Another thread brought to my attention that MMM is recently divorced. There is at least one long time forum member who also divorced after being FIREd for a number of years, and being pretty young. So this got me thinking about the subject...and no, I am not planning on divorcing my DW and I don't think she is planning on divorcing me, either.
With our move, she was able to convert her j*b to a full time w*rk from home position, so we are now around each other pretty much 24/7. I was initially a little worried about that, but so far it's been great. Our day is similar to what Nords eluded to in a previous thread...
I guess the point of this thread is to just get a conversation going on the marital effects of those that have FIREd, especially those that have done so quite early...say 50 years old. What are your thoughts?
I just finished posting over there and then found my name over here linked to a similar thread-- yikes.
I’d like to think that my spouse and I have figured out our lifetime relationship. We come from similar backgrounds, we’ve both had a plebe year, and our careers required us to figure out how to work with difficult people. We also pulled together in harness on the parenting challenge, which requires more hours of thoughtful discussion while exhausted.
Togetherness has always been about communicating and agreeing on our roles. Everything is perpetually subject to re-negotiation. There are always things which one spouse no longer wants to be responsible for, or at least doesn’t want to do anymore. There might be more things which one spouse wants to explore, and the other is less interested.
We’ve always enjoyed being at home, spending our introvert time “alone together” in opposite ends of the rooms. We get together for chores, projects, & meals. We have our own friends & social lives as well as our shared ones.
I think our biggest debate since FI has been landlording. We’ve done it since 1994, I don’t want to do it anymore, and she has very personal reasons for doing something which she doesn’t mind too much.
Last year’s 68-day rehab required a tremendous amount of advance planning, a GC with several subcontractors, and quite a bit of our own sweat equity. When we weren’t on site all day (or even longer) then we were planning the next day or scrambling to salvage the current one. I realized that the thrill of replacing water heaters and toilets has lost its novelty for the rest of my life. The rehab was also surprisingly extraordinarily painful-- I personally went through over a hundred 800mg doses of ibuprofen. You realize that you’re in your 50s, not your 20s, and you might not be able to recover from the pace anymore. Chronic fatigue accumulates and you find yourself [-]arguing[/-] having an intense spouse discussion about topics which would normally not even be noticed. At least we were debating project management, not expenses. At least we settled our differences and moved forward.
We’ve held on to our rental property for the bird-in-the-hand syndrome. Maybe our daughter and son-in-law will want to live in it someday, or maybe we’d move back in to it when we can no longer keep up our current home. Our rental property is very age-in-place friendly in a very walkable neighborhood, while our current home would require a yard service. Maybe it’d even need a stair-chair and perhaps a housecleaner.
Yet during our 68 days I realized that I like our current home a lot better and I’d prefer to die here. (At one point my spouse assured me that was quite likely.) As good as our rental property is, the neighborhood is noisy. The yard is small and the view is negligible. Meanwhile our current home’s drawbacks are logistics challenges which can easily be handled with... money.
Financial independence means that you can do more of what you love and less of what you don’t. Once we had the property back on the rental market, I shared with my spouse that I didn’t want to landlord any more. (Heck, I barely want to adult any more.) I wanted to sell the place, pay the taxes, dump the rest into equities, and keep traveling the world.
She pointed out that our rental property was her backup plan. If I died in our home then she wouldn’t want to live in it anymore, but she could handle the memories we’d forged in our rental property. (I’d never thought of that.) I pointed out that she’d just sentenced me to a lifetime of landlording with no parole.
Our compromise is that she now handles all the landlording. (I’m still on-call labor.) She’s had quite the hassle getting the tenants settled in, and I’m not sure that everything is going as well as it could, but after 13 months it seems to be in autopilot. Maybe after a few more 1 AM texts or if the tenants thoughtlessly trash the place, then she’ll feel the same way about landlording as I do. Maybe she’ll decide to hire it all out to a property manager or even sell it. Either way I have most of what I want, and she has most of what she wants. We’re both happier for having worked it out together. We both feel more secure together.
Our second-biggest debate has been flying in first class on commercial airlines. She’s finally begun to appreciate the travel experience of someone who’s larger, who has wider shoulders than economy-class seatbacks, and who gets body-searched Every. Single. Time. even with the Pre-check scanners. (TSA thinks she’s charming. Then she curls up in a window seat with sleep mask & earplugs, and doesn’t wake up until the landing gear drops.) I’ll put up with a few hours in economy seats during daylight, but on an eight-hour redeye to the Mainland I want a first-class experience.
She doesn’t see the value in flying first class, although she now appreciates my perspective. We’ve done the math to show that travel hacking (and flying military Space A) more than makes up for the cost of a first-class ticket, and we’re not spending it fast enough anyway.
We joke that we’ve known each other for 39 years, been married for 32, and lived together for 30. (Because Navy.) A good friend who knows us well once said that we tend to discuss every disagreement to completion and compromise. We rarely seem to yell “Fine!” or stomp off to neutral corners. Instead we dig into the analysis (or manage to table it until we’re rested) and we eventually work through it.
So far so good.
