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.
Thanks for sharing this update.
I think the thing that really strikes me is how low your spending is and how nervous you still seem to be about spending money. I know this is challenging for many people, but I think one thing that would really help you is if you set up to receive monthly income in your checking account. You should set it up so you have something that resembles a healthy paycheck.
You have a massive amount of wealth. You could spend probably 5X what you’re spending.
I understand you may not currently see what you want to spend that kind of money on, but I think you should work on it. Going out to eat only once on an extended trip seems silly to me. Go to eat whenever you want!
Even your concerns about health insurance sound odd to me. What difference does it make what it costs? It doesn’t make any difference in your financial world. I think the sooner you can let go of that kind of stressful thinking, the happier you will be.
My wife and I are retired like you, and we have about 2/3 as much money as you, and when I finally realized that there’s no way we’re ever going run out of money, I stopped worrying about what things cost. I don’t love how much we have to pay for health insurance, for example, but it doesn’t make any difference. And the freedom of not worrying about what things cost is really priceless.
If I were you, I would work really hard on trying to loosen up on spending and worrying about the cost of things. I think you will find it incredibly freeing.
Thanks for your thoughts. We are definitely continuing to spend where it makes sense to us, we are on a month long trip with family now. No worries about our eating out, I meant to say we usually eat our once per day when traveling, assuming we have an Airbnb to cook in, because we get tired of eating out all the time. If we don’t have a place to cook, we definitely eat out more 🙂. We are planning a major renovation of our house and other spending is in our future. We are just going at our own pace.
If a ~60y/o couple has $9.3M and is spending $76k/annually – you’re going to end up dying with about $75M. If that’s your goal, that’s awesome. If not, spend more in ways to enjoy life more.
Thanks for your thoughts. No worries, we will be some dinf more as time goes on, especially on taxes for Roth conversions as well as travel and our family.
I understand it can be difficult to spend freely after a life of accumulating.
Respectfully, paying taxes on a Roth Conversion doesn’t ‘count’ as spending – you are simply putting some of your $9.3MM into a different bucket.
The longer you wait to ‘upsize’ your spending, the more you’re going to ‘need’ to spend 🙂 You can start small, but start now – and you’ll see you’ll be just fine and get extra joy from whatever you choose to spend on.
Using retirement time for health is great!
Now you need to use retirement money for something. You say you might do first class flights later but you could literally do private jets right now, not later, and still be fine. Or you accumulate that $75M that was mentioned in another comment…
Do a round the world trip at a budget of at least $100K/person for a splurge year and see what you think. Do it every year if you like it!
Definitely get the personal trainer. Five times a week would be affordable!
Or think hard about where this money is going if not to spending on yourself. Do you want your son to have a massive inheritance? Do you want to do charity donations?
Same thought as the others. Massively underspending. We have about the same net worth within ~$500K and spend 3X as much – and we are underspending as it is. We are about a 2.8% spend rate and need to push it higher. We have been retired 2 years and give ourselves annual increases. Next year will spend over 3% and then push to 3.5%. Treat yourself!
“Eventually, it’s possible we’ll move to be closer to our child or purchase an additional home nearby.”
We have been retired for 25+ years. During that time each of our 3 children has moved 3 or more times . We never tried to chase them – impossible! Through the years we have spent extended time with each of them for special reasons. We stayed either in their homes or in a short term rental. We have always kept our home base.
That perceived separation has made visits valuable, enjoyable, and comfortable. We have always made a conscious effort to not be “helicopter parents” and we think our children are better for it. While we have maintained great relationships with each of them, they are independent successful adults. We love them and are proud of them. They know it and also know they can count on us if needed – I recently learned that can go both ways.
Thank you for your update. It is difficult to change spending patterns after being savers. We are similar as you, good amount of savings yet don’t spend lavishly. We could, but hard to change. We fly first class occasionally and it still feels like a treat. We do travel often and enjoy being active as we travel.
Enjoy life, stay healthy and be happy.
Thanks,
Thanks for sharing! I noted your comment, “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.” We never made lots of money in our careers and up retiring from our employment we’ve had the pension from my state government job to rely on. So, we never had to live without a steady paycheck but that paycheck was far less (about one-third) than the meager income we had when working. Primarily due to our parents and grand-parents longevity being no longer than late 60’s to early 80’s, we started taking our social security at 62 and let our investments continue to grow unless we pull money out of them to do more giving (tithing, etc.) to our church and ministries that help the needy. If we didn’t have these sources to rely on, it probably would be more difficult (in the mind) to pull from our investments enough to be able to very comfortably live and thrive. We’d certainly pick a consistent amount to live on but only because we’d have to.
I pray the Lord continue to bless you and use you to fulfill all the purpose for which He created you!