In 2011, I walked away from a six-figure law career and retired at age 41. I thought I was prepared financially. But emotionally? Not so much.

After decades of working, I was used to the sense of purpose that came with a career, and I assumed I’d have to give that up once I stopped working. My biggest fear took the form of one major uncertainty: What would I do with all that unstructured time?

Fast forward 14 years later, and my days are anything but idle. My wife and I now live in Portugal, the No. 1 country Americans want to move to. I spend my free time enjoying local food with friends and hiking the wildflower-dotted coastal trails. Retiring early is one of the best decisions I’ve ever made … but I remember how overwhelming it felt at the start.

Here’s what I’ve learned so far in early retirement, and why I don’t regret it.

I followed a predictable path for most of my adult life: law school, summer associate gigs, and eventually a stable legal career. Then came the 2008 financial crisis. The firm I worked for collapsed — and with it, my sense of direction. I couldn’t picture myself doing anything other than practicing law.

I could’ve stayed in the industry. But instead, I chose the unknown. Most people think early retirement is about not working anymore. But it’s about redefining your identity without a roadmap. That required a mindset shift: I had to become an explorer.

That mindset brought us to Portugal, a country where we didn’t speak the language, didn’t know anyone, and had no idea what to expect day-to-day. It was disorienting at first. But the uncertainty became our motivation to grow, learn, and build a fulfilling life from scratch.

If you’re delaying retirement because you don’t know what comes next, that might be exactly why it’s worth doing. Uncertainty could be your opportunity to travel down paths you’ve never imagined.

When we first retired, my wife and I assumed we’d gradually draw down our savings over time and hope it would last. But something surprising happened: Our net worth kept growing.

A major reason is that living in Portugal drastically reduced our expenses. Here’s what we save annually compared to our old life in Washington, D.C.:

• $15,000 on state income taxes
• $25,000 on health insurance and deductibles
• $14,000 on property taxes
• $20,000 on food, entertainment, and daily costs

In total, we estimate that we save about $5,000 per month just by living abroad.

We follow the same financial strategy we did while working: We live below our means, reinvest the difference, and let compounding do the work. The only difference is that now, instead of salaries, our income comes from investments.

Retirement doesn’t have to be the end of building wealth. It can even be the beginning of a more sustainable, intentional version of it.

Whether you’re working or not, most of us want the same thing: to feel like we matter and are making a contribution.

When we first retired, we had a built-in sense of purpose as parents to a young child. We joined school activities, studied the local language, and built a new life in Lisbon.

But when our daughter went off to college, we were back to square one. Our schedules emptied out, and we faced the same question we did in 2011: What do we do with all this time?

Before diving into hobbies or commitments, we made a plan. We identified six core priorities that bring meaning to our lives:

1. Building and strengthening friendships
2. Personal care and physical health
3. Quality time as a couple
4. Travel
5. Volunteer work and giving back
6. Learning new skills

Once we had those priorities in place, it became easier to build a routine that felt fulfilling.

Today, my wife volunteers at our tennis club, takes pottery and Dutch lessons, and plays sports. I’m focused on writing, freelance retirement coaching, and helping a local nonprofit as a consultant. We host dinner parties, explore new recipes, and take short trips around Europe.

With the right mindset, early retirement can be the perfect new starting point. You just have to be willing to embrace it.

Alex Trias is a retired attorney. He and his wife have been living in Portugal since 2015. He writes about tax planning, investing, early retirement and expat life on Substack.

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While Markeiz Ryan, 36, was a senior airman in the U.S. Air Force, he took a trip to Vietnam that would set him off on a new journey — he just didn’t know it yet.

At the time, Ryan admits, he was feeling down after having gotten in trouble for breaking his curfew. He lost out on several months of pay, was restricted to his military base and demoted from staff sergeant to senior airman.

“After this, I was very depressed and very sad,” Ryan tells CNBC Make It. “But that depression and sadness make you think about where your life is going and it makes you redirect your life into the right direction.”

″[Vietnam] just looked like so much fun and it really lived up to all the hype,” he said. “I ended up having the best time of my life, and that depression was [just] gone.”

Ryan says he didn’t want to let go of the good feelings he had on that trip, so when he got home he almost immediately started planning his return to the country.

The veteran went back to his life in the Air Force and completed his service on a military base in Wyoming before being honorably discharged in 2019.

