I am waking up in Las Vegas today – realizing that I didn’t post any thing yesterday. I was busy spending money and making bad bets here in Sin City / Glitter Gulch and certainly don’t have any helpful personal finance advice from that experience! When I went to the Flamingo Hotel gift shop to buy a T shirt or a deck of cards as … Continue reading Work Anniversary in Las Vegas
I’m on a flight from FL to MN right now and ran across this interesting survey from Empower, an investment company. I thought it did a good job showing how people are thinking about their financial lives & retirement. Link: Empower Study Overall, I’m generally pleased when I see how people are thinking about retirement, even if their actual behavior falls quite short. Like nutrition, … Continue reading Empowerment Retirement Survey …
Kids are expensive. Parents are always excited when their kids grow up and are finally ”off the payroll”. Still, when we are together with our son, we always tell him, “it’s on us”. We’ve been blessed financially. We also only have one child. He’s a smart guy and handles his money well. As a result of all of these things, it’s very easy for us … Continue reading It’s On Us …
If you get guys of a certain age together, they’ll start talking about how they need to get rid of their old vinyl records. I have a buddy who is moving this weekend and after giving his adult kids anything they wanted, he ended up donating the rest of his LPs to the local thrift store. I’m in a similar situation. I was the Music … Continue reading Mr Zero
I’ve always been more “indoorsy” than “outdoorsy”. Growing up, I was more at home in the library than at a campfire. Still, early retirement gives you the time to try new things. Five years ago, a friend got me started on visiting MN state parks. Each year – usually in the autumn – I’ve gone on a road trip to visit & hike in a … Continue reading Unlikely Outdoorsman
An online group recently discussed the question “what are some ways that you SPLURGE or treat yourself in retirement?” Over 740 people responded to the question with many saying that a lifetime habit of pinching your pennies for the future is a difficult habit to break. Far and away the top comment was “More Travel” – especially upgraded with first class seats, 5 star hotels, … Continue reading 80 Ways People Splurge
I aim to be more prepared than the average bear, but this past week has taught me that I am often completely unprepared. You would think with the amount of time I have as an early retiree to get things done, I wouldn’t ever fall behind. Still, I certainly do. We had an unusual power outage at our house on Sunday. It lasted from about … Continue reading Falling Behind
With the horrific news of the last couple weeks and the anniversary of 9/11, I’m doing my best to focus on my own life and not “doom scroll” the frightful headlines. Sports is a perfect respite for doing that. It’s the first full summer that I haven’t been battling any injuries. Two years ago, I was a wreck with a pulled achilles and back pain. … Continue reading Sports > Headlines
Football season is here and that means the start of the betting season, too. I turned on the NFL RedZone channel yesterday at noon and see it is now presented by Draft Kings – one of the big online betting sites. Fan Duel is their key competitor – they have an exclusive deal with ESPN and the ESPN app that I often check for scores … Continue reading Football (& Betting) Returns
About a week ago, I got this provocative fortune in a cookie at a Chinese restaurant. It’s not often that you get interesting admonitions from Panda Express, but this one got us talking. My wife and I couldn’t think of many things that we had done that were “scary” over the last 5-10 years (a blue moon is once every 30 months, on average). … Continue reading Scary Fortune
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