It was unusually warm this past week in Minnesota with sunny weather in the 70s. That never happens in November and we’ve been ‘living outside’ every day. Tomorrow it looks like we get back-to-normal in a hurry with a cold front dropping the temperatures into the 30s with rain quickly turning to snow. In Minnesota, it’s not an exaggeration to say these might be the … Continue reading Minnesota Winter / Florida Sunshine
With the Presidential election this week, I thought I would do a quick portfolio check to see where our retirement portfolio is sitting before the markets react. It seems a big enough change-point, that I would keep track of where we are at – at this moment in time. The good news is that despite the pandemic sell-off in March, we’ve weathered the 2020 storm(s) … Continue reading Election 2020 – Where Are We At?
I always think of the few weeks between Halloween and Thanksgiving as relatively ‘quiet weeks’ relative to the holiday hoopla that comes in December, but it is a very busy time of the year for board work. It seems that every board I’ve worked with picks these same few weeks to get in quarterly meetings before the end of the year. Board work has been … Continue reading Board Meeting Busy Time
If you’re not familiar with the name Bill Bengen, you probably are familiar with his work. Back in 1994, he published his Trinity Study suggesting that a 4% withdrawal rate of retirement savings would be ‘safe’ for most retirees, based on historical financial returns. Bengen – now long retired himself – has been in the news updating his thoughts on the ‘4% Rule’, as he … Continue reading Optimistic Update To The 4% Rule
We’ve been retired for over 4.5 years now and I find myself surprised that it has been that long. People still say I seem too young to be retired, but when you consider it’s almost been 50 months since I went to work at MegaCorp … it feels ridiculous. Where has all the time gone? I find myself really unable to account for the last … Continue reading Where Does The Time Go?
I read through a good online discussion of retirement spending/investment probabilities this weekend. Someone was asking early retirees in a forum if they felt a 90% probability of out-living your retirement nest egg was enough, based on a online calculator like FIREcalc. I’ve written about FIREcalc probabilities before and using Monte Carlo analysis to help pressure test your FIRE plan. It is a great tool. … Continue reading Is 90% ‘Good Enough’ Odds?
My first boss taught me the old adage “if you don’t measure it, you can’t do anything about it.” I have to admit that I am pretty fanatical about counting & analyzing things. It made me effective as a business leader and helped me focus on what was needed to reach early retirement. Just because there isn’t a daily sales sheet or budget to focus … Continue reading Pandemic Spring/Summer Activity
Just a short post today. The weekend was SO busy I am actually happy it is Monday. That’s the way things go in early retirement – the weekends can be so packed with entertainment that Monday is the first time in 3 days that you can catch your breath! This weekend was busy because it was our son’s birthday on Friday and we were also … Continue reading Thank God It’s Monday
Monday Night Football celebrated its amazing Fiftieth Anniversary this week and I enjoyed all the clips of Howard, Frank, and Dandy Don. Plenty of people want to ‘boycott’ the NFL this season, but I’m not going to get into that here. When I was a kid in the 1970s and early-1980s Monday Football was a big deal. I remember doing a speech about how popular … Continue reading Monday Night Football
I recently listened to an interesting podcast with investor Peter Schiff of Euro-Pacific Capital. He’s the guy that earned the title ‘Dr. Doom’ when he correctly forecast the housing bubble that led to the Great Recession. He wrote a book about it two years before it happened. Schiff – a self-described libertarian capitalist – did a 3 hour interview with Joe Rogan recently. He raised … Continue reading Bubble Economy?
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