Product and Service Reviews

Personal Finance for Kids... Here's a Way to Teach 'Em!

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

8 Comments / Kids, Education, Product and Service Reviews, Saving, Spending / /

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

How We Use a VPN for Streaming & More While Abroad

6 Comments / Product and Service Reviews, Life in Early Retirement, Panama, Travel and Vacation / /

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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Book Review: Choose FI: Your Blueprint to Financial Independence

Choose FI: Your Blueprint to Financial Independence

2 Comments / Product and Service Reviews, Debt, Education, Financial Independence / Retire Early (FIRE), Geoarbitrage, Investments, Real Estate, Saving, Self-Employment, Spending, Taxes and Financial Planning / /

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

After 20 Years on Quicken, I’m All-In on Empower (formerly Personal Capital)

42 Comments / Product and Service Reviews, Debt, Saving / /

I’ve been using the Empower (formerly 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

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Total Wireless… Same Verizon Network, Less $$$

55 Comments / Product and Service Reviews, Saving / /

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

The Move to Vanguard… Bye, Bye TD Ameritrade!

35 Comments / Investments, Financial Independence / Retire Early (FIRE), Product and Service Reviews / /

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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Get Paid to Get Laid Off - How to Engineer Your Layoff

Get Paid to Get Laid Off – How to Engineer Your Layoff

11 Comments / Product and Service Reviews, Financial Independence / Retire Early (FIRE) / /

If you’ve been working long enough, you’ve probably been a part of or know of a company that has needed to layoff some of its employees at one point or another. It’s never a pretty situation for anyone – obviously, the employee doesn’t like ’em, but most managers and bosses hate having to go through this ordeal as well. In Sam Dogen’s book, “How to Engineer Your Layoff,” he talks about how to take a grim situation like a layoff and actually

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