It’s hard for me to keep up with all of the promises I made myself when I early retired from MegaCorp a few years ago. Just shy of fifty years old, I wanted to make sure if I wasn’t working at the office every day, I wouldn’t just be piddling my time away at home…
My friend Russ approached early retirement hobbies much smarter than I have financially. He performs with friends in a rock band and I’ve enjoyed our sports car and participating in performance driving events. While we’re both investing extra time into these hobbies that we enjoyed before careers and kids got in the way – I am…
I had a nice visit to both of my former MegaCorp’s last week. I had lunch with a friend on Wednesday and attended a retirement send-off for another friend on Friday afternoon. On that second visit, an also retired buddy and I had the chance to wander around the hallways and see the old ‘haunts’.…
I published our FIRE Travel Framework a couple years ago and thought I would send out a link to it again today, as we have taken our big trips for 2018. Our budgeting for travel has worked out very well. We have been taking trips 4x a year – or roughly once a season since…
Last week my wife and I had the opportunity to visit an Amish settlement in southern Minnesota. We went on a three hour tour of Amish farms with a private guide who knew the families well and was welcome on their farms and businesses. There are about 800-900 Amish that live in the area on…
We watched the movie “The Italian Job” a few nights ago. It’s the heist movie where Mark Wahlberg, Charlize Theron, and company steal and re-steal $35 million in gold bars. It got me thinking about the trend in gold prices since I last wrote this article almost 18 months ago: LINK – Gold: An Investment…
The economy is performing about as well as one could hope at this point in time, but you wouldn’t know it to watch political ads on TV. Despite quarterly GDP growth reaching 4%, the S&P 500 up +30% over the last two years, the unemployment rate at 3.9%, and consumer confidence approaching all-time highs –…
