A friend recently spent 8 hours (and a $19.95 fee) taking an online ‘Safe Driving’ program through his insurance company. It was offered to people over 55 for an $80 reduction in their annual insurance premium for a number of future years. He told me when they were in the middle of taking the class and I thought, ‘no thanks’. Not enough juice for the … Continue reading What’s Your Time Worth In Early Retirement?
I’ve written before that for me, social media plays a very positive role in early retirement for keeping in touch with people. I’m pretty tech-involved and use a number of different platforms – Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, and LinkedIn – in pretty different ways and different amounts of engagement. Related: Social Media in FIRE The one platform that I use the least is LinkedIn. My … Continue reading Hardly Linked to LinkedIn Anymore
My brother and I were talking about some estate work that we each had done recently and the subject came up of safe-keeping documents. We’ve steadily upgraded our approach over the years from using a file cabinet, to putting our wills in the freezer drawer, to buying a fire-box, to investing in a full-on home safe. We now keep our important papers in a large … Continue reading Safety First For Documents
Thank goodness that we have enjoyed an early spring during the Great Lockdown of 2020. We returned from our sunny Florida excursion at the beginning of March and soon everything was closed and the stay-at-home order came. Instead of being locked up in a wintery wonderland, we’ve been able to enjoy the outdoors. Related: Snowbirding Surprises Spring in Minnesota is usually an iffy-affair, but this year … Continue reading Playing Outside Again
Like a lot of people, we are sitting on the sidelines right now when it comes to making any travel plans. One of the crazy things about this pandemic is that there is no where to go to hide from it. I read recently that it has spread to over 200 countries. We didn’t have any travel booked when the outbreak began, but we were … Continue reading Thinking About Post-Pandemic Travel?
With global governments printing trillions of dollars, Euros, Yuan, and Yen to keep economies from going illiquid, I thought now would be a good time to check on Bitcoin. Longtime readers will recall I took a ‘hobby stake’ in Bitcoin back in early 2017 to test my thesis that cryptocurrencies have a role as a more reliable ’store of value’ than government-managed currencies. I have … Continue reading Bitcoin Amid CV19
I’ve been gone from work for 4 years as of April Fool’s Day and even though 4/1 was more than three weeks ago, I never even reflected on the anniversary as it passed. In previous years, I’ve written a post to articulate how things are going, but I guess after this much time, early retirement has just become who I am. Last Friday I had … Continue reading Zooming Back To MegaCorp
We’ve discovered during the CV19 crisis that my wife and I have a different degree of devotion to emergency preparation than some other folks do. I thought we were pretty well set with our emergency prep planning from when our son was in Boy Scouts, but we’ve quickly learned we aren’t prepped nearly as well as we thought we were. Related: Emergency Preparedness for CV19 … Continue reading Stocking Up
The Washington Post columnist, Ezra Klein, once quipped that our Federal Government should be described as an “insurance company with an army”. If you look at government spending, it is dominated by social insurance programs (Social Security & Medicare) and military spending. Combined, these two areas account for about 75% of Washington DC’s annual outlays. The billions of dollars of COVID-19 ‘stimulus checks’ that are … Continue reading Our National Savings Dilemma
“I wish I had the time” has become an ironic phrase for so many folks now stuck at home during the coronavirus crisis. Suddenly, there is time to get after all of the projects you never had time for … but will we? Perhaps Anna Kendrick has it right … We’ve gotten some projects done at home in the last month, but there is a … Continue reading Yes, We Have The Time, Will We Use It Productively?
