Route to Retire ...the path to financial independence

Panama Vacation – Part 1 – Nueva Gorgona and Anton Valley

We finally made the trip I’ve been waiting for… our Panama vacation! And guess what – it was awesome! Because there’s a lot to cover, I thought I’d break this up into a couple posts. This first post will cover the first half of our trip and the second post will cover the second half – easy enough, right? 🙂 If you’ve been following my adventures, you know that I’ve been doing a lot of digging to determine if Panama is the perfect place for us to retire. You might also know that I’ve become a lot more serious about the idea over the past year. Well, reading’s not enough, so taking the trip was the best way to determine

Financial Regrets That Slowed My Path to FIRE

Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links and we may receive a referral fee (at no extra cost to you) if you sign up or purchase products or services mentioned.Financial regrets, I’ve had a few… As I guy in my early forties, I sometimes take a moment here and there to reflect on how my path in life has gone. I don’t dwell – I just try to look back at my mistakes and learn from them to make for a better future. And maybe the “regrets” part of “financial regrets” is a little excessive. If you’re a regular follower of my blog, you know that we’ve recently surpassed the million-dollar net worth mark. We’re in good financial shape right now and now we’re just continuing down

The Lazy Man’s Guide to Fitness

I hate exercise and fitness. You know how some people talk about how running or a good workout makes them feel refreshed and invigorated? Well, I’m not that guy. I despise knowing I have to do it, I hate the actual exercise, and when I’m done, I’m just glad it’s over. If you’re a guy or gal who’s on top of your fitness goals, this post probably isn’t going to be up your alley. If I hate fitness, why do anything? Well, that’s a weird question. Even if I hate it, I know enough to know that if don’t do anything, I’ll fall into that cycle of becoming sedentary and feeling like exercise is too tough. So then I wouldn’t do it and become even more

Another Reason Why Working for Yourself is a Smart Idea…

We all know that working for yourself has a lot of benefits that you can’t get from working for someone else. The ability to better control your company’s destiny, the independence and freedom you can gain, and the flexibility in hours are just a few of the possibilities that might be gained. However, I was thinking recently about another major benefit that working for yourself can provide. But what fun would that be to just share it outright with you? A personal anecdote would make it all the more dramatic and amusing and make it feel like you’ve learned some kind of valuable lesson in the process… The garage sale Every year, our development has a monster garage sale. I say monster because we have

An Open Letter to My Daughter

Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links and we may receive a referral fee (at no extra cost to you) if you sign up or purchase products or services mentioned. An Open Letter to My Daughter My father passed away when I was around the age my daughter is now. That’s made me think over the years that, should something ever happen to me, I’d like to know that I was able to pass on some of what I’ve learned. With that, I decided to write a letter to my daughter with some of my thoughts. I consider this a work in progress. There’s ultimately too much information to share at one time, so I’ll probably update this post or add an additional

Why I Like Overdrawing My Checking Account

Once upon I time, a young man we’ll randomly call “Jim” was in college and barely had a dollar to his name… Ok, fine – that young man was me – dang it, you ruin everything! Anyway, like a good number of college students, overdrawing my checking account wasn’t too uncommon. In fact, it actually wasn’t uncommon for me to blow out my balance on a periodic basis for a year or so after graduating college as well. Eventually, though, I started to make some good progress on my finances over the years and overdrawing my checking account became a pretty rare occurrence, if it happened at all. Over the past year or so though, I’m back to overdrawing the account again. And

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