I understood from an early age that I wanted to
prepare a secure future for myself,
especially in anticipation of a family.
But I also realize the importance of living in the
now and making the most of that.
I'm Darren Theodic, I'm 31 years old.
I'm stationed at Avianna Air Base,
Italy, and I've saved over
$500,000 for early retirement.
My job in the military is radio frequency transmission systems.
We just got here last year,
so we're still somewhat settling in,
but you know, we're making the most of it.
And we just had our first newborn,
our new daughter Sophia.
Our family didn't have a whole lot of money coming
up.
I had to see my mom struggle at times financially.
And so part of that inspired me to do better
for myself financially.
Around the time of 16 years old,
I started gaining interest in personal finance.
I started by reading a couple books.
Some of my early influencers were Warren Buffett,
Benjamin Graham.
I joined the military when I was 18,
back in August of 2011.
My thinking behind joining the military
was I wanted to actually travel the world,
and I knew that I wanted to go to school
later on,
continue my education. And so the military afforded me that
opportunity.
I met my wife, Nadia in late
2021 and we dated until the following summer.
Me being a finance guy,
you know, I kind of got that conversation going early
on in our relationship.
So we started working on monthly budget for her to
aggressively pay down her debt.
And so you know, she went from the time we
met till by the time we got married,
which was about a year and a half and she
paid that 25 grand down.
So I'm super proud of her for doing that and
you know,
I believe that she really took an initiative on that
and got after it.
So when my wife and I moved to Italy from
Germany last year,
we dropped down to 1 income.
So we've had to be even more intentional about
how we spend and save money.
Service members are uniquely compensated
in comparison to civilians. So we get an annual salary,
which is public information, but we also get compensated through
the form of allowances.
We get a food allowance,
a housing allowance, a utility allowance and then we also
get
a cost of living allowance,
which helps us offset some of the additional costs in
our particular locations and that includes overseas.
So my monthly budget categories include housing,
so our rent, utilities, our cell phone bills,
our home fuel bills as well as our vehicle fuel.
I also set aside a certain amount for groceries as
well as discretionary spending.
We have some money for obviously like entertainment that we
do have on any given month and Netflix or Disney
subscription and then also a Spotify subscription.
We do set aside some of our savings to cover,
you know, emergency expenses. So like last month,
I had to make a repair on my vehicle.
Our community, our friends here and Co workers really came
together for us during this time.
They cooked for us, dropped us off some meals as
well as put together a baby shower for us.
So you know, we were very grateful for that.
And through so much gifting we've been really taken care
of.
The cost of living in Italy is actually pretty affordable
in comparison to most parts of the United States.
So and rent alone, we're in a pretty nice house,
A4 Bed, 2 bath and
we pay roughly
€1650, which translates to about
1800 United States dollars roughly.
My wife and I do conduct our monthly budget meetings
and we try to stick to that as best we
can,
but there are areas of course that we splurge in
from time to time by traveling.
So when we go on trips,
we try not to be sticklers for how much we
spend.
We're in a really great location to travel.
We actually have a ski resort about 30 minutes away,
so during the winter it's a fun thing to do.
We're not too far from Austria,
Croatia's right there, as well as Germany.
So I'm currently 12 years in the military and I
plan to retire after 20 years,
which would at that point afford me a pension for
the rest of my life.
Currently I have over
$500,000 invested in the market,
mainly towards retirement, so I'm really taking a laddered approach
to investing for retirement.
So I've started investing in my Roth IRA when I
was 18 and I've been maxing that out pretty much
every year.
So currently invest about 7000 every year into that Roth
IRA,
and I invest also $1300 monthly into a taxable brokerage
account with Vanguard.
And then I also contribute
920 dollars, roughly 20% of my income,
to the Thrift Savings Plan,
which is the federal government's 401K equivalent.
When I retire from the military 20 years in,
I'll get 50% of my base pay at that time.
So the number that is my primary goal to get
to
is $1,000,000 and I hope to obtain that within the
next five years
when I reached the age of
38. I plan to retire,
so I want to really put my time and energy
towards running an online finance business
after I retired from the military.
I'm absolutely going to be a stay at home,
Dad. I'm going to run my online finance business for
a little bit.
So that'll allow me that that benefit to stay at
home,
run that, but also just kind of
hang out and and relax and enjoy my life a
little bit more by taking care of our children as
well as the household.
My wife also is planning to work throughout that time
in our lives together.
But yeah, I'm just going to enjoy it,
allow my wife to go work on her career and
chase her dreams.
We've looked at Portugal as being at the top of
our list in retirement,
and I know a lot of expats have moved there
in recent years,
but Portugal's definitely a place we could see ourselves.
I think between everything that I've got going on in
my life,
you know, serving in the military overseas,
taking care of my newborn,
my wife and I being relatively newlywed,
you know, I think it's a a lot of changes
that I've been undergoing just in the last year.
It's daunting to some effect,
but it's mostly just been a joyful experience.