If you are like me, you have seen first-hand the struggle many businesses – especially restaurants – are having hiring enough employees right now. An acquaintance who owns a prestigious restaurant company in our metro area said they are so short-handed, they are running at only 50% capacity. As a result, I’ve been tipping extra since the pandemic began last year. I like restaurants and … Continue reading Eating Out & Tipping Trends
Anyone that has tried to make a major purchase recently – a home, remodel, new vehicle, or electronic purchase – knows how tight supply is for everything after the pandemic. At the same time, investors are wringing their hands over rising inflation. With that in mind, I was surprised to see this JP Morgan chart on the US personal savings rate. People are doing a … Continue reading Sudden Savings Surprise
I’ve often said that if I hadn’t had a job that required me to go into the MegaCorp office every day, I might have worked much longer. As everyone has learned during the CV19 pandemic, people are happier when pretending to work from home. 🙂 Related: The Onion: Working From Home With the CDC announcement yesterday that vaccinated people can now safely go back to … Continue reading Return-To-The-Office?
It’s always interesting to see what articles people responded most to at the end of the year. Some posts connect with current events, some were linked to by bigger websites, and some are perennial favorites. have several thousand hits. Top 2020 posts … 1. Time To Put Off Retirement? – This early-pandemic post (April 2020) pondered if it was a still a good time to … Continue reading MrFireStation’s Top 10 Posts in 2020
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
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
There it is … the S&P 500 is just 6 points short of record territory, despite the CV-19 pandemic. I was chatting about the amazing rebound in the market yesterday with an old MegaCorp colleague and we were both astounded that it could jump back so quickly. He asked what I thought about the stock market right now and what I would do in his … Continue reading Amazing Rebound
I started looking at the topic of America’s growing debt before the coronavirus pandemic spread. Across all age groups, debt has been accelerating rapidly for the last two decades, and I’m sure it has gotten much worse now. This chart, from a CNBC article, shows the magnitude of the debt problem, with perhaps the greatest growth happening among older Americans … As the chart shows, … Continue reading Debt Has Spread Like A Virus
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