Living The Semi-Retired Life: We're Going Back To Spain (!)... And Two Amazing Subscriber Housing Situations
Lots to cover today.
Let’s bullet point a few things here, then cover the rest—the first two subscriber stories from our recent housing survey, both of which are actually amazing (and pending) traditional retirement stories—exclusive to paid subscribers.
To that end, a reader asked if I’d make the housing survey results available to free subscribers given that I’m asking them to respond. My answer is, mostly, no.
Many authors aren’t transparent about this, but it’s a basic reality. I need to provide more incentive for people to pay for a subscription than “you’re supporting me as a freelance writer.” I must provide value beyond the paywall.
I do this, in part, by adding more general quantitative and qualitative detail, personal stories/concerns and exclusive features for paid subs only. I take the same approach between free and paid on Substack as I do between Substack and Medium. For example, this week I had an article do really well on Medium. However, there’s not much in that article I haven’t already said—over the last year—in this newsletter. It’s just packaged and summarized—after the fact—for the broader Medium audience. I tend to use Medium as an introduction to the deeper, more focused content available on Substack.
Writing this newsletter is a lifelong journey. Therefore, I must focus on paid subscribers. As a means of support, but also for readers who deserve to get not only more, but richer and deeper content because, yes, they pay.
That said, I also comped the first 15 or so paid subscribers to the newsletter (we’re at 243 paid subs today) and I continue to comp anyone—for life—who signs on with a founding membership of $100 or more. I do this and everything else mentioned here because I appreciate the support and want people who subscribe today to be with us for the duration. Ultimately, in relative old age, I’ll write this newsletter and do very little, if any, other writing. Or work for that matter. If that can happen, it makes the newsletter even better.
Now, serious DEAL ALERT.
When my partner and I went to Spain in February, we flew low-cost carrier Level. I’d put the experience somewhere between Iberia or Air Canada and super low frills airlines such as Spirit (who I flew with once and will never fly with again).
For the February trip with Level, we flew nonstop from LAX to Barcelona for $486 each. We thought this was an incredible deal. The year prior we flew Iberia to Rome, via LAX and Madrid, for what we felt was an even more incredible deal at $350 each.
Come to find out it’s Level’s 6th anniversary. And they’re selling flights—through the month of June—for as low as $6 roundtrip. While we could not find anything that cheap (note the “as low as” part and the fact that you book each leg separately these days), we did score a nonstop roundtrip from LAX to Barcelona for $241 each.
That’s insane.
You can only make a reservation for one. So once we found a deal, my girlfriend and I successfully pulled it up on two separate screens and paid for our own tickets.
This low fare does not include seat selection. We’ll either take our chances at the airport or pay for seats closer to the date.
You have to be persistent. It took about 45 minutes of not finding anything lower than $450 apiece, messing with dates, refreshing screens and the website crashing to get the $241 fare.
Level only flies out of LAX, San Francisco, New York (JFK) and Boston in North America.
We’re leaving LA on February 1, 2024 and returning February 29, 2024.
At the moment, the plan is to spend a week in Barcelona and travel north by train to a handful of northern Spain and southern France cities and towns, culminating in a week in Paris before flying back to Barcelona.
In the spirit of increasing, evolving and differentiating what you see in the newsletter, I’m exploring ways—along with my partner—to include video content.
Most of this content would focus on travel and local deals in Los Angeles. We might test some things out between now (locally and on a small trip or two in 2023, such as plans we’re making to visit my parents in Western New York) and the trip to Spain and France when we’d love to go full throttle with video and posts similar to what we did on the European trip this past February.
No guarantees, as I think I suck at video. However, putting this out there puts pressure on me to make it happen. I’m mean to myself like this so the expectation is set. We’ll see what happens.
Taken together, there’s never been a better time to become a paid subscriber to the Living The Semi-Retired Life newsletter.
I turn 48 in July with the set goal to write this newsletter for—at least—another 52 years!
Now the two amazing subscriber housing stories I promised at the outset.
You can still email me if you’d like to participate as a case study (sounds so formal!).
I have a few more waiting to be written up. But today we start with two people who, somewhat ironically, absolutely will traditionally retire.
Both are impressive and interesting stories. They can motivate, inspire and otherwise inform almost any Never Retire or semi-retirement journey. They definitely did mine.