Life in Early Retirement

5 Years as a Blogger - Is It Time for a Change?

5 Years as a Blogger – Is It Time for a Change?

63 Comments / Blogging, Life in Early Retirement / /

This week marks five years for me as a blogger. For some that’s nothing – just ask J.D. Roth, Jim Wang, and ESI Money who are just a few personal finance bloggers who have been around for ages… and they’re all fantastic! For others though, five years might seem like a lifetime. I’ve heard statistics that most blogs fail within 6 months or that 95-99% of blogs fail each year. I’m not going to link to any of these articles, […]

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Is This Stay-at-Home Thing a Taste of Early Retirement?

28 Comments / Financial Independence / Retire Early (FIRE), Life in Early Retirement / /

Stay at home.  Those might end up being the most spoken words of 2020. This COVID-19/Coronavirus pandemic has caused a whirlwind of change in an instant.  Businesses have had to figure out how to adapt quickly or close, unemployment has reached record numbers, and social gatherings have all but disappeared. On top of all that, a large number of people have suddenly become telecommuting employees.  And many surprised parents became homeschooling teachers at the drop of a hat. Some people

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House Hunters International (Panama) – Jim, Lisa, & Faith

38 Comments / Podcasts and Other Appearances, Geoarbitrage, Life in Early Retirement, Panama, Travel and Vacation / /

Any House Hunters International fans out there?!  Of course, you are! Anybody a fan of Jim, Lisa, and Faith (that’s us!)?  Ok, fine – maybe not of me, but at least Lisa and Faith?  Hopefully, you are – that’s why you come to this site in the first place, right?! How about Panama?  Maybe even specifically Boquete?  Yeah, that’s us, too. But wouldn’t it be even more fun to squoosh all those cool things together and come up with something

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Early Retirement with Kids Is Wonderful... but Frustrating

Early Retirement with Kids Is Wonderful… but Frustrating

24 Comments / Financial Independence / Retire Early (FIRE), General Thoughts, Kids, Life in Early Retirement / /

Reaching early retirement in 2018 at 43 isn’t something that a lot of the population is interested in or trying to pull off.  But change that to being in early retirement with kids to raise and that puts us in even more of a niche. We have one child, our daughter Faith, who’s a great kid.  She’s 9 but acts like a really short adult most of the time.  That probably makes life a little easier for us and we

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Random Thoughts in These Unusual Times

Random Thoughts in These Unusual Times

20 Comments / General Thoughts, Life in Early Retirement, Panama / /

Random thoughts everyone… get ’em here while they’re hot!  I decided to make this week’s post a little different. Times are crazy right now.  With the COVID-19/Coronavirus pandemic wreaking havoc, it’s surreal to think about how so many folks throughout the entire world are at home right now.  Some are self-isolating while others are being required to be in lockdown. Regardless, I don’t know of a time like this in this modern age.  This is something new to the world. 

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My Home Workout during the Lockdown in Panama

6 Comments / Health and Fitness, Life in Early Retirement, Panama / /

I’m usually not a fan of the home workout because I don’t feel like I’m getting a strong enough workout in… not enough bang for the buck so to speak.  It also doesn’t help to have distractions around (kids, anyone?) so it tends to take much longer. I recently talked about how I’ve been on a roll going to the gym here.  Even since that post, I started adding a little more variety into my regiment and changed how I

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A Beach Vacation Totaling $405? Yes, Please!

A Beach Vacation Totaling $405? Yes, Please!

18 Comments / Travel and Vacation, Life in Early Retirement, Panama / /

Who doesn’t love a good beach vacation?! The magnificence of the ocean in both sound and sight is something I could just take in forever.  Throw in some sand, palm trees, and a couple of drinks and it’s hard to beat that tropical atmosphere! I’m used to going on a beach vacation every year or two with family or friends.  It’s an awesome, but expensive trip to look forward to that I’m sure many of you are familiar with doing.

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What’s It REALLY Like to Live in a Foreign Country?

30 Comments / Panama, Geoarbitrage, Life in Early Retirement, Travel and Vacation / /

We’ve now been living in a foreign country for six months.  If you’re not familiar, we moved to Panama in August of 2019. We had visited the country in the summer of 2017 as a sort of recon mission along with my brother and sister-in-law.  Don’t worry, we had plenty of fun while there, but the real goal was to determine if we could see ourselves actually living there. The cities we scoped out included Nueva Gorgona, Coronado, El Valle

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Is FIRE the Finish Line or Just the Beginning?

22 Comments / Financial Independence / Retire Early (FIRE), Life in Early Retirement, Motivation, Self-Employment / /

Looking back on my own path to financial independence, I treated the whole thing like a race in my mind.  Reaching the finish line was the utmost important goal. As I continued to make more money every year through raises, I saved more and more.  But the other side of the equation is cutting expenses… and cut expenses we did! In my mind, if it wasn’t a necessity, I really had to think about if it made sense to spend

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Our First Visit to the Dentist in Panama Was… Different

33 Comments / Panama, Geoarbitrage, Health and Fitness, Life in Early Retirement / /

Last week we made our first visit to the dentist in Panama.  I had been looking forward to it for a while now because I’m always intrigued just to see the differences from what I’m used to in the United States. I was told that going to the dentist here is a lot like being waterboarded.  Thankfully, I’d never experienced anything like that before but somehow that actually intrigued me more.  Curiosity killed the cat though, right? Even though we

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