Soon after leaving the Air Force, Ryan relocated to Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, where he spends roughly $1,031 a month on expenses: $850 in rent for a two-bedroom apartment, $130 for utilities, $8.50 for his cellphone, $15 for gas and $27 for a VIP gym membership.

His other expenses include $96 a year for internet, $1,000 a year for health insurance, and $100-$400 a month on groceries. What he spends on groceries varies because he often alternates between cooking his own food and dining out.

To keep up with his life in Vietnam, Ryan’s monthly income comes from several sources and totals roughly $4,000, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It.

It includes approximately $1,500 from VA disability, $1,000 from the GI Bill while he’s pursuing a master’s degree in Business Administration, and $900 to $1,300 from teaching English. Ryan also does occasional odd jobs like voiceover work, where his pay can range from $200 to $600 a month, and is an avid fan of day trading, where he averages about $300 a month.

“This might not sound like a lot in America but trust me, this is more than enough to be middle or even above middle class in Vietnam,” he says.

The one job he loves the most, though, is teaching English as a second language.

“ESL teaching is fun and very rewarding. I wanted to do it since high school. I felt like it was the only job I ever completely enjoyed,” he says.

“Vietnam is the number one safest place I’ve ever lived. I never have to look over my shoulder here. I noticed that there’s this great level of calm,” Ryan says. “People are more focused on their day-to-day life and they’re less focused on what’s going on politically. It’s a much more calm feeling.”

Ryan uses the extra income he receives to invest in the U.S. and Vietnamese stock markets. He says he also supports the local communities and always has money set aside for medical bills and visa runs.

When Ryan first arrived in Vietnam, he moved around quite a bit, but has been living in his current Ho Chi Minh City apartment in one of the country’s tallest residential towers for two years now.

“If I leave, it’s because Vietnam told me to leave. In America, I felt very unmotivated. I felt like no matter how hard you work, you’re still in poverty. You’re constantly chasing a standard that you can’t really achieve,” he says.

“Here in Vietnam, it takes a lot of the monetary pressure out of your day-to-day. You focus on what makes you happy, who you want to become and how you’re going to get there.”

Since moving to Vietnam, Ryan has made an effort to learn the language, but he admits he’s still not the best at it.

“I can never claim that I’m fluent in Vietnamese, but I do a lot better than most of my peers here,” he says.

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When Sahil Bloom was in college, he turned to the richest people he knew for career advice. That’s how the Stanford baseball player — whose athletic aspirations were curtailed by a shoulder injury junior year — ended up in investing.

“By the time I turned 30, I had achieved every marker of what I believed success looked like. I had the high-paying job, the title, the house, the car — it was all there,” he writes in his book “The 5 Types of Wealth: A Transformative Guide to Design Your Dream Life.” 

“But beneath the surface, I was miserable,” he writes. “All I could think was: Is this it?”

It was around the same time that a friend of his laid this nugget on him over a drink: “You’re going to see your parents 15 more times before they die,” given how far away they lived and how often Bloom had been visiting. 

For many years, “I had prioritized one thing at the expense of everything,” he writes. That one thing was money — until he realized he was doing it all wrong. What we should all be looking at is “time, people, purpose, health.”

So in his book, Bloom expands our definition of wealth to include time wealth, social wealth, mental wealth, physical wealth, and financial wealth. His goal is to help readers “measure the right things, make better decisions, and design your journey to wealth, success, happiness, and fulfillment.”

We know CNBC Make It readers want to be happier, smarter, and more successful with their money, work, and life. And we also know that what this ultimately looks like is unique for every single one of you. That’s why we chose “The 5 Types of Wealth” as our October book club pick. 

“This book is about designing your dream life, rejecting the default path, rejecting the default definitions of success, and creating your own,” Bloom says. “You will never feel wealthy, you will never feel successful, unless you create your own definition.”

Ready to dive in? Start reading, request to join our LinkedIn group, and come chat with us and Bloom on Wednesday, October 29, at 10 a.m. ET, at our next CNBC Make It Book Club discussion. 

Any questions for the author? Drop them in the comments of this LinkedIn post (you’ll need to join our private group first, which you can do here). Or email them to us in advance at askmakeit@cnbc.com, using the subject line “Question for Sahil Bloom.”

Have suggestions for future picks? Send them to us at askmakeit@cnbc.com, using the subject line “Make It book club suggestion.”

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In 2015, Allison Ellsworth was in her kitchen experimenting with different gut-healthy drink recipes, trying to make apple cider vinegar taste good. Little did she know that the concoctions she was mixing would eventually become a billion dollar business.

