In looking back at my decision making process, I realise that the decision to quit my job was a long time in the making, not that I knew it at the time. My job was just not rewarding me with anything other that a paycheck. I had got stuck in a colossal rut and become something of a moaning mini with anyone who would listen. A big thank you to all those that did and sorry for being quite the bore.

I’ll blog at some later point about the FIRE movement (Financial Independence, Retire Early), but thinking I had enough capital behind me, it dawned on me that I could shape my future. Paraphrasing Maya Angelou: “If you don’t like something, change it. If you can’t change it, change your attitude“, I realised that I could never change my attitude but I could change ‘it’. I could change things by quitting, but I shouldn’t just change things on a whim.

About 2 to 3 years before pulling the trigger I started doing a fair bit of reading around the subject of ‘retiring’, and was able to find plenty of inspiration. So much so that I thought I needed to make some structure out of it all, and the best way to do this was to create a blog. There will be much in this blog that is a rehash of other people’s work, including the name of this website. The title comes from an article I read in the FT back in July 2019 entitled ‘Life Two: What we used to call retirement’. The article was about a book of the same name by Don Ezra. The book opened my eyes to planning for the next stage of life.

I don’t think that the name ‘Life Two’ has been trademarked, and the UK version of the domain name was free so I thought I’d take the plunge and buy it. Don – if I am treading on your toes then sorry, and get in touch.

So this blog will hopefully be a journal of how I approach, and journey through, retirement. It’s an attempt to make the most of life, documenting what I was thinking, and when I was thinking it. It will be heavily influenced by what I’ve read and learned over time so it’s likely to be a regurgitation of what I consider ‘the best bits’ of retirement journey literature. My thoughts are my own, but where my inspiration comes from others I will pay each their dues as I go.