Going from making minimum wage and trying to save as much as you can and counting every penny to now being able to spend whatever you want, it's been a journey.

I'm Jamal Robinson, I'm an American expat retiree living off of about $185,000 in Dubai.

I actually decided to retire at 17 years old.

I was working at Taco Bell, believe it or not at that age I was able to look around at the job market and I didn't see a lot of people that were happy with work.

I learned that it's really important to make sure that you're working and you have your own relationship with work and you're not doing something that you don't want to do.

So in my mind I always thought that it made the most sense to compress that amount of time in my life and I set the goal to retire early at 45, which I wound up hitting six years earlier than expected.

As soon as I retired I went out and I explored and so far I've spent about nine countries and 15 cities and I've been loving it.

What I love most about Dubai is it really caters to people that have been retired and are looking for a lot of services and activities.

I found that most often the things that were promised to me in America actually existed here.

So the levels of safety, the levels of like integration of people into society where everyone's accepted.

Over the weekend for fun I find myself going out and just exploring new areas.

So I may go out to the creek and just walk around and look at the boats and meet people as I walk.

To people's surprise Dubai is actually much cheaper for me than living in most of the major American cities I've been in.

Dubai allows you to live the kind of lifestyle that you want to live and it allows for a lot of different price ranges.

Every month I pay myself about $15,400 for the month and of that $15,400 I wind up spending about $9,000.

Food I definitely don't go cheap on.

I typically allocate about $2,000 per month.

I go out and eat a lot of times when I have friends and people that I can entertain.

And then as far as home I'll still cook quite a lot.

December was a unique month for me because I'm on a kind of expat private insurance.

I had to pay about $1,600 out of pocket for some medication.

My doctor's visits were anywhere from $200 to $300 a piece.

So it totaled up to be a lot higher.

When it comes to getting around for transit in Dubai I'm a little bit sad about this because I don't have a car.

I use a service here where I get access to a driver and the driver drives me all around the city.

So I pay my four to $600 a month and use that for transportation.

The place that I'm currently living in is two bedrooms and it's roughly about 900 square feet.

It's right off the beach and in a premium area for Dubai.

And this place costs about $5,000 per month.

How I live now is I'm actually spending a lot more than I typically would.

My relationship growing up with money was definitely one of discipline.

Without really consciously thinking through it I chose to save a lot.

Now as I've been able to reflect a lot as an adult, also see where I have a scarcity mindset and maybe not a healthy relationship with money in the sense of I wanted to hoard it.

Luckily I've been able to graduate to a place where I'm much more comfortable.

I've been opening up the checkbook and spending more.

Growing up I didn't get much knowledge on money and investments and things that I'm focused on now.

I think my parents coming from lower middle and class homes were more so focused on survival as many people might be.

My parents had worked pretty hard in their life and I just saw the wear and tear that that took on them.

So I wanted to be careful to not be in a similar situation and have to work and just give all of my life source and energy to a job for the remainder of my life.

I didn't know how I was going to do it but those factors really contributed to me wanting to retire at an early age.

Climbing up the corporate ladder was not easy but I definitely aggressively climbed up the corporate ladder.

I moved to Austin, Texas, worked at this amazing startup called Infochimps and made a lot of great connections there and that accelerated me into tech which later led to IBM, Amazon, Intel, Microsoft and a few others.

So I always kept my eyes open for new opportunities.

Also made sure that I was as valuable as possible and I would say my salary went from about $40,000 to about $60,000 to about $64,000 and then that's when I had one of my bigger jumps.

And then after that I went to north of $1 million.

So when I got the big jump, at most I may go out and get a meal, a lot of times I didn't even do that.

I always remind people that in my head I'm still the guy that's making a minimum wage working at Taco Bell.

So when people see these large salaries or ask me, hey, how did it feel to make over a million a year?

I often tell them, I don't know, it felt like making not quite minimum wage but also not like making a million a year.

I would make a million a year and I would struggle to spend over $50 on items.

There definitely was a certain amount of money that I wanted to hit when I retire.

Over the years that has changed.

It started off in the low $1.5 million, then it got up to $5 million, then $20 million and at some point I realized that with what I need in life, I settled on my number which is around $4 million.

Some of the biggest misconceptions about retirement or at the very least things that people need to know is that retirement is not a destination.

It's really a new phase of life.

I want to maximize my life experiences and not keep saving money for the future.

Part of retiring was so I could explore my hobbies more and the hobbies that I have are typically in the space of creativity.

I DJ in my spare time.

I've always had a love for music so as I've gotten older and got more aware of technologies that exist, I've gotten more into producing music and just playing around with sounds.

When it comes to choosing where I live, I have a matrix of about 14 things that qualify safety, the amount of singles that they have as I'm still single, the population, how diverse it is, the government, how stable it is, the currency and a few other things and Dubai hit pretty high on that list.

What I love the most about Dubai is the cultural diversity.

There's people from literally all over the world so immediately I was able to come and feel at home.

On top of that, it's very centrally located so I can travel to the US or travel to the East and check out various like Southeast Asian countries along with Australia and then at the same time, there's just a lot to do here.

As an American expat that's also black, I would say my experience has been very different than what I'm used to.

In America, you're typically identified as a black person first and then after that you're an engineer or a janitor or whatever they want to label you as and I would say that as I've traveled around the world, as soon as I open my mouth and people hear the accent, I typically get categorized with the rest of Americans so quite often, I don't feel my blackness.

It's almost like you're celebrated and people will come up to you and they want to talk and engage with you so I found that it's been maybe for the first time in my life, a privilege to be a black person and it's been really beneficial.

Overall, I find that I'm more happy and more at peace and it's just much better here than where I was living before.

I do plan to travel in the very near future.

I'm going back to Amsterdam.

I'm also going to Bangkok, Thailand.

I was thinking about checking out South Africa and for various reasons, I'm going to head back to the U.S. for a little while.

And as far as what's actually next, I would say, I try not to think in the typical term of what's next.

As long as I can retain those emotional states and make sure that I'm also doing so while adding value to the world, I'm okay with it.