Spending

A Fun Collection of Random Thoughts You Didn't Ask For

A Fun Collection of Random Thoughts You Didn’t Ask For

12 Comments / General Thoughts, Health and Fitness, Kids, Life in Early Retirement, Spending, Taxes and Financial Planning, Travel and Vacation / /

I was trying to decide what to focus on in this post because I’ve had several random thoughts spending some quality time in my mind lately. Sometimes my brain just has stuff bouncing all over the place. So I decided, why not just touch on a bunch of them? So here we are with a mish-mosh of random thoughts all crammed into one delightful mess of a blog post! Between the action-packed stock market real-life movie so many of us […]

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We Paid $3,200 for an Incredible $25K Europe Trip… Here’s How We Did It

We Paid $3,200 for an Incredible $25K Europe Trip… Here’s How We Did It

12 Comments / Travel and Vacation, Financial Independence / Retire Early (FIRE), Life in Early Retirement, Spending / /

I’ve been excited to tell you the details of our planned Europe trip for a while now. But I wanted to wait until we had the framework all planned out. We now have 38 nights of fun booked for this fall. This includes flights, lodging, cruises, and a first-class train ride. Now that everything’s in place, I did the math on what this would have cost if we had just booked everything through normal channels (Priceline, Booking.com, airline and cruise

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Hunting for the Great Deal vs Just Working a Little More

Hunting for the Great Deal vs Just Working a Little More

10 Comments / Financial Independence / Retire Early (FIRE), Spending, Travel and Vacation / /

I love a great deal. I imagine most people are like that regardless of how much or how little money they have. There’s something satisfying about the whole idea of getting a bargain – almost as if you somehow won “the game” (whatever that game is). But in most cases, scoring a great deal (particularly online) involves some effort on your part. And sometimes getting that great deal can involve a lot of time and effort. Unfortunately, at times, putting

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The Secret to Scoring the Cheapest Southwest Flights

The Secret to Scoring the Cheapest Southwest Flights

6 Comments / Travel and Vacation, Saving, Spending / /

Do you believe that decades ago, I used to hate Southwest Airlines? I thought it was just a mess of an airline and way too chaotic. Fast forward to the past decade and it’s my preferred airline to fly. I love how easy it is to cancel or change your flight. I love that they’re still not charging for checked bags (even though we only do carry-on bags nowadays). I love how the flight attendants generally try to put on

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6 Years of Early Retirement: What I've Learned About Life, Money, and Happiness

6 Years of Early Retirement: What I’ve Learned About Life, Money, and Happiness

16 Comments / Life in Early Retirement, Blogging, Financial Independence / Retire Early (FIRE), General Thoughts, Health and Fitness, Motivation, Panama, Spending, Travel and Vacation / /

Today is the anniversary of my last day of work six years ago. At the end of the workday on December 31, 2018, I became free in a sense. That was the day my early retirement began. If you’ve dreamed about early retirement for a while like I did leading up to this, there’s a little surprise in store that you might not know… It’s not going to be exactly the way you envisioned. That’s because when we daydream or

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Traveling the World: 121 Days, 9 Big Adventures, and 6 Cruises Throughout the Globe

Traveling the World: 121 Days, 9 Big Adventures, and 6 Cruises Throughout the Globe

19 Comments / Travel and Vacation, Financial Independence / Retire Early (FIRE), Life in Early Retirement, Panama, Spending / /

Things certainly have escalated quickly at the Route to Retire household! We started with the plan to take a couple of vacations over the next year and suddenly we’re traveling the world for 121 days! We seem to have this problem – almost a sickness – where we get an idea and tend to go overboard with it. Instead of visiting the country of Panama for a month or two, we lived there for three years (so worth it!)! The

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Southwest Companion Pass: Why Now's the Best Time to Act

Southwest Companion Pass: Why Now’s the Best Time to Act

2 Comments / Travel and Vacation, Spending / /

The Southwest Companion Pass… the holy grail of travel. If you’re not familiar, the Companion Pass allows the earner to bring someone with them for free on every single flight booked by the holder (provided there’s an available seat). Think of the money you could save by cutting flight prices for two people in half while traveling! This is normally a “prize” for someone who flies a lot… like a real lot. The qualification is to fly 100 flights (or earn

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Free Cruises with Just a Little Leg Work… Living Like Rock Stars!

Free Cruises with Just a Little Leg Work… Living Like Rock Stars!

14 Comments / Travel and Vacation, Life in Early Retirement, Saving, Spending / /

Back in May, I wrote a post called The Next Mission… Free Cruises Through Casino Status Matches! It was all about how we stumbled upon a way to get free cruises and what we planned to do to make it happen. Well, here we are several months later and I realized it’s time to update you on how it’s going and what’s next. It’s actually been a cool little adventure figuring out what we need to do and then taking

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The Funny Thing About Sequence of Returns Risk…

The Funny Thing About Sequence of Returns Risk…

21 Comments / Investments, Financial Independence / Retire Early (FIRE), Spending, Taxes and Financial Planning / /

If someone decides to retire and live off of their investment portfolio, an important detail called the sequence of returns risk can be one of the most critical components to comprehend. You might have an understanding or at least a notion of the 4% rule that helps give you some direction in retirement planning. The idea is that you likely can take out 4% from a given portfolio every year and never run out of money. There are several caveats

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Breaking Up With PocketGuard: Why Quicken Simplifi Won Me Over

Breaking Up With PocketGuard: Why Quicken Simplifi Won Me Over

9 Comments / Spending, Debt, Financial Independence / Retire Early (FIRE), Investments, Saving, Taxes and Financial Planning / /

Well, I’ve gone and done it again… I switched personal finance apps in my quest to find the right one for what I needed. I thought PocketGuard was the one, but it turns out I was wrong. I only used PocketGuard for about 6 months but it had some shortcomings that just didn’t work well for me… so I decided to bail on it. Fortunately, I think Quicken Simplifi will be the answer I have been looking for all this

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