Route to Retire ...the path to financial independence

Why Is It So Uncomfortable to Say I’m Retiring Early?

The idea of retiring early is something that most folks in the personal finance and FIRE world understand. When I tell people in the community that I’m retiring early at the age of 43, they say “good for you” and move on. Nevertheless, when friends or family ask me what we’re planning to do once we move to Panama (that is after they get past the idea that we’re moving to Panama!), it gets a little weird. Ok, it gets a little weird, but really just for me. I hem and haw and then say something along of the lines of… “Well, uh, I’ve been working on building up my blog for a while and that’s starting to generate some

Travel Rewards – 12 Free Flights Earned in 9 Months!

You ever see those offers from the credit card companies with the big juicy sign-up bonuses? They might be offering 50,000 points or miles in travel rewards for spending maybe $3,000 in the first few months. If you’re like I used to be, you get those offers in the mail and just tear ’em up and pitch ’em. Those jerks aren’t suckering me into their little trap of overspending my hard-earned money for a lousy plane ticket or hotel stay! Yeah, well that was then. Back in my college days, I got my first credit cards and ran up about $30k in credit card debt. It took me years to realize just how screwed I was and work my way

The Hardest Part of the Path to FIRE is…

The path to FIRE (financial independence / retire early) can be a long and sometimes arduous path. Each of us runs into our own obstacles and stumbling blocks along the way. One piece of good news is that, unlike the early trail-blazers that went down this path, there’s now a wonderful community on the big old Internet. If you look past the get-rich-quick garbage out there, you’ll find a lot of supportive and helpful folks who want you to succeed. Another plus in your favor is that FIRE continues to become something more folks are doing. It’s far from mainstream, but it’s more common than it has been anytime before. Because of that, there are a lot of success stories providing

The Next Steps in Our Early Retirement Plans

I thought I’d take a step back from my normal posts to update everyone on our status – where we’re currently at and the next steps in our early retirement plans. My regular readers know that I’m leaving my job at the end of this year and we’re moving to Panama next summer (2019). It seems like an eternity away, but it’s really not a lot of time. So the good news is that the adventure is almost ready to begin! The bad news is that we have a lot going on to make this happen successfully. I’m a planner by nature, but it’s been a little stressful as each of these big steps has a lot of little steps.

Is FIRE Possible Without Knowing Your Numbers?

Growing up I was always good at math. I pretty much ran circles around the other kids in the class in elementary school and had no problems throughout high school as well. Knowing your numbers back in those days was a whole different ball game. Then college happened. Some of the classes were easy peasy, but then there were subjects like business statistics and macro/micro economics. I think my grades in those tougher classes accurately reflected my understanding at the time – not so good. Fast forward to today and I’ll tell you something that not a lot of folks know about me. I don’t know the intricacies of my numbers like a lot of others do. Sure, I keep

The 3 Things Scaring Us the Most in Our FIRE Plans

By now, many of you are already familiar with our FIRE plans (financial independence / retire early). I’m leaving my job at the end of 2018 at the age of 43 and then we’re planning to move to Panama in the summer of 2019. The gap is so that we can let our daughter finish out the school year before we move. The whole idea sounds pretty straightforward, but that’s going to be a lot of change happening within a short period of time. So obviously, we have some factors making us a little anxious just like any early retiree would have. You might think that our number one fear in our FIRE plans would be running out of money.