Another thing that helps with retiring early here: lower base costs. We were able to buy a row house within walking distance of an U-Bahn station, which makes i

Another thing that helps with retiring early here: lower base costs. We were able to buy a row house within walking distance of an U-Bahn station, which makes it easy to live with one car and possible to live without, and it will be paid off when I’m 50. Smaller cities still often have usable bus systems. Health insurance is not the single-payer utopia some in the US make it out to be, but the public option being default puts a check on the private insurers and even full retail medical costs are usually much lower than in the US: my c-section plus 3 day hospital stay would have been about 5k EUR. Having my “happy surprise” baby at 40 in the US would have killed my “retire at 55” dreams from fear of college costs. Here, it merely delays it a bit, because we’ll need to pay his living costs for a few more years, but not monstrous US-style tuition costs.