Our September 2015 Financial Statement marks another huge step forward in our progress to financial independence. Debt down, investments up!
How much do you really need to retire comfortably, safely, and happily? It may be less than you think. In many locations around the world, we’ve already established that it’s possible to retire with what we’ve already accumulated. Let’s take a detailed look at one such location to see the luxurious lifestyle that $1000 per month will afford.
As I write this, the US markets have just closed down about 2.5% for the day, and about 9% down for the year so far. Though I have written on this topic before, it bears reiterating: Our successes or failures are born in times of adversity. Your future wealth is contingent on your ability to stay the course despite terrifying media proclamations that somehow, someway, this correction is worse than any of the countless corrections that have come before.
When I talk to friends who don’t own rentals, or even when I speak to those on their own path to financial independence, Real Estate Investment (REI) is always a contentious topic. For those with a bad landlording experience in the past, or for those who have never investigated REI, there are a few common questions.
On this blog, I try to avoid clickbait-y headlines. In this case, I can’t think of another way to explain what I’m going to discuss today: real estate gurus are sociopaths.
Last weekend, I sat down in the comfort of my own home, put on my noise-canceling headphones, and had a video chat with a Paty, a Peruvian woman living in Lima. Paty is a student of International Relations, and fluent in Spanish, English, and French. She proceeded to gently correct my Spanish grammar and vocabulary for the next half hour. In the end, my teacher and I said farewell and promised to meet up again next weekend for another conversational lesson.
When we manage to snag a great airfare, like our $374 round trip ticket to Egypt via Paris, the people in our lives always ask us with astonishment how we managed to find it. The truth is, it’s really pretty simple. I’m going to share how we find a majority of our great sales and error fares here.
When I spent almost a year in Europe after I got out of school, I got seriously into Champions League soccer. Everyone I made friends with was following the league, so I spent a lot of nights out at the bar watching matches, and thus, a California boy with no soccer experience was transformed into a screaming, flag-waving Olympique Lyonnais fan.
Yesterday, the New York Times published a story (NYT has a paywall, get past it by googling the title of the story – “More Protection For a Nest Egg Has Some Brokers Upset” – and clicking the link from Google) about the financial services industry’s response to a proposal by the Department of Labor. The proposed rule would require that all financial advisors place their customer’s interests ahead of their own when providing investment advice.
Recently, Mr. Money Mustache, a guy who wrote the book on FIRE, wrote a post about dog ownership. In the title, he rightly stated that dog ownership is optional. My impression of the post itself, though, was that there was a deeper dislike of pets (and dogs in particular) at work.