Welcome back to the early retirement podcast. I hope you're enjoying these interviews.

Hopefully they are resonating in a way. And if they are, just shoot me a note. Email me, aureatruthfinancial.com and tell me, yep, super helpful or no, I missed the old content where it was more 10, 15 minutes, quick tidbits, maybe a story. I make all this content for you guys. So let me know what would be helpful. And then once again, if you want, you're going to see a link in the description to get a free guide to retiring with confidence. That is everything. So if you look and you get overwhelmed, don't be. It's not to make you go, oh my gosh, I'm missing something. It's to give you that feeling of, wow, maybe I'm not worried about something or maybe I am worried about something that for no reason. I just am in a better spot than I thought. Maybe it's that moment of clarity where you go, wow, yeah, maybe I can retire earlier than I thought. Or maybe you get a little sense of, wow, it's a good gut check for me to see. There's lots of things I hadn't considered. So I just want you all to get confident and finding out when

you can retire, when you can make work optional. Thank you for, as always, listening to this podcast.

I'm going to go ahead and play the interview now. Guys, enjoy. Melody, what I'm really curious on

it, so you retired at 56. You could have retired at any time. I mean, you could have worked till 65. Now,

maybe you wouldn't have wanted to because of the stress that you shared, but why specifically

did you choose to walk away at the time you did?

So I was thinking about it. I spent a lot of time, you know, pondering my finances and realizing

that I was a little tired and a long career will take it out of anybody, but I realized that I had a choice between the luxury of more money or the luxury of more time.

And I decided to take the luxury of more time. And it means that I have maybe not an extravagant retirement, but I have more time. And it means that I have, you know, maybe not an extravagant retirement, but I have

more time to enjoy it. What I'm doing in this new show, Retirement Reality, is having heartfelt,

candid conversations with people who have already retired so you can hear from them. What worked

well, what didn't, and everything in between, I hope you

enjoy. And if you're retired and you want to personally come share your story on a future episode,

there's a link right below this in the description of this episode where you can apply to be a guest.

Now go enjoy the episode.

Guys, get ready for this episode. Listen to this.

At 39 years old, $0,000, retired at 56 years old.

Divorce, financial abuse, a passing away of a spouse, all inspired her to go, I'm going

to take control of my life.

And some of you that worry strongly about

health care before retirement and it just weighs on you with extreme, oh my gosh, how on earth

...