We quit our jobs in our 30s to travel and live part-time from a sailboat. We have no regrets about giving up the golden handcuffs.

Bianca and Charles Boddie, shown in Taipei, quit their jobs to travel and buy a sailboat in what they dubbed a 'first retirement.' Courtesy of Bianca and Charles Boddie Bianca and Charles Boddie left lucrative jobs in Seattle to sail and travel in a 'first retirement.' They sold their condo and bought a sailboat, adjusting their lifestyle and finances carefully.

The couple has no regrets and are now exploring business opportunities and other next moves.

We'd been thriving in Seattle's tech boom — Bianca, in the US on a work visa, was a senior finance reporter at Business Insider covering how Wall Street's biggest firms use and invest in technology, and Charlie, a software engineer within Amazon's payments organization, had spent eight years working toward a principal-engineer role .

We had what people like to call golden handcuffs : good salaries, rising careers, and a sense that if we just kept working hard, we'd likely keep making more money.

The handcuffs weren't all that tight, either; they were actually pretty comfortable.

But for us, quitting our jobs and taking time away from work was a constant if far-off dream.

When immigration concerns made our international travel commitments uncertain, we decided not to postpone our dream any longer — and started to look at the numbers.

Our plans began with a spreadsheet For years, we had saved and invested traditionally: 401(k)s, an apartment that would hopefully appreciate and provide a nest egg for a family home, and some riskier exposure to the stock and bond markets.

To leave our jobs, we'd have to figure out how to balance spending during our break without blowing the financial future we'd spent years building.

So we did the thing that makes almost every big life decision feel slightly less terrifying: We put together a spreadsheet.

We pegged dollar figures for daily spend, travel, and the boat.

Even though they were rough, and there was a sense that the estimates could prove to be way off, putting it down in front of us made it feel real.

It also gave us an opportunity to get comfortable with the level of savings we could expect to draw down.

We quit our jobs and took the leap By June 2025, we'd both quit our jobs , sold our Seattle condo, and bought a 42-foot sailboat, Windsong , beginning what we now call our "first retirement." Almost a year and a half later, we and our dog, Stella, have sailed well over 1,000 miles around the Pacific Northwest, traveled to a dozen countries , and committed more meaningful time towards our families and hobbies.