Tag: finances

There Is No Financial Truth, But Why That's a Good Thing // Our Next Life // Early retirement, financial independence, FIRE, retire early, happiness, adventure, work optional

There Is No Financial “Truth” (But Why That’s a Good Thing)

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We’re supposed to save 2 times our salary by age 35, or is it 25 times our expenses to retire early? We’re supposed to ignore Social Security, but also claim it at 62 to hedge against market risk. We should try to get out of debt as quickly as possible, but also paying off a mortgage early is missing out on potential market gains. There is so much “truth” out there, so many “right” answers, and many of them conflict. How to make sense of them and decide which are actually true? Start by tossing out the whole notion that financial truth exists in the first place.

Don't let the impossibility of achieving perfection hold you back // Our Next Life // early retirement, financial independence, FIRE movement

Don’t Let the Impossibility of Achieving Perfection Hold You Back

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If we know we can’t achieve something the way someone else did, or the way we might have originally have envisioned for ourselves, it’s easy to throw up our hands and decide that it’s not even worth trying. Here’s how I let go of the idea of perfection to get on a better financial path, and some tips for how you can stop letting notions of perfection and imperfection hold you back.

Pre-Early Retirement To Do List // What To Do Before and After You Retire Early

The Before and After Early Retirement To Do Lists

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Our early retirement might be right around the corner, but we still have a lot to do before the year is up to make sure that we’re truly ready to make the big leap. Then after we pull the plug, we have a different set of things to do. Here are our big lists of things to do before we retire early, and right after, as well as things we’ve already checked off the list this year. Are we missing anything? Let us know!

Asking for More and Getting It // 2016 Goals Review + 2017 Goal Setting

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We’re thinking a lot lately about asking for more — asking for the compensation we deserve at work, and asking more of ourselves. And now, it’s official: in 2016, we successfully did both. Today, the story of how I negotiated for more money at work, and how we rose to the higher challenges we’d set for ourselves this year. Do we consider 2016 an unqualified success? Read on!

Not Fostering Comparison // Are We the Joneses?

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Today we’re reflecting on comparison — when it can be good, when it crosses the line, and if it’s even possible to know when you’ve crossed that line. We work hard to share our story in a positive way that encourages others, but lately we’ve been wondering if some of what we share inadvertently creates an arbitrary standard that begs comparison.

OurNextLife.com // Pre-Retirement To Do List, Things to do before we retire, pre-retirement checklist

Our Pre-Retirement To Do List

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As we get closer and closer to our retirement date, the idea that we are actually going to retire early is becoming real. And as we get closer, we’re creating a different kind of to do list — one less focused on saving, and more focused on mapping out everything we need to do before we pull the plug on our careers next year.

OurNextLife.com // Early Retirement and Financial Independence Blog // Adventure, Happiness, Mountain Living

The Retirement Lie Part 1 // Media, Social Norms and the Problem with “Average”

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Today we’re kicking off a new periodic series called The Retirement Lie. We recognize every day how lucky/fortunate/privileged/rare we are for being able to pursue early retirement, primarily because we also recognize that just being able to retire at all is becoming increasingly unlikely for a large majority of people. In this series, we’re delving into the forces that are keeping people from retiring confidently and securely, beginning with the way media talk about retirement savings.

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?

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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.

All the Secrets of Our Success // A Compendium

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Today is a “clip show” post of sorts, putting together for the first time all of our money beliefs and actions that have gotten us where we are today. We spend a lot of time looking forward, and projecting future health care needs, where our income could come from and of course all the feelings. Today we’re sharing the master list, the grand compendium of everything that’s helped us get this far in our journey to early retirement.

OurNextLife.com // early retirement, financial independence, adventure, mountain living, world travel

How Will It Feel to Actually Spend Our Investments?

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We’ve spent more than a decade building up our savings and investments, all the while granting them a special status by not touching them. Even shelling out $8,000 for our tax bill this year felt painful. The pain of paying that bill made me wonder if I have “special occasion thinking” around our investments. And if, when it comes time for it next year, we’ll actually be able to spend our investments. Let’s explore…

OurNextLife.com // Early Retirement, Financial Indpendence, Adventure -- Green Ferns header photo

Planning for Health Care in Early Retirement

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We value our health pretty much above everything. If we had a such thing as a “health portfolio,” it’s safe to say we’d value that above its financial counterpart. Something we are thinking a lot about is how we’ll ensure that we always have access to good quality medical care at every stage of our lives. Here’s the rundown of options we’re currently considering as the landscape keeps shifting.

