I’ve been wanting to be a part of the ChooseFI podcast shortly after it began. Jonathan and Brad launched the show at the end of 2016 and quickly took the FIRE community by storm! It’s a fantastic podcast helping to discuss the path to financial independence. They bring on various guests to examine different aspects and strategies of reaching FI. What’s really great though is that they also focus quite a bit on enjoying the journey along the way. I …
Ever heard of Google Voice? If not, know that this could be one of the best ways of staying in touch with family and friends while you’re living abroad. One of the small concerns we had was how to keep communication simple with everyone while we’re living in Panama. When we get there, we’re going to get Panamanian cell service for our phones. The problem is that gives us a Panamanian phone number. So if we call anyone in the …
Using Google Voice to Stay in Touch While Living Abroad Read More »
Minutiae. It’s such a funny word. It makes me chuckle just saying it, so I thought it would be perfect for what I want to talk about today. We’re learning pretty quickly that when you want to move to another country, you can’t just pick up and leave. There’s a lot of minutiae that will need to be ironed out in the planning. See, wasn’t that was fun to read that word again? Minutiae. Anyway, I thought I’d take some …
Yup, you read that right… I did a FIRE presentation regarding geoarbitrage and our plans to move to Panama. Deanna (aka Ms. Fiology) asked me to do a talk for the ChooseFI local group in Northeast Ohio. I’m a reasonably outgoing guy, but public speaking is a whole different ball game. I had never done a presentation like this before, but I decided why not push my comfort level and give it a shot? So I agreed. Although my stipulation was …
I’ll leave the “bigger is better” jokes up to you guys. But, if you’ve been around the personal finance blogosphere long enough, you’re bound to hear things like that or “less is more” or some other variations of the phrase. To me that just seemed obvious – sure, if you want to cut your costs, eliminate your cable or drive a used car and **poof** you’ve saved a few bucks. Frugality at its best. However, I’ve learned that spending less …
Expat health insurance – the one piece of retirement unique to those living in another country. One of the biggest struggles for folks wanting to pull the trigger on early retirement in the U.S. tends to revolve around healthcare. Unfortunately, I can’t help you with that one except to say to plan for the worse. You have to build the unknown into your FIRE number because it can be the one wildcard that can throw off anyone’s plans. That sucks, …
Selling a house. Selling our house. It sounded easy enough and we needed to consider doing that as part of our plan to move to Panama next summer. We thought about keeping it and renting it out, but after discussing the options with our financial advisor, it actually made more sense to sell it. We have a lot of equity in it and we’ll need that money to cover our first five years during our Roth IRA conversion ladder. That said, …
Selling a House… It’s the Reason I’ll Never Buy Another Read More »
Early retirement planning. You’d think the closer we get to our FIRE date, the simpler things would become. I mean really – I’m leaving my job in just a few months so as I continue to train my replacement, my workload should start to diminish over time. Plus, we’re downsizing to an apartment soon (if we could ever sell our house!). What else could there be, Jim? How much early retirement planning do you really need? Didn’t you already get these …
Strategies We’re Using in Our Early Retirement Planning Read More »
With our recent announcement of us moving up our early retirement date to the end of 2018, the pressure’s now on. We’re now planning to retire abroad to Panama in the summer of 2019. The news was exciting for us to share, but now reality’s setting in. Although a year seems like a lot of time, there’s really a lot that needs to be done. It would be one thing if we were just moving to another country for a …
My loyal readers know that we’re planning on moving to Panama in 2020. We’re quitting our jobs at the end of 2019. We’ll then let our daughter finish out her school year (fourth grade). And then, yeah, we’re moving to Panama. Sounds crazy, right? You can say it – you won’t hurt my feelings. What’s funny is that most of our friends don’t have the heart to tell us what they’re really thinking. We know what they’re really thinking is …
The #1 Question We’re Asked About Moving to Panama… Read More »
