I’ve written before that the biggest difference that I’ve come to associate with early retirement is that your fundamental relationship with the concept of TIME changes. That is, instead of time being USED as a resource of productivity, it becomes SAVORED as a resource of lifestyle enjoyment. Recently, I’ve been reading the magnificent history book Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari. It might be the best … Continue reading A History of Time & Timekeeping
Our window box flowers are looking better than ever this year. We live in Minnesota, so we don’t get color like this except for in the peak of summer. Gardening is said to be the most popular hobby in the United States, and when you have more time to plant, water, and care for flowers you sure do see the benefits. Recently our garden hose … Continue reading In Pursuit Of The Perfect Purchase
I had a dream last night about going back to work. In this dream the MegaCorp bosses were in a pinch and wanted me and one of my former colleagues to come back and fix the business I used to run. It seemed like fun in the dream, but I don’t know how the dream turned out since I woke up before we got too … Continue reading Quickly Faded Dreams About MegaCorp
My friend that snowbirds in Florida during the Winter came back to MN a few weeks ago. We are now three tennis matches and three softball games into early summer. The activities we enjoy each week are inevitably capped with a cold refreshment and often with a visit to a new restaurant/pub. We’ve been to 30+ different places over the past few years! We were … Continue reading Hazy Recollection of MegaCorp
This is the final weekend to work on your income taxes. April 17th is the deadline this year because the 15th falls on a Sunday and the 16th is a District holiday in Washington. We filed our taxes earlier this week. We finally got the right paperwork from MegaCorp – whose bureaucracy still operates as it did in the 1990s. The cost of running the … Continue reading A Shocking Comparison for Tax Day
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
At the end of the year, the media is full of retrospectives on the top news events and celebrity stories, so with that in mind, I set my thoughts to what are the biggest news happenings that have affected people on their journey to financial independence and retiring early (FIRE) in 2017. Here’s my list (in no particular order) … TRUMP BUMP – The stock … Continue reading Top 7 FIRE News Stories of 2017
December is always a crazy month in the office. I had the fortune of visiting MegaCorp yesterday and be reminded of what an unusual month it is. It had been quite a while since I had been back in the old digs. I saw the daily calendar printout of one of the people I was meeting with. He was back-to-back with 8 or 9 meetings … Continue reading Christmas Time At MegaCorp
No words of wisdom from the FIRE Station this morning – just some interesting numbers to put your journey to FIRE into some perspective: AGING 50% of Americans are retired at age 63 18 years is the average length of retirement 13% of the US population is over age 65 today 6.1K Americans turn 65 each day 10.K Americans retire every day 55% of Americans … Continue reading Numbers To Put Your FIRE Journey In Perspective
I visited with a friend over a beer last week and we discussed a lot of things, including – inevitably – national politics. As I wrote in my election day post about what the next President needs to do, I argued that the most important issue is government out of control spending. Rein in the spending, and you rein in the government. My friend argued that it … Continue reading FIRE Politics – Seize The Rich?
