Tag: contingencies

Building Climate Change Into Your Early Retirement Plans // Our Next Life // early retirement, financial independence, FIRE

Building Climate Change Into Your Early Retirement Plans

You don’t have to agree on what’s causing climate change to agree that it’s happening, that it’s getting worse and that it will affect those of us who are retiring early (just like it will affect everyone on the planet). So how do you account for something as massive as climate change in your financial and life planning? What do you do with the doom and gloom news stories, besides throw your hands in the air and declare it hopeless? Let’s break it down into actionable steps.

Retiring Early in the Face of Fear // Our Next Life // The biggest non-financial question we've been getting lately, now that folks know we've retired, is "Aren't you scared?!" And you might assume that people who've made the big leap and given up the big paychecks would say, "Nope!" But that's not true. We are scared. Just as anyone doing something big and at least a little bit risky should be. But we didn't let that fear hold us back, and that's what actually matters.

Retiring Early in the Face of Fear

The biggest non-financial question we’ve been getting lately, now that folks know we’ve retired, is “Aren’t you scared?!” And you might assume that people who’ve made the big leap and given up the big paychecks would say, “Nope!” But that’s not true. We are scared. Just as anyone doing something big and at least a little bit risky should be. But we didn’t let that fear hold us back, and that’s what actually matters.

Bringing back the allowance in early retirement // Systems for financial success and peace of mind // using a personal allowance to take the pressure off our nest egg savings as well as our marriage and relationship!

Allowance 2.0 in Early Retirement // Systems for Financial Success and Peace of Mind

We’re about to go through a life and financial transition as big as graduating from college or getting married — and that’s switching from earning plenty while working to earning very little in early retirement. Which means that we need a new set of systems to ensure our financial success, especially given our status as anti-budgeters. But it also means that we’re bringing back a tool we gave up years ago: the personal allowance.

Calculating Our "Enough" -- Determining the Numbers Behind Our Financial Independence and Early Retirement Plan

How We Calculated Our “Enough” Number for Early Retirement

Today I’m (finally) sharing something that I’ve wanted to write about for a long time, but haven’t tackled because there is no easy formula: how to determine what is “enough” to save for early retirement. “Enough” is perhaps the centrally important concept to early retirement, but it can feel overwhelming to quantify your own. Here’s a breakdown on how we calculated ours, and how you can do the same for your own circumstances.

Don't Forget About Your Later Years // Planning for Early AND Traditional Retirement -- make sure your planning includes planning for early retirement, and all the considerations that go into traditional retirement planning

Don’t Forget About Your Later Years // Planning for Early AND Traditional Retirement

We know — the excitement of the *early* part of early retirement is powerful. So much so that it’s easy to focus our retirement planning mostly on those early years. The later years are also so much harder to predict — more variables, a longer time horizon, more unknown unknowns. But as we’ve seen in our own planning, it’s easy to have an inadvertent early phase bias built in — here’s how to suss that out and ensure that you’re planning for both your early retirement and traditional retirement.

OurNextLife.com // What Are Your Deal-Breakers? When Does Early Retirement Become No Fun or Not Worth It? Early retirement deal-breakers

What Are Your Early Retirement Deal-Breakers?

We like to plan for pretty much every possible eventuality, and given that we’ve already put about as many contingency plans in place as we can, we’re still thinking about the question, What if things don’t go as planned? But now we’re on to the more metaphysical answers, not the financial ones, like: What are our early retirement deal-breakers?

OurNextLife.com // Mr. ONL enjoying the view // What If the (Almost) Worst Happens? How will we adjust our early retirement plans if bad stuff goes down?

What If the (Almost) Worst Happens?

I am definitely a planner by nature, which means that we have all kinds of contingency plans, emergency preparedness plans, you name it. But I recently realized that I tend to plan for the worst only, and not for the almost worst. Today we’re talking about what happens if any of those not-quite-worst-case scenarios happen.