the healthiest I’ve tried in SEA. Bun Cha is the dish I’ll have on the list for the party they throw once I die. It’s soooooo gooood!

The beaches in Da Nang and Hoi An were clean and the 5 am vibe was great. It felt like the whole city was out there working out!

The surf was underwhelming after months of Sri Lankan swell… but hey, I took anything to tickle my surfing fancy. I did rent a massive 9-footer and had loads of fun riding it.

Another thing I liked about Vietnam was biking around. I love motorcycles. And even though Vietnamese road safety leaves much to be desired, road trips were really enjoyable. I went on a two-day trip to Hue with a new friend, which opened my eyes to how Chinese influenced Vietnamese culture was. I also visited Hoi An for a day trip. Hoi An has clean and empty beaches, lots of great coffee places, and unforgettable banh mis. Its old town was the cutest reminder of Italian Venice. Far from the original, but still cute!

📝 Personal Development

The Renzo Gracie Vietnam BJJ academy was loads of fun. The morning classes were loads of judo throwing practice mixed with BJJ drills, which I had not practiced much before!

I also met a few cool new friends who had a meaningful impact on me. One of them is a friend I call The Grungy Backpacker (TGB). TGB now inspires me every time I think life is throwing curveballs or when I’m feeling slightly lazy about doing something hard. This friend has no feeling in one leg and one arm due to a childhood injury. And hey, TGB still manages to climb the highest mountains, run marathons, and go on crazy adventures without complaints. This friend became an inspiration for how positive a human can be. Giving and taking all there is to life. I bet TGB is spelunking in a Cambodian cave right now and sipping cold Milo with a big smile.

During a month on the Vietnamese coast, I developed a new morning routine: journaling. Initially, it was a therapeutic practice, but it soon became a favorite ritual, paired with my coffee habit. I chose to journal first thing in the morning to capture my unprocessed, unconscious thoughts before they could be influenced by external stimuli like phone notifications, noisy neighbors, and the sensory overload of the day. This approach was inspired by a talk by Josh Waitzkin. All my journal entries include three elements: one win, one point of stress, and one thing I am grateful for, inspired by Sahil Bloom's post.

Vietnam was a one-month stop to reset and make the permanent home dream a reality. I decided to move to the calmest place I know - Chiang Mai. It had all I needed to focus on the long-term goals while experimenting with this new lifestyle calmly for the rest of the year. Finding a real long-term home might take a few more tries, but Chiang Mai was hands down the best option I already know well.

🥭 Home Sweet Chiang Mai

Chiang Mai, Thailand, May 13, 2024

I came back to the condo I have been renting for the last three years. Straight out of the taxi, the reception lady recognized me and said a phrase that made my eyes water - “welcome home, kaaaa” 🥹

It was super easy to get into my preferred routine. The gym with all sorts of torture equipment was 10 minutes away. A great BJJ academy with lots of friendly black belts was 15 minutes away. I picked up running as a new challenge for the year and great running locations are also just 10 minutes away too. What else could a healthy body possibly need?

I signed a contract for an education visa for 6 months in Thailand. Having a clear immigration situation has let me feel at ease about working on this new feeling home project.

Any guesses about the first thing I did after the contract was signed? Like a true European, I placed an order with IKEA 🤩. Now I own an ergonomic pillow with an artsy case, a sharp Japanese knife, cute colorful food storage containers, and an iconic IKEA bag to bring even more nomad-travel-unfriendly items into my home!

At the time of writing, it’s been over a month here in Chiang Mai. It’s been extremely calming. Life feels slow but with a lot of meaningful progress. I’m making plans for road trips months ahead, and for projects I can start once the space in my calendar feels right. Most importantly, I wake up with joy on most days, thankful to see the mountains on the horizon and listen to the birds cheering for sunrise.

🫀 Personal Development

Now that I have a longer timeline of being in one place, I have doubled down on getting my body in even better shape. Why? 32 is an age close to when men peak at their physical performance. Some time in the second half of the 30s muscle atrophy and VO2 Max deterioration start to show. I thought to myself I’d better use this time to build as good of a base as I can to have more of that healthy lifespan to atrophy on in the future, haha.

On the therapy front, I had an interesting encounter with one of my shadows - aggression. I have been living with a sense that I’m a reasonably calm and peaceful person. That is true, to a degree. I would not hurt a bug without a very, very good reason. What struck me, though, was how much in denial about my aggressive self I was. Apparently, all the surfing, grappling, and intense gym training is just a healthy way of channeling this shadow. And man…. there’s a lot of it inside of me. This discovery has put a few more of Jung’s books onto my reading list and has put me on the lookout for other shadows I’ve been denying having. I’m curious how many of you have done shadow work and what were your biggest surprises?

On the reading front, I’m enjoying the Flow at a chapter-a-day pace. One of the early thoughts that caught my eye was the author’s claim that attention is at the core of the quality of each human’s experience. Attention - the very thing we have destroyed through social media in the 34 years since the book was published. The attention spans of a goldfish and lower life satisfaction seem like a very credible conclusion I came to. The book is still in progress, and I wonder what other thoughts it will inspire.

Anyway, this has been a long one. I realized just how hard it would be to squeeze such a long, eventful period into a short story only after spitting out a few thousand words. Hopefully, it was an insightful read. Let’s wrap up, shall we?

🎳 The Retirement Curveballs

As I settled into retired life, a few unexpected challenges became apparent. These will be the projects I’m excited to take on next:

1. Making Meaningful Connections Without Being Overbearing - I have more free time than most, so I need to adjust my expectations to align with others' realities. My go-go-go attitude can be too much for people with full-time jobs and other commitments.
2. Budgeting for Fun and Spontaneity - I retired on a comfortable budget for living in Asia, but this doesn't account for unexpected expenses, like a month-long surf trip to Okinawa that could cost me $5,000-$6,000. I'm exploring ways to generate additional income enjoyably to accommodate these types of adventures.

These are "good problems" to have as I call them. It's more of an opportunity to learn, adapt, and find fulfillment in this unexplored lifestyle.

🔮 Crystal Ball Gazing

What will I do with my time in the next six months?

I’ll complete my first marathon
I’ll get much better at my jiu-jitsu
I’ll continue to work on my writing
I’ll work on my software ideas
I’ll finish the settling-down experiment and reflect on it in 2025

🥁 The most exciting one for me! 🥁
I’ll figure out a way to dream again. I have not remembered my dreams in about 10 years, and I want to figure out a way to remember my dreams at least once a week.

It seems like a great set of goals to aim for. I’ll update you here about the progress! Hopefully more often and in shorter form 😄

Subscribe here or follow me on Xitter for more frequent updates.

Buziaki mordeczki

P.S. Looking back over the last six months, I'm filled with gratitude for the people in my life. Especially the ones that brought joy and gave support through challenging times. Thanks for sharing the journey and making it memorable. Love y'all 🫶