I was honored to have our journey to FIRE (financial independence & retiring early) featured in our suburban magazine this month. My friend, Samantha, suggested they interview me for a feature in their December issue because people that ridiculously walk away from a perfectly good career before they are 50 are pretty unusual. 🙂 I tried to use the opportunity to help people see that … Continue reading Our Journey To FIRE
I didn’t buy a ticket for this week’s $1.7B MegaMillions lottery. While I love the basic idea of getting a chance to be an instant billionaire, doing the math on the odds spoils the fun for me. While now commonplace, lotteries are certainly one of the most interesting social concepts of all. “Let’s have tens of millions of people put a small amount of money … Continue reading Did You Play The Lottery This Week?
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 investing a lot more money.   In fact, I’m … Continue reading Hobbies That Cost, Hobbies That Pay
One of the most delightful cities we’ve visited in the last 10 years is York, England. Most Americans never set foot too far out of London or Edinburgh when they visit the UK, but multi-layered historical York is a treasure not to be missed. We stayed there for three days on an autumn trip last year. Here are SEVEN great things to see in & … Continue reading FIRE Travel – Delightful York, England
Our son graduated from high school in 2016 and we let him choose a big international trip to mark the occasion. No surprise that the boy who grew up loving Nintendo, Pokemon, and electronics chose Tokyo! I’ve written a couple posts about it – packing for the trip & Japan’s unique retirement perspective – but I never have done a destination guide to the sites. … Continue reading FIRE Travel – Electric Tokyo, Japan
It’s been almost a year since I published my initial post on cryptocurrencies and I thought it would be a good time to provide an update on how our foray into this Wild West of personal finance has advanced – and what I’ve come to believe about their benefits and the confusion around them. PORTFOLIO STATUS If you read the headlines, you may believe that … Continue reading Update – Is Bitcoin a Bust or Bounty?
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’?
The stock market has been quite jittery over the past week, and although we keep a good amount of cash on hand, that makes me jittery, too. I don’t usually watch the market returns everyday, but when the market sinks -10.1% in a couple weeks – official counting now as a ‘market correction’ – that gets my attention. I know that the market was on … Continue reading Stock Market Jitters – Down -10%
If you are looking for one reason to NOT retire early, I would suggest you study the cost of individual health insurance. I knew this would take a jump when I left MegaCorp a few years ago, but given the politics messing up this market, I continue to be astounded at how it has gone. You can see from the chart below that our health … Continue reading Health Insurance – Biggest Concern for Early Retirees
“Staying busy in early retirement?” people ask me all the time. Yes, I guess I can say that I’ve found literally MILLIONS of things to do, since I chalked up a healthy 4,548,220 steps in 2017. How do I know? Well, about 6 months before I quit working in 2016, I started tracking my daily activity. I’ve kept track of it every day since – … Continue reading 4,548,220 Steps to 2018
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