My life after retiring: dealing with anxiety and buying more properties (Ch. 3)

Sharon Tseung 0:02
This is the digital nomad quest podcast with Sharon Tseung. teaching people how to build passive income, become financially free and design their best lives. Hey, guys, it’s Sharon and Sean. And today we’re gonna talk about life after retiring part three. So I like doing this series, because it’s not just about grinding for money, right, but you want to set up this life so that you can actually have time for the things you love to do spend time with people you love, travel the world, whatever. So I wanted to kind of showcase our lives a bit more. And what we’ve been up to since kind of achieving financial freedom. So we recently came back from Aruba. We’ve been kind of booking a lot of trips lately, I feel like we’ve been doing a trip every month, sometimes twice. Yeah, so we’re actually leaving, actually today to the Bay Area than Vegas and back to the Bay Area. So we’re gonna be doing a lot of traveling. And Aruba is just a great like, reset, I think for me, because I have been a little bit stressed, which I’ll get into in a bit. But I think Aruba really reminded me of the importance of being present. Because what I find is when you know, you’re around the beach, and you’re around, just like, there’s a lot of things to do. And you know, you see a lot of people walking around all the time, you’re way more present. Whereas I think when I’m here, like I’m driving to each place, and I’m not really like looking at the scenery as much like we’re going from one place to another, or we’re just sitting here at home working, do you feel the same way?

Unknown Speaker 1:28
I mean, you’re not driving anywhere, everywhere you have all the free time because

Sharon Tseung 1:31
that is for sure. But there’s not much scenery to look at, right? Like in the bourbon.

Unknown Speaker 1:36
Yeah, exact versus walking around and seeing everyone on vacation and being happy going stuff, exact sports.

Sharon Tseung 1:41
So I felt a lot more like happy just being around there and not thinking about what I needed to do in the future. Or like, think about the past, I was just like, what are we going to do today. So these resets are, I think, really important too, so that when you get back home, like you really can focus on working again, or if you don’t have to work, right, but it’s just kind of like it lets you escape and helps you relax. So I kind of needed that. Because I was feeling a bit of like anxiety, I would say in January, I found that when you are doing content, there is like that temptation of continuously wanting to keep up with other people, you see a lot of other content creators making a lot of stuff and posting every single day. And you’re like, you know what, I need to keep up with that. But that’s just something in your head, I would say right, it’s important to think about your own journey versus comparing with other people’s journeys, because everyone has different goals, right? My goal isn’t to be like some amazing content creator, I hope you guys like my content. But I would say that my goal isn’t to be some famous creator, whereas some other people might want to be doing that. But then because other people are doing that it makes me go, oh, maybe I should do that. Right. So then like he had an alarm set at like 8am or something like that to be 3830, which to me, honestly, is early. So like it would wake me up every time I heard the alarm, then I’d get stressed because he got that alarm so that he can have his early meeting with his VA to plan content. So I’m like waking up like my body’s tense, like, oh, I need to start working on content. It got to the point where in the middle of the night I woke him up was like, I need to talk to you. And then we talked about it. And he was like, okay, like, I will just set my meeting later, we can wake up naturally. And that just made me feel so much better. Because I did all this stuff so that I could wake up with no alarm. And I could do things intentionally. And I just felt like I wasn’t doing that as much.

Unknown Speaker 3:36
So now we wake up naturally at 9am. Which is nice, because you could take our time getting out of bed. You don’t have that sort of jolt to like get up.

Sharon Tseung 3:42
Yeah, I think like I still wake up at a decent time, I guess. So today, I actually do wake up around that time. Oh, okay, nevermind. It does kind of vary. But one thing is, so I actually have insomnia. So I did take like a sleep program before. And it taught me that if I keep at a schedule, like I’m not gonna get insomnia that often, I think only had one time of insomnia within like 30 to 40 days when I was on that schedule. So when we started doing this no alarm thing, I started being all over the place with my sleep, like playing video games too late at night and then couldn’t sleep again. And then like every other day, I was sleeping, not sleeping, sleeping, not sleeping. So then I decided that okay, I don’t have to have an alarm. But I have to sleep by a certain time. So now we kind of just make sure that our electronics are off before I don’t know, 10 or 11 yet, okay, but video games are before 11 I would say though, that’s what we make sure to do, because my mind will just like keep going. We’re playing

