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 »
If you’re a regular follower of my blog, you know we’re moving to Panama in 2020 – Boquete, Panama to be specific. I’ll be quitting my job at the end of 2019 and then getting everything prepared and ready to go while my daughter finishes her fourth-grade year of school. To say we’re excited would be an understatement. In the blink of an eye, everything’s changing. We’ll have vast new territory to explore and no 9-5 jobs getting in the …
Ah, the cost of living in Panama… something I should have posted about months ago. As my long-time readers know, the Route to Retire family has decided to move to Panama in a couple years as part of our FIRE plans. I’ve also talked about how inexpensive it can be to retire to a place like this. It’s interesting that you can actually take advantage of the difference in living costs between two locations to help you financially. And there’s actually a …
The Cost of Living in Panama… Geoarbitrage at Work! Read More »
I’ve been thinking a lot about tomorrow lately and any regrets I would have if that day never arrived. There was a touchy-feely show on back in the 80’s called Highway to Heaven. I was only a kid back then, but I used to watch it all the time and I loved it. I’ll wait while you laugh at me. Yeah, well, it gets worse. I was pretty excited to see that it showed up on Netflix at some point …
