Joe and Diane Stevens: Early retirement, happy retirement

Splitting their lives between California and New York City, Joe and Diane Stevens are living a retirement they regard as truly golden years. Many people would agree. But they didn't get there by accident.

The careful choices that got them where they are may have started with Joe's mother, an accountant before she married.

"My mother was very frugal," says Joe, 68, a psychiatrist who's been retired for nearly two decades. "She was very aware of spending money, and she didn't like to do it."

Following that example, Joe and Diane always looked for the best prices on things they've purchased. They've driven modest cars and remained focused on what was most important to them.

"We put away all the money we could every year with plans for retiring early in mind," says Diane, 66.

Now with a comfortable home in California and an apartment in Manhattan, Joe and Diane are living it up while they enjoy the payoff from decades of focusing on their long-term financial health.

Though they have always been careful with their money, they never felt that they deprived themselves or did without. "It didn't ever seem like a hardship," said Diane. "We've traveled all over the world since our 20s."

For relatively little money, they have stayed in fabulous houses more than 50 times while traveling to the Virgin Islands, Denmark, England, France, Ireland, Mexico and more. They did this through a home exchange service called Homelink International.

In the process they've opened their own homes to strangers. They're often asked: How do visitors from other countries treat your place? Joe says every visitor has been golden. "In fact," Diane says, "we've even made friends through the organization when there have been overlaps at their place or ours."

Joe's career as a military psychiatrist and later in private practice took the family to North Dakota, Colorado (where he was chief of psychiatry at the Air Force Academy) and Texas. Throughout, they always put money away for the future, passing up an indulgent lifestyle that they could have afforded.

As some of their friends drove Jaguars and Mercedes, Joe and Diane drove Hondas that lasted a decade or more. When they traveled, they stayed in moderate hotels. "We did travel to Europe and other places," Joe recalls. "We just didn't do it in high style."

They have come to appreciate a style of travel in which they get their food from local markets and try to fall into the daily cultural rhythms wherever they are.

"We never liked the fancy hotels anyway," says Diane, who has a master's degree in family therapy. "They were too homogenized. It felt like it wasn't an adventure."

Yet somehow their prudence was so subtle that their friends were surprised when in 1987 Joe and Diane announced they were retiring before they were 50. Diane herself was pleasantly surprised they could do this, even though she had always been Joe's sounding board for financial decisions and knew they had saved successfully.

If Joe and Diane had sat down 40 years ago and outlined an ideal retirement, their fantasy would have fallen short of reality. They couldn't have imagined how much satisfaction they would get from having total control of their time for two lively decades so far.

With a world of possibilities wide open to them once they retired, the couple moved to California and New York, partly to be near their three grown children. Their grandchildren were the ultimate lure for Joe and Diane to split their time on both coasts. When it's too cold or too hot in New York, they lease their apartment out for short-term stays and come to California.

These days Joe spends up to an hour a day literally juggling balls - up to five at a time - to keep physically sharp and improve his coordination. He and Diane work out in a gym. They walk, too, determined to keep their 11-year-old beagle, Emma, healthy enough so she can easily travel between California and New York.

Joe and Diane, who have been Merriman clients since 1993, say retirement's biggest surprise has been how easily they took to it. Friends tried to warn them that Joe, a hard worker always tethered to his pager, would have a shock going from 90 miles an hour to leisure.

"I never saw any of that," Diane said with a laugh. "From the moment we retired, we were fine."

Joe used to heed the alarm clock and go to work. Now the alarm can remain unset, and the savings pool that they built over the decades quietly goes to work for them every day while they live a life filled with children, grandchildren, travel and activities of their choice.

Two decades after they punched the last time clock, Joe and Diane Stevens still don't have enough time to do all they want to. She's a published novelist and short story writer. He has published short stories and does occasional work in psychiatry, including prison work at Rikers Island.

They've never particularly lusted for things they don't have, and at this point their biggest desire is for continued good health so they can keep enjoying the fruits of a lifetime of careful financial choices.

"We are in an incredibly fortunate position," Diane said.