Meet The Ali’s…
We met in 2004 in Seattle, started teaching ourselves about managing our own investments in 2005, got married in 2006 in Canada, reached financial independence in 2017, and quit our office jobs in 2018. At that point, Ali was 44 and Alison was 54 years old.
During our travels…
Once we stopped focusing on our jobs we wanted a complete change in perspective, and cost of living. We considered all of our options, and decided to sell our home and donate most of our belongings. And then we started traveling full time. We spent our time exploring different places and meeting new people, with Ali as chief travel planner. Meanwhile, with Alison as our chief spreadsheet wizard, we started building our new investment withdrawal strategy to cover our living expenses. Admittedly, that was extra fun while we were traveling because our living expenses were greatly reduced with no home to pay for in downtown Seattle.
As soon as we reached Singapore, our first international destination in January 2019, our family and friends wanted to hear more about what we were doing. We took their advice, and Ali started this blog which was mostly an outlet for her research and writing. For every destination we visited, Ali wanted to research their entire history and learn everything she could about their culture and current geopolitical climate.
This is Ali…
This is Alison…
The blog…
When Ali started the blog it wasn’t really intended for a broader audience, it was intended for family and friends. But the internet connects us all, so this blog also gave us a bit of a following from people who love travel, all kinds of personal finance money nerds, and the FIRE community. And best of all, this blog gave people a way to reach out to us so we could chat or meet them in real life. And very quickly the blog turned into another hobby — talking about money with a very broad group of people who reached out to us through our blog. And we always offered to talk about money with our family and close friends, so we started offering that to people through our blog. In reality we were doing free financial coaching for anyone who asked us to work with them, which gave us a really interesting way to keep talking about money with more and more people, with different kinds of accounts and income sources from different parts of the world. It was amazing when Alison first created a spreadsheet built for retirement accounts in Canada, and then Australia, and so on. We learned a lot about all kinds of money tools, and made a lot of new friends along the way. And we LOVED all of that.
By the end of 2022, we were spending so much of our time on video calls or working on notes and spreadsheets for other people, that we felt like we were running a financial coaching business. It just got too big. It was time to consider the option of ending our coaching conversations and hitting the off-button on the blog. Ali was more than ready to turn her writing and research skills in a different direction.
One night after three back to back coaching calls, Alison declared that she had no interest in turning our lives into a business. And what we were doing did feel like a business. We agreed that it was time to retire from our early retirement hobby. Ali stopped working on this blog in order to start another one that’s intended as much less personal, and Alison archived most of the 76 spreadsheets she had built and maintained for other people during our financial coaching years. Now we just do those things for fun, with our close friends and family which we love.
The covid pandemic…
We were in Mexico in 2021, along with our good buddies the Senior Nomads, when covid started gaining notoriety. We returned and went straight to a family member’s empty rental home in Arizona for a multi-week quarantine on our own. After a few weeks of solitude and zero covid symptoms we decided we were safe to kidnap Alison’s mom (with her consent and encouragement) from her continuing care retirement home. We usually spent a few months together every summer so this was the “covid solitude” version of our usual summer fun together as The Three Mrs. Walkers. Only Alison’s mom could inspire us to move to Arizona!
These days…
These days we’re still living on version 2 of our own little “Queer Compound” in Arizona, with our very dear friend and his fabulous dog Zoey. We’ve got our own little community to count on.
Our lives have changed dramatically since 2018 when we retired early, but one thing that never changed is how much we love spreadsheets and talking about all things money and taxes. These days we continue our money talks with all of our closest friends and family, Alison still reads pretty much every new personal finance book that comes out and thinks about our taxes every day. Ali writes, paints, gardens, and spends much less time on the internet. And we still do our best to keep “All Options Considered!”
All Options Considered 