Product and Service Reviews Archives

The Best Chrome Extensions for Online Shopping $$$

8 Comments / Product and Service Reviews, Saving, Spending / By Jim @ Route To Retire / November 17, 2020 November 13, 2020

Last week, I dished out a post of over 6,800 words: Moving to Boquete or Visiting? The Ultimate List of Tips!! This week, I thought I’d keep things a little simpler and let you know about some of the best Google Chrome extensions for online shopping. It’s time to save some money, folks! With the holidays around the corner and the pandemic continuing to do its thing, shopping online should be even more widespread than ever this year. Sometimes I …

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Here’s Why I’m Liking… RV Parky

6 Comments / Here's Why I'm Liking..., Product and Service Reviews, Travel and Vacation / By Jim @ Route To Retire / September 25, 2020 November 12, 2020

I recently started a new series called “Here’s Why I’m Liking…” to help showcase awesome products, services, and apps I come across. Today I’m going to tell you about a cool website/app I started using called RV Parky. For those of you following along, we recently completed a big ol’ road trip. When done, it ended up covering 5,863 miles over 40 days. It was a wonderful time and we’re blessed to be able to just pick up and go …

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A Couple of Good Fiction Books to Read

8 Comments / Product and Service Reviews / By Jim @ Route To Retire / July 21, 2020 July 22, 2020

I’m constantly reading non-fiction books to continue learning – personal finance, biographies, business books, etc. But sometimes, I just need a couple of really good fiction books to read to free up my mind and get my imagination going. With the amount of traveling we had to do recently to get from Panama to the U.S. and then all the unknowns pushing up my anxiety, some good fiction books to read are just what the doctor ordered! I don’t have …

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Here’s Why I’m Liking… The Fitbod App

Leave a Comment / Health and Fitness, Here's Why I'm Liking..., Life in Early Retirement, Product and Service Reviews / By Jim @ Route To Retire / June 12, 2020 June 11, 2020

Hey, everyone – I thought it would be fun to start a new series called “Here’s Why I’m Liking…” I’m guessing that the title of this one should be a pretty good giveaway that I’m talking about the Fitbod app today. I keep running into awesome products, services, apps, and just other fun stuff that I think you would enjoy as well. This series will showcase those cool things. Sometimes there are just some great products and services out there …

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Personal Finance for Kids… Here’s a Way to Teach ‘Em!

8 Comments / Education, Kids, Product and Service Reviews, Saving, Spending / By Jim @ Route To Retire / May 19, 2020 May 19, 2020

lt seems to be a relatively common discussion in the community here that we need some better education when it comes to personal finance for kids. The problem is that most schools don’t build this into the curriculum. Kids end up graduating from school more academically prepared but not financially prepared. That’s a huge problem. Personal finance for kids needs to be a pillar in our educational system. Not knowing even the basics such as the magic of compound interest …

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How We Use a VPN for Streaming & More While Abroad

6 Comments / Life in Early Retirement, Panama, Product and Service Reviews, Travel and Vacation / By Jim @ Route To Retire / May 8, 2020 May 8, 2020

If you’re like many of us, you’ve been spending a heckuva lot more time at home during this pandemic. And right now, streaming services are busy providing entertainment to folks at home. But living outside the U.S. generally warrants a VPN to access that same entertainment. I’m sure you’ve heard that term “VPN” before, but even if you’re not very technical, I’m going to get you on the right page with what you need to know. Today I’ll talk about …

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Choose FI: Your Blueprint to Financial Independence

2 Comments / Debt, Education, Financial Independence / Retire Early (FIRE), Geoarbitrage, Investments, Product and Service Reviews, Real Estate, Saving, Self-Employment, Spending, Taxes and Financial Planning / By Jim @ Route To Retire / October 1, 2019 October 1, 2019

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 …

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After 20 Years on Quicken, I’m All-In on Personal Capital

30 Comments / Debt, Product and Service Reviews, Saving / By Jim @ Route To Retire / February 26, 2019 March 9, 2020

I’ve been using the Personal Capital financial software now for the past few years. However, I’ve only been dipping my toes in with it… until now. Quicken’s been my go-to software for just over 20 years. I stumbled on it back in 1999 when I first started at the career I just retired from. I was hired in as an engineer to fight the scary Y2K bug and Intuit was giving away their Quicken 98 software for free as a fix to …

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Total Wireless… Same Verizon Network, Less $$$

53 Comments / Product and Service Reviews, Saving / By Jim @ Route To Retire / June 5, 2018 September 24, 2019

I debated quite a bit about writing this post. What makes a post on Total Wireless as a cell phone provider any better than the cable-cutting posts that you see all over the place? The last thing I want to do to you as my readers is provide a disservice by focusing too much on the small side of savings. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that this is something that you need to be …

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The Move to Vanguard… Bye, Bye TD Ameritrade!

35 Comments / Financial Independence / Retire Early (FIRE), Investments, Product and Service Reviews / By Jim @ Route To Retire / November 7, 2017 September 25, 2019

If you’ve delved into the FIRE community even slightly, you’re probably already familiar with the shrine that is Vanguard. The Vanguard Group is an investment/brokerage firm out of Pennsylvania that manages over $4 trillion in assets. Eh, who cares? All the big brokerages manage big dollar assets like that. True, but Vanguard’s different from the other firms out there in that Vanguard is structured as a mutual company. What that means is that it’s a private company where the owners are actually …

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