Financial Independence / Retire Early (FIRE)

Should I Pay Off My House Early?

You’ve been doing well with your finances.  You don’t have any car loans or credit card debt.  You’ve been socking away money in your 401(k), Roth IRA, and other investments.  Now you’re looking for more avenues to help put yourself in a better position with your money. Eventually, you start asking yourself that one question… the one that can really stir up some good debate… Should I pay off my house early if I can? On one hand, you have that huge feel-good aspect […]

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Four Weddings and Maybe My Funeral…

Today I’m getting slightly off track because I need to rant and, well, it’s my blog so I’m going to go for it! Ok, first off, maybe four weddings is an exaggeration… I have three to go to in the next month. And maybe it’s not really going to be my funeral, but it sure feels like it! Here’s the problem… Wedding number one is out-of-town – it’s in the big city… New York City. I hate the big city.

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Should You Compromise Your Lifestyle to Retire Even Earlier?

If you’re reading this right now, you’re most likely either looking for a way to retire early or you already have a plan in place.  Either way, the thought repeatedly comes to my mind of ways to make retiring early happen even sooner. I run an interesting gamut of being frugal with most things but still splurging by taking cruises and other fun vacations on a regular basis.  It drives me nuts to waste money on things I have the ability

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Dividend Stocks on Sale!!

My grandfather used to always say “When everyone’s running in one direction, you should be running in the other.”  Well, this past week was a great opportunity to follow that advice and pick up some new dividend stocks. When the stock market started to drop, people started to panic… everyone and their brother was hurrying to sell what they could before “they lost it all.”  The media hyped it up even more and got people even more worried. The good news is

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You Don’t Need to be Rich to be Financially Independent!!

When I was in my twenties, I had this vision that I would be very rich.  Rich, rich, rich!!  I thought I needed to have all the money in the world if I was ever going to be done working. I mean, how else can you retire if you aren’t rich and sipping champagne on a yacht near your own private island in the Caribbean somewhere??!! Now, although that vision coming to fruition would be great, it took me until the past

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How to Access Your 401(k) Money Penalty-Free

The majority of my net worth is tied up in my 401(k).  The reason, if you remember, is that my employer gives me an unlimited 35% match on my plan. This makes it hard to pass up the free money. However, it makes it a lot harder to get to that money when retiring early. When I was younger, I really just planned on having millions… being rich would just carry me into retirement.  However, after digging more into things

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Save It All… or Spend It All?

As my brother and I got older, we both gained a good understanding of how important money really is in our society.  We both made sure that we worked our way up into solid-paying jobs and we continue to pull in more income where possible.  He went after and gained his real estate license on top of his regular career to help bring in additional money.  I went the landlord route to chase after long-term cash flow. However, we like to laugh at how

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Panama

Is Panama the Right Place to Retire?

I’ve been trying to figure out a good place to retire that’s not, well… Ohio!!  I’ve lived in Ohio for most of my life and it’s done well for me, but why live in a place that ever snows?!! The answer is simply that I have roots here… friends, family, stable job, and so on.  Pulling the trigger to move out of your comfort zone is a tough thing for most of us to do.  And the problem is that once you have kids, they start

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Dividend Stocks

Make Dividend Stocks a Part of Your Portfolio

As I continue to build up some passive income to help carry me once I retire, I’m taking a second look at dividend stocks. If you’ve read some of my previous posts, you know that I think rental property can be an important part of your portfolio, but I don’t want to solely count on that for passive income. I’m not completely new to dividend stocks, but I’m definitely not the expert. I look at Jason at Dividend Mantra and

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Birthday Cake

Happy 40th Birthday to Me!!!

Well, I’m about to hit the big FOUR-OH this month.  Happy birthday to me! 🙂  So with that, I thought it would be a good opportunity to share my goals and plans I have for the next ten years. If you’ve read my “about” page (Time to Make the Donuts), you know that my goal is to retire at (or hopefully before) the age of 50.  To some of you that might seem like a pretty good feat, and to others, it might seem like

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