Some people complain about the inefficiency of government, other people complain about the inefficiency of working for a big company. I’ve been spending hours dealing with the nexus of both of these time wasters in getting my income taxes together before the April deadline. Last year, I spent more than 20 hours on the phone trying to straighten out what day I left MegaCorp the … Continue reading MegaCorp Nonsense Doesn’t End in Retirement
A friend of mine’s daughter got married last summer and I was shocked to hear that the wedding was costing $35,000. It turns out that is close to the average cost of a wedding in 2016 according to a website called, TheKnot.com. I don’t remember how much our wedding cost 28 years ago, but while it was a beautiful day, we certainly didn’t break the … Continue reading Financial Analysis: How Many Years of Work Does A Wedding Cost?
About 10 years ago, a product scientist that worked on my team at MegaCorp was getting ready to retire and bought himself a bright red Pontiac Firebird with the big hood scoop and body flares. He was a fun guy to work with and said he wanted to treat himself to something fun for retirement and figured that if he only drove it in the … Continue reading What’s Your FIRE Splurge?
I retired much earlier than most people. I was 49 years old, just two weeks short of my 50th birthday. As I talk with people about early retirement, I find that most people don’t really know how early is ‘early’. The average retirement age in the USA is 62. That’s a bit higher than it was a few years ago, it’s also a bit lower … Continue reading Are You Retiring ‘Early’?
We had the joy of spending a few days in Tennessee earlier this week with good friends of ours who used to live in Minnesota. No surprise, when we arrived from the Bold North, we brought snow with us! People we talked to in Tennessee said it was the first snow they had gotten this entire winter. Our friends moved here a few years ago … Continue reading Where To Live In Early Retirement?
If you ask my wife what her favorite kind of music is, she will say “LIVE music”. More than the genre, any music performed in person sounds so much sweeter and powerful. We’re on our second trip of the year with a stop in Music City USA – Nashville, Tennessee. If country music isn’t what you usually listen too – and it isn’t for us … Continue reading FIRE Travel – Nashville, Music City
There’s something about the term ‘millionaire’ that still captivates people’s imagination. Even as Forbes released their annual list of the world’s ‘billionaires’ (spoiler alert: Jeff Bezos, $100B), people are still excited about accumulating 1/100th of that amount. I’ve noticed that many of my top read articles over the last three all have ‘millionaire’ in the title. Maybe as the world’s richest move into billionaire territory, … Continue reading Aspiring Millionaires In A Billionaire World
If there was ever a poster child for modern society’s affluenza of over-consumption, it would have to be self storage garages, right? People have SO much stuff that they can’t fit it into their homes – despite the average living space doubling over the last 40 years. A friend and I met for lunch recently at a wickedly greasy steak place and he talked about … Continue reading The World of Self Storage Garages
Many people think of the stock markets as being owned by fat-cat rich people like Mr. Monopoly. I recently ran across an ARTICLE on Business Insider with a great chart showing how much ownership of the $25T US market has changed over the years. You can see there has been a significant democratization of US equities with a tremendous share of company ownership in employee … Continue reading Who Owns The Stock Market?
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