Today, the 38-year-old is the co-founder of prebiotic soda brand Poppi, which she started alongside her husband Stephen Ellsworth. Almost a decade after her kitchen experiments, in May 2025, Ellsworth sold the business to PepsiCo for $1.95 billion.

The deal includes $300 million in anticipated cash tax benefits for a net purchase price of $1.65 billion.

Ellsworth has always been a hustler.

“I just knew I never wanted to work for anyone … I was good at, like, hacking systems and … I always had this really great gift to be visionary [and] see through cracks,” Ellsworth told CNBC Make It.

While in college, she took a full year off to travel and still managed to graduate in four years. During her studies, she also worked several jobs where she figured out how to execute more efficiently than expected.

“I worked at a call center, and I learned really early working there, that if I did certain things, I could [double], triple … 5x the sales of everybody else,” Ellsworth said.

After college, Ellsworth spent years on the road working in oil and gas research. She would travel all around the United States by herself, which eventually began to weigh on her health.

“I did that for seven years … working all over the U.S. I’ve driven through every single state by myself, stayed in teeny, little towns and motels and ran huge, multi-million dollar projects in my 20s. It was crazy.” she said.

But since she was always on the road, she had trouble accessing nutritious food. ”I felt ill. So my face started breaking out, my stomach was hurting. I was allergic to all sorts of different things … and I couldn’t figure out what’s going on,” she said.

When doctors couldn’t help, she began to Google all of her symptoms and decided to try taking apple cider vinegar, which is known to have many health benefits, but is unpalatable when taken on its own.

“I just fell in love with apple cider vinegar, and the way it made me feel, but I wanted to make it taste better,” said Ellsworth.

In her kitchen, Ellsworth began experimenting — infusing the apple cider vinegar with different fruits and natural ingredients and mixing it with soda water. Over the span of about three months, she came up with the first version of her recipe which would become the foundation of her brand.

By 2016, she and her husband were preparing for their first child when she decided to take a break from her job and all of the travel. With more free time, she decided to bottle up her gut-healthy drinks and sell them at her local farmers market under the name “Mother Beverage.”

Within three weeks of selling at the farmers market, they were discovered by Whole Foods, she said. “When the Whole Foods buyer came to our booth and was like: ‘We don’t have anything like this in Whole Foods. Here’s my card.’ That was that moment I was like: ‘Oh, I have a business,’” she added.

“I remember, my husband was still working. I was three months pregnant. We just bought a house, and I was like: ‘We’re gonna do this. We’re going all in.’ He thought I was crazy, but … we just never looked back,” she said.

The couple quit their jobs to focus on Poppi.

By 2017, Mother Beverage was selling in Whole Foods and by 2018, Ellsworth said the company made about $500,000 in revenue. In the same year, they went on the television show “Shark Tank” where they pitched Mother Beverage to a lineup of business moguls.

During the filming of the show, Ellsworth was nine months pregnant. “I had the baby 10 days later,” she told CNBC Make It. Ultimately, the couple landed a deal with businessman and investor Rohan Oza — who offered $400,000 for a 25% stake of the business.

After the deal took place, the company went through a nine-month rebrand. They added a touch of sugar and swapped their glass bottles for colorful cans, and “Mother Beverage” became “Poppi.”

“We decided to go with colored cans because it screams soda … If you think about it, soda is the biggest TAM (Total Addressable Market). Everyone drinks soda,” said Ellsworth. “We knew who we were. We’re revolutionizing soda for the next generation, and that is our North Star.”

Poppi launched in March 2020, right around when the pandemic hit and consumers were looking for healthier products, she added. From there, Ellsworth and her team poured into their branding.

“We were a digital-first brand. We were one of the first brands to get on Tiktok and go viral and really build … a social first community,” she said. “We did omnichannel, so we went Amazon and retail at the same time … and then we just brought in an incredible senior team with a lot of experience pretty early on.”

“We had a good partner who kept us funded, and [so] we weren’t always starved for cash,” she said. “We just had the right people, right time, right product, and any time we saw momentum, we invested in it.” All of these decisions created the perfect recipe for Poppi’s success and for the company’s $1.95 billion acquisition by PepsiCo.

When asked why she decided to sell her company, Ellsworth said: “We [wanted] to continue to get Poppi to as many people as possible, the only thing to really secure that is to bring in a distribution partner like Pepsi.”

She added: “It was just a gut feeling, I guess.”

