With Memorial Day over, we are now officially into summer travel season. We have a couple of fun trips planned for this summer – to the Holy Land & Petra in July and Toronto, Canada in August. We generally plan our trips out 3-9 months in advance depending on how adventurous the trip is. Like last summer, I’ll post some additional destination guides to places … Continue reading Summer Travel – Rudy Maxa Thoughts
Mortgage rates are in the news again as the average rate on a 30 year fixed mortgage reached 4.6% this week. It was the highest the rate has reached in the last 7 years – up 0.7 percentage points from where they were at last year. Fifteen year rates are also up – reaching 4.15%. These rates are still incredibly low relative to what they … Continue reading Paying Off Your Mortgage As Rates Rise
Like many early retirees, I worked ‘One More Year’ (OMY) beyond what I had originally planned. I was enjoying work and I had an idea to work OMY exclusively to raise money for a charitable fund. It was an idea that I originally wrote about three years ago in this POST. When I did leave MegaCorp for the final time, we had set aside my … Continue reading One More Year / Angel Fund Update
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
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)
Some people complain about the inefficiency of government, other people complain about the inefficiency of working for a big company. I’ve been spending hours dealing with the nexus of both of these time wasters in getting my income taxes together before the April deadline. Last year, I spent more than 20 hours on the phone trying to straighten out what day I left MegaCorp the … Continue reading MegaCorp Nonsense Doesn’t End in Retirement
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
