Route to Retire ...the path to financial independence

The Breakdown of Our Net Worth Savings & Investments

I’ve been considering providing a breakdown of our net worth for a while now. I’ve held off for a couple reasons though: For some reason, this isn’t very common for many bloggers to do. We seem to consider this to be sacred territory and almost taboo. I’ve been making a lot of changes and wanted to let the dust settle a little before talking about this. Well, I love breaking taboo – if you’d ask my friends, they’d tell you how I tend to say things that seem inappropriate, but are usually what everyone is thinking. It might be some stirring the pot but it gets some good conversation going! When our net worth hit the $1 million mark back

Interview on the FIRE Stories Site

Hey everyone – just wanted to let you know about an interview I just did for Tim Pittman at FIRE Stories. FIRE Stories is a newer site that Tim started just this past January. He interviews folks who have achieved financial independence and retired early. His aim is to determine how they got to where they are today, what mistakes they’ve made along the way, and garner advice on how to start adopting the FIRE mindset. I didn’t know Tim when he approached me, but I really liked the mission of the site so I happily agreed to be a part of it. We’ve only talked through email, but he seems like a great guy and I’ll be following his site

The Minutiae of Moving to Another Country

Minutiae. It’s such a funny word. It makes me chuckle just saying it, so I thought it would be perfect for what I want to talk about today. We’re learning pretty quickly that when you want to move to another country, you can’t just pick up and leave. There’s a lot of minutiae that will need to be ironed out in the planning. See, wasn’t that was fun to read that word again? Minutiae. Anyway, I thought I’d take some time today to talk about some of the minutiae we’re starting to think more about lately. Fine, I’ll stop saying the word… for now. But I do have a funny feeling it’ll find it’s way into this post at some

My First FIRE Presentation on Geoarbitrage

Yup, you read that right… I did a FIRE presentation regarding geoarbitrage and our plans to move to Panama. Deanna (aka Ms. Fiology) asked me to do a talk for the ChooseFI local group in Northeast Ohio. I’m a reasonably outgoing guy, but public speaking is a whole different ball game. I had never done a presentation like this before, but I decided why not push my comfort level and give it a shot? So I agreed. Although my stipulation was that we keep the FIRE presentation informal, my mind tends to not work that way. I would have liked to just wing it and simply talk about our story on-the-fly and field questions throughout. Instead, I ended up putting together

Being a FIRE Millionaire Doesn’t Mean You’re Rich

There’s an interesting mentality that I notice creeps up periodically. It’s the idea that some people think that being a millionaire makes you filthy rich with plenty of money to throw around. Folks who aren’t as entrenched in the personal finance world tend to think that if you’re a millionaire, you actually have $1 million ready to spend. In other words, if you’ve hit that mark, you must be sitting on bushels of cash just ready to be spent. This is probably a common way of thinking if you don’t fully understand how early retirement works. I know I thought the same thing before we continued to grow our finances. However, that’s really not true, particularly with those who are

Christopher Guest Post on Physician on FIRE

I first met the face behind Physician on FIRE at FinCon17. Not only did he turn out to be a good guy, but he was giving out koozies for free… I love free swag! Physician on FIRE and I have a few things in common: Our blogs are both a handful of years old (mine started in 2015 and PoF’s in 2016) We’re both 43 – we’re aging like fine wines! We’ve both spent a little bit of time in Central America (PoF in Honduras and well, you probably already know about my trip!) We’re both funny guys (well, we both think we’re funny guys!). We both enjoy a good brew… I mean look at the photo on this page. By combining

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