We gave up everything for the simple life and it's incredible. Part I

Hello Steemers!
Newbie here with my first Steem post. I believe the best way to start is with a brief background on myself and why I think I have something to share on this platform.
You see, my wife and were completely burned out at our respective jobs a couple of years ago and we made some pretty big decisions that changed our lives forever. Since its my first post I’ll just break it down for you…

We both quit our jobs.
We moved to Guatemala for 6 months to de-stress and get our heads on straight.
We then moved to the Appalachian mountains of Virginia.
Lived in a barn for a year while building our home.
We are now working to create a better life for ourselves with homesteading techniques.
All while still trying to indulge our love for travel and adventure while not going broke as young retirees. (OK young is relative).

I’m afraid I’m going to be a terrible Steemian because I have no idea what people want to hear from me. So I’m going to just say what I think is important… My wife and I had great jobs making very good money. We should have been much happier than we were, but work was incredibly stressful and demanding of our time and brain waves. We were basically working for our vacations as well as to have nice things that we didn’t have time to enjoy. Things had to change. I wish I could tell you it was an easy decision and we just said to hell with it and quit to start the life we always wanted. However, the need for security and fear of not having money was staggering. We planned our exit for around 8 years before it came to fruition. I envy folks who have been able to drop everything and go straight to the life they’ve always wanted, but that just wasn’t us. We really liked our paychecks and security. It took years for the call of the world to finally be so loud we couldn’t turn it down. Finally the stars aligned and we jumped at the chance to start a new life.
In my following posts I’ll go more into our past lives, jobs, how we got to this point, and etc but for this one I want to focus on our first steps after freedom.

Our first order of business was to get our finances in order. Not that they were out of order, but we were not at a point where we could just quit collecting a paycheck and go off galavanting all over the world. We had a home that needed to be sold and we needed top dollar for it. We also needed to meet with financial planners to determine several factors:

How much money could we spend. Not just now, but each month and each year until we die or start collecting social security (assuming they’ll still be such a thing).
How should we invest our life savings to ensure we can safely make interest to live on without losing it all.
How do we protect ourselves and our life savings. (Insurance, Will, Trust, etc)

Luckily we were able to sell our home with a Facebook ad for $18 without a real estate agent. They even requested everything in our home; the furniture, pictures, knick knacks, everything! To us, it was a sign that everything was meant to be and was going our way. We spent about about 5 months squaring all of these things away (home sale and various finances) before boarding a plane to Guatemala.

Man, this has been fun to think back thru and share with you. I didn’t expect to enjoy it so much. Next time I’ll start with Why Guatemala and share that experience with you. Spoiler alert, we loved every minute of it.

See the rest of our journey here.
(Part II) and (Part III)