This blog started with a fairly simple question: could I use AI to build a website without knowing how to code?
Apparently, yes. Getting it to look the way I wanted took a few attempts. Getting the writing to sound like me is still a work in progress, as my increasingly specific complaints to the AI will attest.
I wanted to learn how to use these tools, perhaps moving on to building apps once I’d figured out the blog. Retirement seemed a good subject to start with. I’m now looking at leaving full-time work within the next six to twenty-four months.
That is quite a wide window. At least it’s narrower than “eventually”.
Why write about it?
I wanted to keep a record of this period. Retirement has been somewhere in the distance for a long time, and now it’s close enough that I’m thinking about what it would actually look like.
Writing helps me structure those thoughts. Sometimes I only discover what I think about something when I try to explain it. Sometimes I discover that I don’t have much of an explanation yet.
The blog will be anonymous for now. I’m comfortable sharing parts of the journey without putting my entire personal life on the internet.
The spreadsheet had something to say
Preparing the Portfolio page turned out to be more useful than I expected.
I consolidated my holdings and income figures, and discovered that considerably more money had been coming in than I’d realised. Across the period I reviewed, the payouts were well above the S$5,000 monthly target I had in mind for retirement.
I knew the investments were there. I hadn’t paid nearly enough attention to what they were collectively paying me. Apparently, I had been monitoring my investment income with about as much enthusiasm as I read software update notices.
Seeing it laid out changed my perspective. It gave me much more confidence that I could pull the trigger whenever I was ready.
Which raises the obvious question: why haven’t I?
That deserves a separate post. For now, I’m enjoying knowing that I have more room to choose than I’d thought.
What would I do with the time?
As retirement gets closer, I’ll write about my plans for life after work. I have some ideas, but I’d like to leave room for interests I haven’t discovered yet.
This blog is already one of them. A short while ago, I wasn’t expecting to spend an evening deciding which illustration best represented my retirement philosophy. Now I apparently have opinions about muted olive.
I’d like to keep experimenting with AI and see what else I can make. There’s something satisfying about learning a skill simply because it interests me, without needing to justify it in a performance appraisal.
Once I’ve retired, I hope to continue writing here about how things are going. The financial updates will carry on, alongside whatever projects I take up. It will be interesting to see which plans survive contact with all that free time.
I’m not expecting a huge readership. I’m enjoying making the site, and writing it has already helped me understand my own position better. If someone else finds it useful—or recognises a few of their own thoughts here—that would be a welcome bonus.