Retired by 50: Real-life stories

By Liz Pulliam Weston

In my last column, I introduced readers to two couples who used the principles outlined in the simple-living book "Your Money or Your Life" to say goodbye to the corporate 9-to-5 world.

Here are three more couples who each followed slightly different paths to early retirement. Eradicating debt and becoming their own bosses was important to each, but they chose different methods to accomplish those ends.

Here are their stories:

Rob and Mary Bennett

Rob Bennett was 35 and had no savings when he was laid off in 1991. He'd loved his job as a reporter for a tax newsletter and hadn't seriously thought about doing anything else.

But being jobless made him feel vulnerable enough to consider other possibilities.

"It was a horrible feeling," Bennett remembered. "I told myself I would never be in that position again."

Bennett and his soon-to-be wife, Mary, decided to make financial independence a priority. The first step for Bennett: Make more money, and save as much of it as possible.

Bennett landed a job with Ernst & Young following the same tax legislation on Capitol Hill that he had covered as a reporter, but for private clients. It was a "corporate job" rather than the purer journalism he wanted to be doing, but the pay was a lot better than his old job: By the time he quit, he was making $125,000 a year. Mary made about $40,000 annually working for a nonprofit.

They combed their budget looking for expenses to cut. The cable TV was disconnected, they stopped buying each other more than token gifts, and a $500 monthly food budget was slashed in half. The Bennetts started looking at every expense in terms of how much more quickly they could reach their retirement goal.

It takes $75,000 to earn $3,000 a year in interest income, assuming a 4% return. Each $3,000 in annual expenses that Rob's family cuts means they have to save $75,000 less for retirement -- thus moving their financial independence closer to reality.

At first, they funneled every dollar they could into paying off the $148,800 mortgage on their 1,500-square-foot townhome in Arlington, Va. When that goal was accomplished, in less than four years, the Bennetts set about boosting their investment portfolio. In their best year, Rob said, the couple saved $88,000.

They still took vacations -- a driving trip down the California coast, a five-day biking tour through Vermont where they rode from one bed-and-breakfast to another, plus a few excursions to rural communities where they thought they might like to relocate.

"You don't cut out things that you value," Rob said. "The most important thing (about spending money) is can you remember it? I vividly remember those trips years later."

The couple also knew they wanted to have kids, Rob said, so they aimed for the kinds of vacations that would be harder to take when the children came along.

And come they did. Their older boy, now 7, was born about a year before Rob retired from his corporate job at 43. In November 2001, they sold their townhouse and paid cash for a home in rural Purcellville, Va., a transition I wrote about in an earlier column, "To cut costs, move to small-town USA." Their younger son, now 5, was born shortly afterward.

Mary, who home-schools the boys, still earns about $4,000 a year working for her former full-time employer, while Rob figures he needs just $10,000 in freelance income to supplement the income from their investments. He's written a book about his approach to money called "Passion Saving: The Path to Plentiful Free Time and Soul-Satisfying Work," which is sold through his PassionSaving.comWeb site.

Continued: Unexpected expenses

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