Jim @ Route To Retire, Author at Route to Retire

One of the Absolute Best Facets of Early Retirement

A lot of you have been following FIRE (financial independence, retire early) blogs as you continue down your own path toward financial freedom. And the numbers to reach FI (financial independence) are important, but what about the early retirement side of things? Some of you will continue to work and just want FI to ensure a secure retirement. If you love what you do, that’s the best scenario you can have. Congratulations! But others of you want to get out of the workforce to gain more freedom. You want the flexibility to have the choice of what you’ll do every day. That could be anything from just spending more time with your kids all the way up to learning a

10 Reasons Not to Live in Panama

Life’s not all a bed of roses here in Boquete. I thought today that I’d share some reasons not to live in Panama. So far, living here has been a wonderful experience for me and my family. It definitely was an adjustment (and still is occasionally), but just being a part of a life that’s so different than we’re accustomed to is both interesting and amazing. A couple of weeks ago, I talked about The 7 Reasons I Love Living in Panama as an Expat. Between the perfect temperature (at least for me!) in Boquete where we’re living, the mountain scenery, the cost of living, and more, we’ve been very happy. But there’s no perfect place and I thought I’d give

This Bad-@#$ Expenses Spreadsheet is My Gift to You

I’m super excited about a new expenses spreadsheet I’ve been working on that I think you’re gonna love. And this ain’t just any old expenses spreadsheet – it’s focused on your recurring expenses. If you’re like me, you’re familiar with those times when you make a big purchase and have buyer’s remorse shortly after. It happens. But those are the easy cases – it’s a one-time purchase and it’s staring you right in the face. The tougher problems to solve are those random costs that occur on a periodic basis (every few weeks, monthly, quarterly, yearly, etc.) that are much harder to keep an eye on. We all have expenses or subscriptions that we signed up for and – meh,

The 7 Reasons I Love Living in Panama as an Expat

I’ve been living in Panama as an expat for a little over a month and a half now. And what a truly awesome experience it’s been so far for me and my family. The first couple of weeks were like a vacation. Most of our time was consumed with exploring and having fun. We spent our days eating out, shopping (ok, mostly just browsing!), and doing fun activities like whale watching. Starting at the beginning of September, we began to scale back a little bit. It was time for us (mostly Lisa) to start Faith’s homeschooling. That had its ups and downs but seems to be working pretty well as of late. But it also has meant an earlier bedtime

Choose FI: Your Blueprint to Financial Independence

I don’t normally write book reviews on this blog, but I’m making an exception for the new Choose FI book. I was expecting my opinion to sway one way with the book but my impression after reading it went in a completely different direction. Chris Mamula is the author of Choose FI: Your Blueprint to Financial Independence (along with coauthors Brad Barrett and Jonathan Mendonsa). If you’re not familiar with Chris, he retired in 2017 at the young age of 41 (beat me by two years!). He also spends a lot of time writing at the Can I Retire Yet? site. I met Chris at the FinCon conference in 2017 – such a nice guy! We didn’t get a chance

Solving the World’s Problems… Starting with Mine!

When it comes to solving the world’s problems, I’m the man. I’ve got it all handled. Call me “Mr. Fix-It”! Ok, maybe that’s far from true. I’m not solving the world’s problems at all. In fact, I sometimes struggle to handle my own problems. But, I’m good at adapting and actually enjoy change. I have an engineer’s/programmer’s mindset and like to logically find an optimal solution to problems. And now that we’re living in Panama, I get to push my problem-solving to a different level. We live in a small town in the mountains called Boquete. There’s no Walmart, Target, or Home Depot here. The closest counterpart I’ve got is a small discount store called Novedades La Reyna and a