RESTED

The RESTED approach

Updated

The RESTED approach

Most people think retiring early means being rich. It doesn’t. It means being specific about what you want your life to cost, and then building backwards from that number. That’s the core of the approach, and everything else hangs off it.

Retire early

Retiring early isn’t about stopping everything at 45. It’s about getting to the point where work is a choice, not a requirement, sooner than the default plan says you can. That starts with knowing what your life actually costs, saving deliberately, being tax-efficient, and building some income that doesn’t depend on a job. I treat it as an engineering problem: model it, test it, adjust it.

Slow travel

Slow travel means staying longer in fewer places. It’s often cheaper per day than a fast trip, because a monthly rental beats nightly rates and you take fewer flights. But the real reason is depth: you live somewhere for a while instead of passing through. It’s also a way to test what retirement might feel like before you commit to it.

Experience

The money is the easy part to measure. The harder question is what you’d actually do with the time. Experience is about designing the days after work on purpose: the routines, the people, the projects and the health that make a long retirement good rather than just long.

Discover

Discover is the open-minded part. New places, new ideas, and an honest look at what I’ve got wrong. It’s also why RESTED is shared in public: writing it down keeps me honest.

How the pieces fit together

Retiring early buys the time. Slow travel makes that time affordable and interesting. Experience and discovery make it worth having. None of it works without the numbers, and none of it is worth doing for the numbers alone.

What RESTED isn’t