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Dr. Suzanne Ferree is a human performance and longevity expert who sees patients in their mid-40s to mid-60s and equips them with practices for optimal health. Ferree has been studying longevity since 2014.

“Originally, I was seeing a lot of older patients that were already in disease state, and I started to realize I needed to be able to catch them earlier,” says Ferree, who is also the founder of Vine Medical Associates in Georgia, where she serves as the senior physician.

She realized the sweet spot for improving health outcomes later in life for older adults is midlife between the ages of 45 and 65.

“That’s where I feel like I can make the most impact, and where the patients, if they do [make] some changes, can make the most impact,” she says.

At 53 years old, much of what Ferree shares with her patients she incorporates in her own routine. Here’s how she structures her life to improve her healthspan.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

CNBC Make It: What are some things that you’re doing to keep your body healthy?

One of the things I love is an app called Think Dirty, and it is based on the Environmental Working Group’s information about the toxicity of chemicals that we’re exposing ourselves to. The Think Dirty app is primarily regarding personal care products like shampoo, soap, hair spray, etc. And so I try to choose the least toxic option.

If you barcode scan your items, like your shampoo for example, it will tell you how toxic that particular item is, what’s toxic about it, and give it a score. And then it will give you a link to an alternative option that is less toxic for you.

I’ve read everybody else talking about sleep, and that’s so important, getting quality sleep. But I would say, if I could add a different dimension to it, getting my last meal a couple of hours before sleep allows my body to not be busy digesting, but busy taking care of the clean-up process at night. That really restorative sleep where the immune system, or the sort of trash system of the brain opens up, everybody dumps their trash, and the trash trucks come by and takes it out of the system.

Also, moving my body in significant ways. Anything that’s anti-sedentary. So that would be things like walking my dog, taking a yoga or Pilates class. I do a private session with a Pilates instructor, and I do some weight training because I believe that muscle’s the currency of aging. I will run occasionally. I try to mix it up, because I feel like routine is not super helpful for me personally. I like to do different things on different days.

What are you doing specifically for your brain health?

For sure, sleep comes in, getting regular sleep. Also, learning new skills. So for example, learning how to salsa dance. I fairly recently took up salsa dancing.

You’re using the top part of your body and the bottom part of your body. The upper part of your body is doing something different than the lower part, and then you’re also using your brain. So, the brain is being really triggered.

Salsa is probably one of the best exercises because of that. I guess swing dancing would fall into that same category where you’re using the body in different directions at the same time and requiring your brain to memorize steps. Just like you need to work out your muscles, it’s important to work out the brain in that way too.

And then meditation. Spending time on a daily basis in some form of meditation. Sometimes that is dancing to music in my living room. Sometimes it’s actually sitting in a lotus position and using a mantra.

Another thing that I hear about is the importance of connecting with others for longevity, of having those healthy, positive relationships in your life. What’s your social fitness like, and how are you getting that social interaction?

I have a significant other, my partner. It’s nice to spend time with him and his family and my own family. I have girlfriends that I do things with during the week and on the weekends.

Sex is, of course, important. I think if we’re keeping ourselves sexually interested, then that’s a sign of a healthy body. And then I have a community that I spend time with. It’s out of town, and I go do sort of a yoga meditation retreat with them on a periodic basis.

What are some of the foods that you’re getting into your daily diet for optimal health?

I think as many colors as I can possibly get. The order of how you eat your food is important, so eating vegetables first, protein second, and any carbohydrates, including drinks, as your last intake is the way to go.

It helps with slowing down that glucose absorption, so that you’re not getting such high spikes of blood sugar.

I try to eat whole foods. So rather than eating things that are packaged or processed, I like to eat things like asparagus and sweet potatoes. One of my favorite sweet potatoes is this purple sweet potato that we get at Sprouts, and it’s delicious.

I’m always interested in seeing what longevity experts are reading. So what are you currently reading?

I’m reading a book called “Conscious Loving,” and before that, I read a book called “The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible.” And right now, I’m almost done with “The Midnight Library” for some fiction.

To summarize Ferree’s longevity practices, here’s how she structures her routine to stay healthy:

• For her physical health: Using clean personal care products, prioritizing good sleep habits and moving her body often.
• For her brain health: Learning new skills like salsa dancing, and meditating daily.
• For her social fitness: Spending quality time with her partner, family and friends.
• For her daily diet: Eating the colors of the rainbow and focusing on whole foods.
• For her media diet: Reading a balance of fiction and non-fiction books.

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