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My Test Run of Medical Service in Panama Went Awry

My Test Run of Medical Service in Panama Went Awry

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

Living in a foreign country means it’s in your best interest to learn the ropes. One of those ropes I wanted to become familiar with was the medical service in Panama. I wanted to see how things flowed and have an idea of costs that were involved. I wanted to know what happens when you need to go to the hospital here. If an emergency should happen while we’re here, being a little familiar with how things work here could […]

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How We Use a VPN for Streaming & More While Abroad

How We Use a VPN for Streaming & More While Abroad

6 Comments / Product and Service Reviews, Life in Early Retirement, Panama, Travel and Vacation / /

If you’re like many of us, you’ve been spending a heckuva lot more time at home during this pandemic. And right now, streaming services are busy providing entertainment to folks at home. But living outside the U.S. generally warrants a VPN to access that same entertainment. I’m sure you’ve heard that term “VPN” before, but even if you’re not very technical, I’m going to get you on the right page with what you need to know. Today I’ll talk about

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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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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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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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My 2¢ on the Coronavirus, Stock Market, and Other Fun

22 Comments / General Thoughts, Investments / /

Well, folks, between the fear of the Coronavirus (COVID-19) and the roller coaster of a stock market, life has really changed for us all in the blink of an eye.  For some, it may be some minor inconveniences and for others, it could be a real punch in the face. I initially wasn’t going to write a post on this because I figured that everyone and their brother are already on it.  However, sometimes it’s good to hear different perspectives. 

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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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Portfolio Rebalancing - Get Your Asset Allocation in Line

Portfolio Rebalancing: Get Your Asset Allocation in Line

8 Comments / Investments / /

I’ve never done a portfolio rebalancing on my resting investments.  As I’ve made money moves over the last few years to get prepared for early retirement, that’s helped me to rebalance accordingly at those times. However, this was my first shot at actively doing a portfolio rebalancing just because it was time. All the smart financial folks out there will tell you that rebalancing is an important part of maintaining your investments.  The problem is that those folks don’t usually

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