Route to Retire

Growing up I was always good at math.  I pretty much ran circles around the other kids in the class in elementary school and had no problems throughout high school as well.  Knowing your numbers back in those days was a whole different ball game. Then college happened.  Some of the classes were easy peasy, but then there were subjects like business statistics and macro/micro economics.  I think my grades in those tougher classes accurately reflected my understanding at the time – not so good. Fast forward to today and I’ll tell you something that not a lot of folks know about me.  I don’t know the intricacies of my numbers like a lot of others do. Sure, I keep

By now, many of you are already familiar with our FIRE plans (financial independence / retire early). I’m leaving my job at the end of 2018 at the age of 43 and then we’re planning to move to Panama in the summer of 2019.  The gap is so that we can let our daughter finish out the school year before we move. The whole idea sounds pretty straightforward, but that’s going to be a lot of change happening within a short period of time.  So obviously, we have some factors making us a little anxious just like any early retiree would have. You might think that our number one fear in our FIRE plans would be running out of money. 

Would you stay in the country for an extra $5 million?  That was the question posed to me by my mom last week. “If I hit the lottery and gave you $5 million to come back from Panama after one year, would you do it?” Obviously, she’s not thrilled with our plans to leave the country and move to Panama next year.  Leaving family and friends is always the toughest part of moving. Her thinking with this hypothetical question was that $5 million would be enough to change our plans so we wouldn’t permanently move out of the country. It turned into an interesting discussion that I thought would be a good topic to go through. Her stipulation in the