I distinctly remember my high school Sociology teacher commenting that research showed that older people tend to have a more negative view of the world because they spend a disproportionate amount of time watching the evening news. Since the evening news tends to focus on what is wrong in society, it made sense that the more you watched it the more negative you might … Continue reading Early Retirement and the 24-Hour News Cycle
When I published my 200th post on MrFireStation.com, someone asked me to write about some of the FINANCIAL FAILURES that we encountered on our way to achieving financial independence and retiring early (FIRE). I will write about these over the next few weeks and cross-reference the posts in case someone wants to read about all of our mistakes at once! Today’s mistake has to do … Continue reading Financial Failures On The Way To Early Retirement – Stock Options
We are just back from our wonderful trip to Japan, where we spent the last two weeks. We got home last Thursday afternoon and are finally adjusting to the difference in time zones (14 hours). You can see from the pictures some of the sites we saw in Tokyo & Kyoto. We were very busy, but it was an amazing cultural immersion! The jet lag … Continue reading Relaxed Return From First Early Retirement Trip
When people have asked “What are you going to do in early retirement?” – I’ve often answered that it is a great big wonderful world filled with things I am interested in learning about and trying. We are just back from our summer vacation to Tokyo & Kyoto and I am amazed at how much of the world we know so little about. There is … Continue reading FIRE Station Fun – Big Wonderful World
Deciding to retire early, just before I turned 50, certainly makes me a bit counter-cultural in terms of expectations for how long one works. I have estimated before that only about 1 in 20 workers (5%) in the United States retire at 50, and the average age of retirement is sixty five. Since we are traveling right now in Japan (I am writing this on … Continue reading Changing Japanese View of Retirement
The whole Fire Station Family is out spending our money on good times this week. We are on our summer vacation (to Tokyo & Kyoto) and not thinking this trip is money spent foolishly at all. We each have our priorities that we budget for and travel is a big one for us. Check out this post from last year on our early retirement travel … Continue reading FIRE Station Fun – Good Times
There are people working all around us, of course – every day 24×7. Especially during the workweek, but there are also many people working on the weekends. That said, even after just three months of early retirement you start to not notice them as much. Many jobs are ‘out of site’ – people that work in office buildings, folks that work on the road, and … Continue reading FIRE Station Fun – Road Crews Reactions
This post is part of the MrFireStation.com series called Life After FIRE … For MANY years, when we would go to church the weekly program would announce what the Retired Men’s Group was doing that month. It sounded FUN. They were golfing, they were listening to an expert on a local business or project, they were raising money for a good cause,or they had a speaker … Continue reading Life After FIRE – Fitting In
With Independence Day, it is hard not to see the parallels between what the Founding Fathers fought for as a nation and what we all fight for in our lives … FREEDOM. As it says in the Declaration of Independence, we “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. ——” These are the … Continue reading Freedom – For Our Nation, For Ourselves
I read a few versions of this story online recently and thought I would share a cleaned-up version of it. It highlights both the incredible cost of small bad habits to our journey toward financial independence and retiring early (FIRE) and the self-righteousness that some “geniuses” apply to other people’s decisions – forgetting that personal finance starts with the word PERSONAL. The example here is … Continue reading Parable of Saving: Where’s Your Ferrari?