The Frugal Habits We Don’t Miss for One Second

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We constantly come across new tips on how to get to “optimal frugality,” and while we think it’s great to continually try to optimize your spending, something that we now know to be true is that there’s never a point of ultimate optimization, a point when we have everything figured out perfectly. Rather, it’s an ongoing process of dropping habits and adding new ones. Here are some we’re happy we’ve dropped.

Rethinking the Emergency Fund

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A lot of what we talk about here is specific to people on the early retirement path, but today’s topic is something every single one of us should have as an important part of our financial plan: an emergency fund. We think of our emergency fund not as a one-and-done kinda thing, but as something that has evolved upward and downward over time. And now, as we’re approaching early retirement, we’re once again rethinking how much we need to have saved in our e-fund when we hit our magical date.

How My Audit Fears Dictate Our Taxes

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I have a super visceral memory related to taxes that I still carry around with me. My parents divorced when I was in high school. The divorce itself was fine, but what was not fine was watching them get audited post-divorce for a year in which they had been married. It was the worst I ever saw of my parents, but it was also an important lesson in dealing with accountants and the IRS.

What Keeping Our House Cold Has Taught Us

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We really aren’t frugal by any reasonable definition of the word. We never consider forgoing things we need. But I decided to look at our lives and see if there was any area in which we truly are frugal, and ask what that means for us. And there is one example: the thermostat. Here’s what keeping our house cold has taught us.

Invest More or Pay Down the Mortgage? // What To Do With Extra Funds

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A tension we notice a lot in PF blogland is the question of whether to prepay the mortgage, or sink as much money as possible into market funds, and it’s a question we struggle with, too. In some imaginary world in which we could see into the future and see how the markets will perform, it would be an easy decision to make. Let’s dig into how we answer this question in reality.

Then January Happened // The Joy of Fluid Goals

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the last time we talked finances, we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave at the end of 2015, back when it appeared that we were ahead of schedule on our early retirement goals. but now we are now experiencing the financial hangover, the realization that actual reality may shake out differently than we’d hoped. all the more reason to keep our goals fluid!

When We’re Not on the Same Page About Money

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while it’s easy to paint a pretty picture here in blogland, the truth is that, despite all that counseling, and reading that book and others, and even despite being in complete and total lockstep with regard to our early retirement and life goals, we aren’t always on the same page about every aspect of our finances. we think it’s important to acknowledge that. here’s how we’re dealing with our current disagreement.

Why We Take Willpower Out of the Equation

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we think it’s easy to feel a bit hopeless in the face of financial hurdles if you’re not a person for whom financial virtues comes easily. if you’re not a natural saver, you’re not doomed to a life of financial misery. but, you have to know what your weaknesses are, and develop a system to work around them. here’s how we’ve built a system that doesn’t rely on willpower at all.

A Butterfly Flaps Its Wings // The Story of Our Worst and Best Investment

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today we’re telling the story of the city condo we once owned, and which we’ve struggled to define as a “good” investment or a “bad” one. it’s a reminder that it’s not always easy to tell good decisions from bad decisions — or good investments from bad investments — but rather it’s about what those decisions do to your trajectory, and what other decisions they influence.

Our Next Life By the Numbers // Our 100th Post!

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wow, you guys. though time doesn’t fly when you’re trying hard to retire already, it feels like just yesterday that we started this little blog to chronicle our journey to early retirement (actually it was about 10 months ago), and here we are, 100 posts later! we thought we’d celebrate the day with a rundown on some of the other numbers we’ve racked up while writing these 100 posts.

Our Golden Handcuffs // Sticking It Out in Stressful Jobs Until We Retire

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we feel the sunday blues in a big way. and we know why: not only do we just not love having to work every day, we know that we’re in especially high pressure, stressful, occasionally soul-sucking jobs. but we didn’t just default into these golden handcuffs of ours, and we don’t stay in our jobs because we lack imagination. our choice to stay put in unsustainable jobs is a clear-eyed decision we’ve made, based on considering all of our options and deciding what’s most important to us. the most important thing? getting to our exit date as soon as we possibly can.

The Ten Questions to Answer Before You Retire Early

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early retirement is a bfd. and it’s not for everyone. it’s a very different path from the one most people follow for a reason, and it’s not one we should go down without having our eyes wide open. early retirement won’t magically fix everything we wish was different about us or our lives, and it comes with its own set of pitfalls and stresses. to help sort this out, we’ve put together a list: the ten questions you should be able to answer before you retire early.

