A young couple dared big and won big after they retired early to live out their dreams on an idyllic Greek island where they can get by on £5,000 ($6,500) a year.
Steph, 30, and Mat Trott, 34, from Burgess Hill, Sussex, ditched their businesses as dog walkers in August 2018 and moved to Houmeri, a small village in Rethimno, Crete, Greece.
They had been living with Steph’s parents but soon got tired of that. So they moved into a caravan while trying to save up enough money to move to the Greek village that had been dreaming of retiring to. They just decided to do it 30 years early.
Using £50,000 ($65k) of their savings, they bought a two-bedroom villa surrounded by olive trees and swear that it’s “the best decision” they’ve made.
They even purchased a £25,000 ($32k) stone ruin, the “Walnut Cottage,” which they plan to run as an Airbnb next year after they’ve finished renovating it.
Their sustainable lifestyle includes using a solar oven for cooking, growing their own vegetables, having a water system that supplies them with filtered water, a composting toilet, and only resort to electricity when absolutely necessary.
Steph said: “We couldn’t afford the lifestyle we wanted in the UK – especially coming from Sussex, the property is extortionate it was out of our reach.
“Our whole aim was to create a life with fewer outgoings so we wouldn’t have to work as much – now because we don’t have a mortgage, we don’t have to work near as much as we used to in the UK.
“We were dreaming of moving to Greece when we retired but eventually, we decided to do it earlier.”
During the summer period, Steph works in a hotel part-time while Mat, working as an animal nurse assistant, travels to the UK for six weeks. The rest of the year, they’re just enjoying life on the island.
While their combined annual salary in the UK is only around £20,000 ($26k), they say their sustainable lifestyle allows them to live on less than £5,000.
Steph added: “We try to be as eco-friendly and go back to nature as much as possible, our whole aim is to be as environmentally friendly as we can.
“We are very frugal, we don’t have any mortgage, our outgoings every month are minimal, we are vegetarians, we try to do everything to reduce our impact on the earth.
“When we were saving to come to Crete, we reached a point where we were saving about 90 percent of our wage so we got so good at saving money, we know how to cut corners on everything.
“Some might think we are lazy, but our aim is to give back – we are raising money to neuter the stray cats, we are planting fruit trees up our lane for anyone in the village to come and pick the fruit, we are cleaning the beaches.”
They also say that they don’t plan on coming back to the UK in the foreseeable future.
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