Unknown Speaker 4:38
competitive games that have a lot going on, you can get energized to win. Exactly. It’s hard to wind down after that

Sharon Tseung 4:45
exactly. For you. Yes, it’s been important to have a little bit of a schedule for me but not too much of a schedule where I feel like I have to keep grinding and that’s another thing is I think that I’ve let go a lot with my expectations of like, oh, I need to Hit this by this age I want to keep with the life goals list. So let’s actually pull up the bucket list. Again, I always do this every episode card. So now we are back into my bucket list. So I have been really into music again. And as you can see, like a lot of these life goals are around music. So I’m trying to like create songs that I’m proud of. And I realize how far I am actually from my goal because I definitely need to put in a lot more work I need to generate like a song a week or every two weeks to get a lot better collab with artists and things like that. I even took a mentorship consultation with this music group that actually produces and song rights for big K pop artists, they even have a song for ina who’s one of my all time favorite artists, which was really exciting to be able to talk to her about recognize, like, Oh, this is the amount of work I need to do to get to that level. So that helped me a lot. And that made me decide number five is my goal. Because I’m not as interested as like being a performer, I’m more interested in creating stuff. So creating songs, even music videos is fun. For me, I like performing but I’m still kind of more scared of it and more into like the songwriting process, I would say. So that’s why this is going to be a goal for me. So basically, we’re changing this private membership group to be blue now, because I’m not working on this anymore. So we are actually putting this on the back burner, because we know that starting a private membership group doing monthly calls and doing a lot of stuff like that does require a lot more time investment. And we’re not sure if we want to do this. At this moment, I might even remove this from the list unless later on, we decide this is something we want to do. But I have basically moved this away. However, for the personal branding course, we are working on this. And initially, I think I have mentioned that it was going to be broken out to a social media course. And then like a systems course in like creating the team to create content. But we’ve actually decided to move this into one course around like building great content, creating the systems and then monetizing to become like a six figure brand. So this is on its way. I think this one is done now. So I’m going to strike through this. There’s some things that I could optimize even better, but it’s at a point where it’s pretty good. Now I’d say we’ve been able to take out a lot of work on our end and delegate this out.

Unknown Speaker 7:20
I’m one apartment complex, I want to do that. I’m just saying like, that could be a good idea. Because we when we started looking for we can partner with other people who are already doing this and just you know, piggyback off of their experience. And for the

Sharon Tseung 7:32
first few, we’ll see what happened. Let us know if you have interest.

Unknown Speaker 7:36
Do let’s be in a movie. That sounds like a lot of fun. It can be like a zombie or something. Right?

Sharon Tseung 7:40
Well, okay, this is a weird thing we’ve been doing lately is we read these Walking Dead comics. And then we try to act out each part. So right before we sleep because we got to turn off electronics. I might as well read a book. So we ended up just like I read one roll, he reads one roll, and we try to act it out. Anyway, it leaves me

Unknown Speaker 7:59
zombie dreams too. Does it happen sometimes? When I’m being chased by zombies, it’s all because of her.

Sharon Tseung 8:05
I’m sorry. But it’s been fun doing that. And it would be cool to do something with acting, we’ll see. I’m not good at acting. Okay, one other thing that I did was meditate for 90 days straight and journal for 90 days straight. So I use headspace for meditation. And for journaling, I would just write it on my remarkable tablet. And I found that I don’t think I like got that much out of it.

Unknown Speaker 8:27
I agree. I found that every time you did it, it would lower our energy and I’d have taken a nap.

Sharon Tseung 8:31
Okay, that’s for him. But for me, because I get anxious. When I focus on breathing, I ended up getting more anxious to be honest. So I almost is counter intuitive. It’s like worse for me. So I think I hear that there are different types of meditation, where instead of focusing on breathing, you focus on like your foot or your hands. So that’s, that might be something for me to consider. Because when I focused on my breath, I started thinking, Am I doing this right? And I like panic a little bit. It’s kind of stupid, it might not make sense to you. But for me, it didn’t help us much journaling for 90 days straight, I would just start being like, oh, like I forgot to do it. Let me just write some BS sometimes, like that’s what happened. But I do like, for example, when we went to Aruba, I was kind of writing down like our inside jokes and other things like that. I like having that record that I can like look back on in the future. So that’s a good part of it. But I’m probably not going to continue these guys exercising for 90 days straight. I tried to in the beginning and then I just like I couldn’t keep up with it. So that will be for another day. I would say

Unknown Speaker 9:31
well at least now you are shuffling every time you go to the gym. So as before, you were pretty hesitant about going to gym with me because he would just waste your time on the treadmills and be like, I don’t like it but now you’re dancing you even better workout and it’s more fun.

