It seems that every single person has a blog these days.  Our son insists that I also start writing a blog.

Speaking of our son…  He is the one who influenced us to make the decision of early retirement.

My husband and I came with our 4 years old son to the USA in 1989 from the former USSR.  For more than 23 years, we as all immigrants, worked hard to survive, then worked hard to achieve some comfortable level of life, then worked hard to maintain that comfortable level of life.  We live very comfortably, enjoying every single moment of life, we’ve created for ourselves and our son.

Like all Americans, we went through good times and bad times. We survived recessions, bubbles and crashes of the stock market, we had lavish corporate jobs,  went through the numerous mergers, acquisitions, lay-off, outsourcing, you name it…

A couple years ago we received an email from our son from Rishikesh, India, also known as the World Capital of Yoga.   He sent us a picture of his hotel room saying “you can live in Rishikesh on US$5 per day”.  I was furious! He is crazy! How will I live in this hotel? On $5/day. Somebody has to work!  But I want to see that place!

A few years passed by.  The urge to travel to Rishikesh and to other places disappeared.  However, the dissatisfaction with dedicating the entire life to work and maintaining what we have did not go away.

In December 2010 my mom died.  When I was cleaned her apartment, I found absolutely new stuff that she kept for tomorrow and never used.  I just realized that we also keep for tomorrow our plans to travel, see the world, but would we be able to do it?   Will we be still alive?  (Some of our friends died just before or in their early fifties.)  Will we be in a good health?  Will we be able to move without assistance?  All these questions that we afraid to ask ourselves…

I still do not remember how exactly this happened, but after return from India, our son declared that we should spend all our hard earned money on ourselves, he will be all right, and we should seriously think about preserving our health and maintaining life-work balance.  As simple as that!  And this though started to penetrate our beings….