You Get What You Get, So Don't Throw a Fit

You Get What You Get, So Don’t Throw a Fit

16 Comments / Travel and Vacation, Financial Independence / Retire Early (FIRE), Motivation / /

You get what you get, so don’t throw a fit. This might be a little bit of an off-topic post, but since cruises are my favorite vacation and that’s the banner on my site, I’m hoping you’ll hang with me on it.  Plus, the point is actually more than the cruise itself – it’s about enjoying life and aiming for more. I started this post while on a cruise ship.  We’ve been on a number of cruises with lines like […]

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Expat Health Insurance – Our Plans for Panama

27 Comments / Insurance, Financial Independence / Retire Early (FIRE), Geoarbitrage, Panama, Travel and Vacation / /

Expat health insurance – the one piece of retirement unique to those living in another country. One of the biggest struggles for folks wanting to pull the trigger on early retirement in the U.S. tends to revolve around healthcare.  Unfortunately, I can’t help you with that one except to say to plan for the worse.  You have to build the unknown into your FIRE number because it can be the one wildcard that can throw off anyone’s plans. That sucks,

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A Moment to Exhale... So Now What?

A Moment to Exhale… So Now What?

22 Comments / Financial Independence / Retire Early (FIRE), General Thoughts, Travel and Vacation / /

Well, we’re finally over the hump.  We actually had a moment to exhale.  We sold the house and moved into an apartment.  Everything should start to get easier and easier as we get closer to the big move to Panama next summer. I started this post while at the airport on our way to Miami to get our cruise kicked off.  We booked this trip at the beginning of the year thinking we’d have nothing going on at this time.

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For Those Who Hate Budgeting, Try Reverse Budgeting

For Those Who Hate Budgeting, Try Reverse Budgeting

10 Comments / Saving, Financial Independence / Retire Early (FIRE), Investments, Spending / /

Last week, I talked about money throughout my life.  I’ve had my ups and downs with it just like most folks.  What I didn’t talk about though is my hate for budgeting. I’m probably one of the most organized people with a good old case of OCD you’d love to know.  I need structure in order to operate.  For me, everything has its place and making a plan is always the smartest way to do something. It’s actually soothing for

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Why I Want a Stock Market Crash This Close to FIRE

18 Comments / Investments, Financial Independence / Retire Early (FIRE) / /

What kind of person actually wants a stock market crash just two months before retirement? This guy, that’s who! That might sound like a weird sentiment especially considering I’ve been worried about this exact thing over the past couple of years.  After all, a down market would kill my net worth at the same time I plan to start withdrawing my money. This discussion is specific to the mindset of getting closer to retirement.  If you’re in the accumulation phase of

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Money Throughout My Life

Money Throughout My Life

17 Comments / General Thoughts, Debt, Financial Independence / Retire Early (FIRE), Saving / /

Money.  We all know its importance or you wouldn’t be reading this post. Whether you like it or not, it’s what the world runs on.  You could opt out of playing the game and become a hobo, but there are very few of us that can live happily ever after in that position. You can’t let money rule your life, but it’s important to understand its role.  Once you can control your capital instead of it controlling you, you’re one

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Selling a House... It's the Reason I'll Never Buy Another

Selling a House… It’s the Reason I’ll Never Buy Another

36 Comments / Real Estate, Financial Independence / Retire Early (FIRE), Geoarbitrage / /

Selling a house.  Selling our house.  It sounded easy enough and we needed to consider doing that as part of our plan to move to Panama next summer. We thought about keeping it and renting it out, but after discussing the options with our financial advisor, it actually made more sense to sell it.  We have a lot of equity in it and we’ll need that money to cover our first five years during our Roth IRA conversion ladder. That said,

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FinCon… It’s Really All About the People

32 Comments / General Thoughts, Blogging, Financial Independence / Retire Early (FIRE) / /

I’m writing this post on the airplane coming back from Orlando.  I just got finished another great FinCon conference. Not only that, but I’m writing it while on the plane the old-school way – pen and paper.  Sure, I’ve had to rewrite the whole thing to get it online because I bailed on bringing my laptop to the event.  But I care about you guys so much that it’s worth the effort… you’re welcome. This is the second year I

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Only You Can Change Your Circumstances

Only You Can Change Your Circumstances

10 Comments / Motivation, Financial Independence / Retire Early (FIRE) / /

Some guys have all the luck.  Things just seem to work out for some people and not for others.  Such is life.  After all, you can’t change your circumstances… can you? Hmm, that’s a question worth digging into – can you change your circumstances in life? I’ve always had this weird fascination about how cool it would be to take someone from the past (like from the 1700’s or 1800’s) and bring them to the present. Yeah, I’m a weirdo –

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Guest Post on ESI Money: How to Get Up the Nerve to Retire

Guest Post on ESI Money: How to Get Up the Nerve to Retire

2 Comments / Guest Posts, Financial Independence / Retire Early (FIRE), Life in Early Retirement / /

Hey, regular readers – just thought I’d drop a quick note to let you know about a guest post that I recently did on getting the nerve to retire early. John at ESI Money reached out to me recently to let me know that a number of his readers had a concern.  The problem they were having is that they were close to early retirement but have been unable to pull the trigger. Since he knew that I’m close to

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