Sharon Tseung 9:42
I feel like I’m pretty good at it now, but I’m gonna hold off on crossing it out. I think you need at least like a year or two, you know, but I think that we’ve been going to shuffle meetup because this was one of his life goals to get good at shuffling so I’m not even as into it, but now I’ve gotten a lot more into it. So I’ll go to Meet up so with him, I’m going to like festivals with him now, which I used to like hate going to festivals actually, I prefer like going to clubs, phone and go dance. But it’s a good workout. That’s like a big reason why I’m doing it. Because normally when I workout, I don’t feel like I’m dying like cardio. But here, like, I feel that so I feel like that’s good for my heart, especially with the whole anxiety thing. So yeah, that’s basically some of the changes that I’ve made onto this list. It’s getting to over 101 goals now, which is kind of insane. Because when I first was writing this out, I was like, 101 is a lot of frickin goals to write out. But now that I’m like doing this, there’s a lot I want to do with my life. And it’s actually really helpful to have this list to make sure that I’m living a life true to myself, that is to his full potential. And that’s why I teach what I teach today, because I want to inspire you guys to do the same. I want you guys to remove those financial restrictions, so you can live your life to the fullest. So I think the theme of this episode, for me at least is to really just let go a lot and really work on this list of goals and don’t get too wrapped up around things that seem good, right? Like things that I’m just keeping up with other people to make myself feel better in a certain way. That’s like an ego thing, right? I’d rather work on the things that I would be very happy spending my life doing, like traveling, going back home to visit family and hang out with friends and work on music. So I think I’m a lot more aligned January was much more stressful mentally for me. And now that I’ve let go a lot, I feel a lot better about you.

Unknown Speaker 11:30
I mean, it’s like you’re saying it’s kind of like keeping up with the Joneses, right? I think the average person will look at their neighbor and see, wow, this guy has a nicer car than me. They have a bigger salary than me. And then they want these things. But then I didn’t they don’t really matter right matter. It’s like that you said, being able to experience life the way you want experience, like 101 goal is different from 101 goals, right? So I think we’re doing a good job and making sure that we prioritize those things, you know, our relationship, our health, our mental well being more so than just chasing success. Definitely.

Sharon Tseung 11:54
I think that’s so funny that you say that to like keeping up with the Joneses. Because in that sense, it can seem like the clothes you wear the house you buy the cars you buy, but it’s like it can still apply to keeping up with making content or like hitting a passive income number. It doesn’t even have to be about showing off in a certain way. So I feel like you have to keep in mind what you’re doing for yourself versus like for keeping up with someone else. So I’m glad that like, I recognize that I think you guys probably see too on our stories, we have a lot of fun. Like we’re going out all the time, I want to make sure that people understand this whole thing isn’t about just grinding for money. The point is that freedom that it creates, but if you mentally like make it so that you’re not free, because you start trying to compare yourself then you’re not actually free. So you have to be aware of that and just live a life more intentionally.

Unknown Speaker 12:44
I mean, that kind of goes back to what I was doing before I quit my job as a hard money lender. I was making three times more money as a lender than I was as an engineer, but it caused a lot of time and stress that I didn’t want like that didn’t want in my life. I didn’t want to be 45 years old making millions a year but stress all the time, right. Yeah,

Sharon Tseung 13:01
exactly. Well, I hope you guys enjoyed this episode on our life after retiring part three, I hope to make more episodes where you actually follow us along sometimes I have issues with all the setup that is required. It’s nice that this whole CD is already set up here for us press record, it’s a lot easier but I’m gonna try to get that setup so you guys can follow us along but I hope you guys enjoyed this episode and I’ll see you guys in the next one. So I hope you guys enjoyed this episode. Please make sure to rate review and subscribe. It really helps our podcast grow. And thanks again. I’ll see you guys in the next one.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai