Early Retirement Archives - Page 2 of 17

It Takes More than Money – My Interview on Retire By 40

A lot of you already know that Joe from Retire By 40 was my inspiration for heading down the path to FIRE. He gave me the kick in the pants I needed to realize that early retirement was possible. I took a week off of work when my daughter was born in 2010. When I had to go back to work after that and couldn’t be with her throughout the days after, it crushed me. I struggled, but I thought that was just the way it goes. But then, a couple of years later, I stumbled across the Retire By 40 blog and was blown away. There were a lot of similarities between our lives and that gave me pause.

The Drawdown on Investments – Our Game Plan

After last week’s post on the breakdown of our net worth, I thought it might be a good follow-up to provide more detail on our drawdown plans… a part II, if you will. “Why?”, you might ask.* I realized that there aren’t a lot of folks in the trenches talking about this subject. Many FIRE sites talk about the strategies of getting to the point of early retirement. However, it seems like there aren’t too many that talk about actually drawing down on your investments. So, why not share more of our own plans to help spur some discussion? Maybe this will help you come up with some ideas for your own strategy on drawing down your accounts. Or perhaps you’ll

Interview on the FIRE Stories Site

Hey everyone – just wanted to let you know about an interview I just did for Tim Pittman at FIRE Stories. FIRE Stories is a newer site that Tim started just this past January. He interviews folks who have achieved financial independence and retired early. His aim is to determine how they got to where they are today, what mistakes they’ve made along the way, and garner advice on how to start adopting the FIRE mindset. I didn’t know Tim when he approached me, but I really liked the mission of the site so I happily agreed to be a part of it. We’ve only talked through email, but he seems like a great guy and I’ll be following his site

My First FIRE Presentation on Geoarbitrage

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 that we keep the FIRE presentation informal, my mind tends to not work that way. I would have liked to just wing it and simply talk about our story on-the-fly and field questions throughout. Instead, I ended up putting together

Being a FIRE Millionaire Doesn’t Mean You’re Rich

There’s an interesting mentality that I notice creeps up periodically. It’s the idea that some people think that being a millionaire makes you filthy rich with plenty of money to throw around. Folks who aren’t as entrenched in the personal finance world tend to think that if you’re a millionaire, you actually have $1 million ready to spend. In other words, if you’ve hit that mark, you must be sitting on bushels of cash just ready to be spent. This is probably a common way of thinking if you don’t fully understand how early retirement works. I know I thought the same thing before we continued to grow our finances. However, that’s really not true, particularly with those who are

Finding Balance in Early Retirement with Kids

Finding balance in life is tough. Between your regular job, chores, time with spouses or people you’re dating, and going out to play with friends and family, time is limited. The fact is that we all only have 24 hours per day… 168 hours each week. Then you throw a kid into the mix… ha! Good luck! It’s like a turbulent hurricane of confusion every day. And the frenzied mess doesn’t scale well either. With each additional child you have, it gets even more chaotic. So finding balance between everything in life is tough enough, but with kids, you’re almost out of luck until you quit your job or your kids grow up. At least, that’s what I thought. I