I got an email from a friend from high school recently asking how our early retirement financials are holding up since it has been two years since our FIRE escape. He wanted to know if we were trending over or under our projections. Stated another way, he said “I want to know if I can retire!” 🙂 After reading his note, I realized that I … Continue reading Second FIRE Anniversary – Financial Tracking Update
It’s finally looking like Spring in Minnesota, although we haven’t had any rain yet. Folks on a journey to FIRE know to set aside money for a rainy day, but the great majority of people do not carry a big enough umbrella insurance. That is, an umbrella policy that pays for liability judgements above the limits of your existing auto & home insurance policies. Umbrella … Continue reading Umbrella Coverage – Protect Your Nest Egg
Its hard to believe that I’ve been writing this blog 2-3x a week for over 3 years. I started it more than a year before I retired and now that milestone is two years in the rear view mirror. I’ve enjoyed sharing this journey and appreciated all of the recent positive comments, messages, tweets, and emails readers passed on during the ‘Two Year FIRE Anniversary’ … Continue reading Birthday From From MegaCorp Past
Many people worry about losing connections with people as they they make their FIRE escape into early retirement. Social connections are necessary in the workplace and people sometimes fear that they will be sitting home alone watching cable news when they stop working. That might have been the case at one time, but social media has undoubtedly been a game changer for millions. I’ve long … Continue reading Social Media & FIRE Lifestyle
This is the second of two posts that detail the eight dimensions on this ‘Life Wheel’ that I developed just before early retiring from MegaCorp two years ago. It is a long answer to the most common question I get these days: “What do you do to stay busy?” Last week, I covered the first 4 sections of the wheel in this POST. Today, I … Continue reading FIRE Second Anniversary – Life Wheel Update (2)
A friend of mine’s daughter got married last summer and I was shocked to hear that the wedding was costing $35,000. It turns out that is close to the average cost of a wedding in 2016 according to a website called, TheKnot.com. I don’t remember how much our wedding cost 28 years ago, but while it was a beautiful day, we certainly didn’t break the … Continue reading Financial Analysis: How Many Years of Work Does A Wedding Cost?
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’?
There’s something about the term ‘millionaire’ that still captivates people’s imagination. Even as Forbes released their annual list of the world’s ‘billionaires’ (spoiler alert: Jeff Bezos, $100B), people are still excited about accumulating 1/100th of that amount. I’ve noticed that many of my top read articles over the last three all have ‘millionaire’ in the title. Maybe as the world’s richest move into billionaire territory, … Continue reading Aspiring Millionaires In A Billionaire World
Many people think of the stock markets as being owned by fat-cat rich people like Mr. Monopoly. I recently ran across an ARTICLE on Business Insider with a great chart showing how much ownership of the $25T US market has changed over the years. You can see there has been a significant democratization of US equities with a tremendous share of company ownership in employee … Continue reading Who Owns The Stock Market?
We had some new friends over for dinner on Saturday night and I, of course, got lots of questions about how we retired before we turned 50. The husband figured that I made some amazingly, lucky investment that paid out like we had won the lottery. He asked what our special investing strategy was and I told him I pretty much just invest in S&P … Continue reading Callan Periodic Table – Fascinating, But Useless?!
