The Plan: Early Retirement & Slow Travel
Introducing us: KC and Shawn
I’m KC and this is my husband Shawn. We’re in our early-mid 50’s and, up until recently, were both SVPs of Human Resources at our respective companies. We live in a suburb of Phoenix, Arizona, where we raised 3 amazing kids who are all now in college. We also have an elderly, though still spicy, Shiba Inu named Mochi.
Shawn reached a significant milestone by celebrating his retirement this summer. After a trip to Spain to visit two of our kids who were studying abroad, he has been spending his new free time working on getting our house ready for an eventual sale. I’m still working at a technology company here in the valley.
Our plan is to downsize from our current home into a smaller place sometime next year, and embark on a year or two of slow travel once I retire. We want to spend 1-2 months at a time in each of a list of locations we chose throughout Europe and SE Asia, coming home for a month in between.
Travel is a passion we both share, having visited multiple countries in Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and Latin America for both pleasure and work. Because we understand the physical toll of travel, we knew making sure we were both in good health was one of our top priorities. To that end, we’ve been undergoing various health checks recently to make sure everything looks good. We each have a chronic condition that is well managed - mine is migraine, Shawn’s is asthma - but otherwise we didn’t expect any negative results.
One of the tests Shawn had done, due to genetically high LDL cholesterol, was a CAC scan, and this is where our story took a detour…
4o mini