Kathy Merlino

Even in my 30's I dreamed of early retirement. My husband, Martin, wanted an early retirement, too. The freedom to do whatever we wanted whenever we wanted was a powerful pull. It's apparently a powerful pull for a lot of people because when we announced our retirement date, the number one question from young and old alike was, "How did you do it?" How did we get to early retirement? We soon learned everyone thought we had some secret like we were genius investors with some super method we discovered and would now share with the world. What we discovered is really, really basic. And it's less about investing and more about saving than anything else. If there's one important, most significant thing we did, it was to shift our minds away from consumerism for consuming's sake. Instead, we make it a practice to ask ourselves before buying, "Is this a need or a want?" Sure, we bought a lot of stuff to satisfy our wants. Martin has his serious rider bicycle and a motorcycle. We live on six acres so I can garden and grow food to my heart's content. And, then, there's my John Deere tractor. But, bottom line, those are to us necessary items because they provide some of what feeds our souls. They aren't toys that sit in the garage gathering dust. We also have our share of gadgets like the iPad, albeit version 1, along with a remote keyboard on which I'm typing at this moment. My point is that we live a rich, full life and have been for decades while living below our means and stashing huge amounts of money. When you reach the point where you're living on 40% of your gross income and you've stashed enough reserve to generate that income plus taxes for the rest of your life, you also reach the realization you can retire. But back to the mental shift. If you can't or won't shift your mind to a different view of the world around you, you won't succeed. That's how important the mental shift is. Like most Americans we were spenders, consumers. We'd go to the mall whenever we didn't have something else to do, always walking out with new stuff. We worked hard, made a good living but we spent just about everything we made and even spent what we hadn't made yet by borrowing and borrowing. We wanted to give our kids a nice home in a nice neighborhood in a good school district. We wanted to fit in with our neighbors, buying whatever the requisite amount of current stuff. At work I wore designer clothes and jewelry, walked in every morning with a latte