General Thoughts Archives - Page 2 of 16

FinCon… It’s Really All About the People

I’m writing this post on the airplane coming back from Orlando. I just got finished another great FinCon conference. Not only that, but I’m writing it while on the plane the old-school way – pen and paper. Sure, I’ve had to rewrite the whole thing to get it online because I bailed on bringing my laptop to the event. But I care about you guys so much that it’s worth the effort… you’re welcome. This is the second year I attended FinCon. Last year, I wrote a couple of posts recapping the event – My First 24 Hours with the J. Money Mohawk and My 6 Favorite Fincon17 Moments. This year, I decided I wouldn’t go into FinCon with a specific

The Hardest Part of the Path to FIRE is…

The path to FIRE (financial independence / retire early) can be a long and sometimes arduous path. Each of us runs into our own obstacles and stumbling blocks along the way. One piece of good news is that, unlike the early trail-blazers that went down this path, there’s now a wonderful community on the big old Internet. If you look past the get-rich-quick garbage out there, you’ll find a lot of supportive and helpful folks who want you to succeed. Another plus in your favor is that FIRE continues to become something more folks are doing. It’s far from mainstream, but it’s more common than it has been anytime before. Because of that, there are a lot of success stories providing

The Next Steps in Our Early Retirement Plans

I thought I’d take a step back from my normal posts to update everyone on our status – where we’re currently at and the next steps in our early retirement plans. My regular readers know that I’m leaving my job at the end of this year and we’re moving to Panama next summer (2019). It seems like an eternity away, but it’s really not a lot of time. So the good news is that the adventure is almost ready to begin! The bad news is that we have a lot going on to make this happen successfully. I’m a planner by nature, but it’s been a little stressful as each of these big steps has a lot of little steps.

Is FIRE Possible Without Knowing Your Numbers?

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

The 3 Things Scaring Us the Most in Our FIRE Plans

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 an Extra $5 Million Sway Your Plans?

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