Today I have an update for you from a previous millionaire interview.
I’m letting three years pass from the initial interviews to the updates, so if you’ve been interviewed, I’ll be in touch. 
This update was submitted in April.
As usual, my questions are in bold italics and their responses follow…
OVERVIEW
How old are you?
I’m 57 and my spouse is 60.
We’ve been married 33 years.
Do you have kids?
We have one child who is 28, and has finished graduate school and is fully self-supporting in another state.
We are very proud of him and all he has accomplished.
What area of the country do you live in (and urban or rural)?
We live in a large city in the Southwest.
We live in a central area, but still have to use our car to get anywhere.
What was your original Millionaire Interview on ESI Money?
I was MM332.
Is there anything else we should know about you?
I do a lot of volunteering in my community, I’m involved with three different organizations to varying levels, and really enjoy my time helping out. I’ve also tried to get involved in new endeavors – joining a couple of hobby-related groups and regularly joining an exercise group.
I love to cook and garden and am working on eating healthily and increasing my exercise. I was not someone that did a lot of exercising during my working years, but now I’m building a habit of daily exercise.
If you had told me this 10 years ago, I wouldn’t have believed you. But now that I’m not working, I’ve decided that my “one job” every day is to do some sort of movement.
Ideally, I try to do a workout and a walk everyday. I’ve figured out that if that is my goal, then I’ll usually hit this 5 days a week.
I’m a believer in moderation when it comes to exercise as that is what’s been sustainable for me vs. extreme programs. I’m considering hiring a trainer one of these days or going to a local PT center that also does training for help with a program and correct form for strength training.
NET WORTH
What is your current net worth and how is that different from your original interview?
As of March 2026, our net worth is $9.3 million.
That is up $3.2 million from the original interview.
What happened along the way to make these changes?
The huge majority of this growth was from growth of the stock market.
I retired at the beginning of 2023, and my husband later the same year, so we didn’t have much more W2 earnings to add to our nest egg after I retired.
What are you currently doing to maintain/grow your net worth?
We remain invested in the stock market, both in taxable and nontaxable investment accounts. We also continue to pay attention to our spending.
Folks on the MMM forums urge us to spend more, and we have modestly increased our spending (if you don’t count health insurance) but it’s been hard for us to consider spending on what we consider high-end items, such as flying first class. I guess I’m saving this for when I’m older.
We do a lot of cooking at home as we both enjoy good food, but it’s still a lot cheaper than eating out all the time. When we travel, we tend to eat out one meal and the rest in our rental or hotel room.
EARN
What is your job?
I’ve been retired since early 2023. Both my husband and I worked for large technology companies in a technical/science field.
We were senior individual contributors when we retired. I’d never wanted to be on a management track, my husband was briefly, but didn’t like it.
I enjoyed being an expert in my field and helping others succeed via mentoring. I also liked traveling to other locations at my company and the personal connection I got from meeting in person people I’d only talked to online/phone meetings.
What is your annual income?
I don’t really consider us having an income, as I always thought of it since we are no longer employed.
But our investments do provide interest and dividends, although this is less than our annual spending. Our investment income in the last two years averaged about 65K.
SAVE
What is your annual spending and how has it changed since your interview?
We have spent an average of 76K in the past three years. This is an increase in spending for us since retirement, but a bit confusing since we now also track spending on taxes and medical insurance (as these used to be deducted by our employers).
This year I anticipate a somewhat higher spend, as our insurance costs are much higher.
For example, in 2025, we spent 76K. 27K was spent during traveling (includes food).
9K on food at home and restaurants while not traveling. 20K on home goods, maintenance, car, utilities, insurance, 1.2K clothes, 13K on medical expenses and insurance, 3K on hobbies/entertainment and the rest of the 3K was misc.
What happened along the way to make these changes?
We have significantly increased our travel, mostly slow travel, spending a few weeks to a month in each location. Last year we were away from home almost 40% of the time, this year might be a bit less.
When we travel, we tend to stay in apartment rentals or visit family so the costs are not extremely high. I would love to continue this style of travel and even do more to be closer to our family which is spread across the US and the globe.
