It’s just a couple weeks to Christmas, so I thought I would send out a quick link to reviews I previously wrote on helpful personal finance books. If you know someone interested in FIRE (financial independence & retiring early), I highly recommend any of these books: Making The Most Of Your Money, Jane Bryant Quinn The Millionaire Next Door, Thomas Stanley & William Danko Affluenza, … Continue reading Holiday Book Suggestions for FIRE Enthusiasts
The holidays are a time for roaring fires and cozy Christmas dreams. Yet, the last few weeks have been far from that in the investment world as Wall Street grapples with big drops in S&P 500 value, a bond yield inversion, and global economic uncertainty. While I’d rather be writing about a ‘Santa Claus Rally’ – instead we are closing out the year in negative … Continue reading Playing with FIRE is Playing with RISK
We’re Sam’s Club members and just before Thanksgiving, I stopped in to quickly return something. I was glad I hadn’t bought anything that day, because the line to get OUT of the store was an incredible sixteen carts long. Both Sam’s and Costco require customers exiting to have their receipts checked by store employees by the door. I always felt that this practice was ineffective … Continue reading Warehouse Club Time Wasters & Lies
Last week Americans voted in the midterm elections, which yielded a ‘comeback’ for Democrats and a split legislature in Washington DC. The media weren’t sure what impact that would have on investors, with MSNBC publishing two articles (within hours of each other) stating that the likely government gridlock was both the BEST and WORST thing that could happen to Wall Street. A week later is … Continue reading Mid-Term Elections – Historical Impact on Investors?
How do you manage your spending with your spouse? How do you ensure that your spending is ‘fair’? Do you use combined accounts? Separate accounts? A hybrid approach? Today, I thought I would share the approach that Mrs. Fire Station and I use, which leverages a unique concept we named “Sunshine Funds”. First, all of our income and spending have always come out of one … Continue reading Sunshine Funds – Budgeting Our Individual Fun Money
Tomorrow is Election Day. It far exceeds April Fool’s Day in terms of the number of people who get pranked! A lot of this year’s focus continues to be on health insurance, so with November Open Enrollment now here, I thought I would take a quick look at what premiums we are likely to pay in 2019. I titled this post as a ‘First Take’ … Continue reading Health Insurance for 2019 – First Take
If you follow personal finance news at all, you may have recently seen Suze Orman making headlines by throwing up all over the FIRE (financially independent & retired early) movement. When it comes to FIRE, she says she “Hates it. Hates it. Hates it.” and it may be the “dumbest personal finance decision” people can make. I’ve written before about Orman’s highly suspect financial expertise and … Continue reading Really BAD Financial Advice
It’s hard for me to keep up with all of the promises I made myself when I early retired from MegaCorp a few years ago. Just shy of fifty years old, I wanted to make sure if I wasn’t working at the office every day, I wouldn’t just be piddling my time away at home and driving my wife crazy. One of the first things … Continue reading Fifty States Quest – The Country Is Waiting
I published our FIRE Travel Framework a couple years ago and thought I would send out a link to it again today, as we have taken our big trips for 2018. Our budgeting for travel has worked out very well. We have been taking trips 4x a year – or roughly once a season since we stopped working: Sunny Winter Trips: Disney World, Los Cabos, … Continue reading Travel Framework Update – Bonus Trips
We watched the movie “The Italian Job” a few nights ago. It’s the heist movie where Mark Wahlberg, Charlize Theron, and company steal and re-steal $35 million in gold bars. It got me thinking about the trend in gold prices since I last wrote this article almost 18 months ago: LINK – Gold: An Investment In Fear? Despite being considered an excellent hedge against inflation … Continue reading Time Yet For Gold?
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