Our employers used to provide us with very good insurance at a pretty low rate. I got one year of insurance when I left as part of a severance package and after that we transitioned to the ACA for insurance.
The first two years were pretty low cost as we limited our income, but this year we were no longer eligible for ACA tax credits so our costs are close to 24K for two adults, with extremely high deductibles. Fortunately, this was something I was aware of, so I wasn’t too surprised, but it still feels painful to pay this much.
I’d say this has been the worst aspect of spending increases. There is some inflation but I don’t feel we’ve been affected by this too much.
We’ll see how the recent increases in airfare affect our travel budget.
INVEST
What are your current investments and how have they changed over the years?
I wouldn’t say our strategy has changed much for investment, but we did ensure we had several years’ worth of spending in cash, and have this invested in high-yield accounts (to the best of our ability). This helped us feel more comfortable with market rises/falls. In 2022, right as I was deciding to leave my employer, we ended the year with down 15% net worth, but fortunately, the market rebounded and the next year we were up 27%.
We have about 7M in stock funds (mostly index funds), 0.6M in individual stocks, 0.6M in bonds, 0.7M in cash and the rest is house equity and other funds like HSAs (also partially invested in the market). As you can see, I’m hoping the stock market remains strong going forward. It felt as early retirees, that it was too early to take too much out of the market as we needed it to grow long term.
What happened along the way to make these changes?
We really just stayed the course and kept invested in the market as we had all along. As I mentioned, we did increase our cash allocation.
We’ve worked to close various small accounts and consolidate our finances to fewer brokerages/banks. This is still a work in progress.
Our Fidelity contact is pressing us to move more assets under the Fidelity umbrella, but I think we will continue to stay in both Fidelity and Vanguard as this feels safer to me.
This year as we are not subject to ACA income restrictions, we are cashing out of various investments and building up cash reserves. We are going to consider Roth conversions at the end of the year when we see better what our income is and what tax bracket we’ll be in.
MISCELLANEOUS
What other financial challenges or opportunities have you faced since your last interview?
The biggest financial challenge was learning to live without that steady paycheck. When we both worked, we got paid much more than we spent, so our “challenge” then was moving money out of our checking to investments.
Now we had to reverse course. I know some people arrange for regular inputs from their savings/brokerages to their checking for spending, but so far we prefer to move money as we need it.
We just recently opened a cash management account with Fidelity to get better yields for the money we use for everyday spending and also to avoid needing to keep moving money over to our bank’s checking.
Overall, what’s better and what’s worse since your last interview?
Our everyday life is definitely better. We both love deciding on our own schedule, not having stressful work meetings and corporate directives.
We have enjoyed more time with our hobbies, travel and time with family. I was able to travel to help my family during a time of need last year.
We’ve significantly increased our exercise (when we worked, we basically didn’t do much at all, just occasional walks or hikes). We have struggled a bit with health issues in recent years, which makes me happy we retired early so we have time to address these and enjoy our time without worrying about work.
It would be much worse to deal with these issues at the same time as having to go into the office or travel for work.
Sometimes I have had moments of missing the community aspect of being at work and the feeling of being needed. I’m working on replacing this with volunteering and other activities.
This is a bit disrupted by our travel schedule. It’s also a work in progress to meet new people and plan social activities.
The activities I’ve joined tend to have mostly people who are older than me, and I’m new to the group so it’s been a struggle to make new friends. I’m still in touch with friends and some former coworkers, but as time goes on, people move away or interests change, so I’m aware of the need to make new connections.
What are your plans for the future?
Continue on as we’ve been going, doing slower travel, especially in the summer, to escape the heat.
Eventually, it’s possible we’ll move to be closer to our child or purchase an additional home nearby.
Given that you have a bit more wisdom and experience, what advice do you have these days for ESI Money readers?
Quitting your job might be the hardest decision you have to make. It can be very scary, but we used the online calculators available to us to look at the risks and made the jump as you really never know what life will bring, and I like to say “life is too short to be stuck in more boring meetings”.
It also helped to have examples from both the real world and online. One of my close friends retired a few years before me and I was able to confide in her when I was considering leaving my job and get her encouragement that this was possible.
I was also helped by the MMM forums, where many people helped with comments, encouragement and resources to help me make my decisions.
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