Finding Your Kindling // Lighting Your FIRE with Contagious Flames

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you know we love a good object lesson. recently we had one inexplicable morning when the fire just would. not. light. those days are a reminder that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over but expecting different results. the answer: add kindling. the point of the kindling is not only to get us past those obstacles, and to get the fire going a little, but to get those flames to start spreading — and spreading fast.

The Anti-Greed Manifesto // Early Retirement Is About “Enough”

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we’ve both come across a seemingly frequent but also puzzling (to us) phenomenon while perusing new blogs. when aspiring early retirees are telling people in their lives about their plans to retire early, they’re getting negative responses. one of which has us utterly befuddled: the assertion that the accumulation of assets required to retire early constitutes pretty much the worst quality we can imagine: greed. here’s our response, in manifesto form.

All the Charts // Our Progress Toward Early Retirement

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today we’re sharing the clearest glimpse yet into where we are on our journey toward early retirement in money terms, along with a detailed breakdown of how we plan to fund both our early retirement and our full retirement. we’re talking percentages instead of absolute numbers, but are going into a lot more detail than we ever have before. that’s right: it’s all the charts.

How We Went from Ballers to Savers, and Lived to Tell the Tale

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one of the things that’s different about us, compared to lots of bloggers in the pf community, is that we are not frugal by nature. at some point, we realized that all of that spending, even if it wasn’t on stuff, was still locking us into needing our jobs, and needing them for a long, long time. and since we value time more than anything, and were in a position to make early retirement a reality, we knew we’d regret not changing our ways. but it hasn’t always been easy. here’s how we lived to tell the tale.

Adjusting Our Goals // Rolling With the Market Punches

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we’ve been tracking our numbers for years now, and have always set annual goals for ourselves in terms of savings and mortgage paydown. but crazy as it may sound for us to say this, we’ve never defined those goals in terms of strictly what we would contribute. we’ve only defined our goals in terms of total balance. but with only goals about total balances, we now feel like we’re failing in the current market landscape, when the truth is that we’re saving more than ever. here’s how we’re adjusting our goals.

On Still Not Sharing (Most of) Our Numbers // Talking Finance With No Finances

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one of our earliest posts on this blog was about how we don’t share our numbers. it’s mostly because, one day not too far off in the distance, we will drop this whole anonymous charade, and we don’t want all the details of our finances attached to our names and faces. in our culture, money comes with meaning and prejudgments. having x amount means you’re supposed to behave a certain way, dress a certain way, spend a certain way. we don’t want those expectations to precede us.

Progress and Uncertainty on the Road to Early Retirement // Mid-Year Check-In

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looking at things big picture, we’re astonished at how far we’ve come in a short time, aided in large part by jobs that overpay us. since we bought the house four years ago, our net worth has tripled, and the year-over-year gains are pretty big, owing to us getting serious about saving and about paying off the house quickly, as well as growth in the markets since 2009.

Our DIY Life // How We Save (and Sometimes Splurge) By Doing It Ourselves

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we have always loved doing things ourselves. what’s funny in retrospect is how little the money piece has mattered to us in questions of diy, at least with the small stuff. but of course that was then. and this is our running-like-hell-toward-early-retirement now. money matters. especially the saving of it. so now when we diy things, it’s just as much about saving money as it is about the joy of making something.

How We’ll Learn to Stop Worrying and Love The Budget // Managing Our Finances in Retirement

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we never hide that we are not frugal by nature, we’re not budgeters, and we’ve really only succeeded at retirement saving by employing a pay ourselves first approach that is essentially tricking ourselves into thinking we have far less to spend than we actually do. that is all well and good for now, but things will definitely have to change once we quit our jobs at the end of 2017.

Goals, Reality and Quirks // Our Asset Allocation

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don’t let any of our more philosophical posts fool you — we’re still total nerds, and we love tracking every possible aspect of our early retirement plan as much as the next guy. but, we don’t share our numbers here, which has sometimes made it tough to explain some of our more unique circumstances, like our need for a two-part retirement.

Spending On Our Health, Our Most Important Asset

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lots of being healthy is absolutely free: getting outside to exercise in the fresh air, choosing not to smoke, maintaining a healthy weight, avoiding toxic people. and we do all of that stuff. but we also spend out on our health in some big ways, and plan to do even more when we’re retired. some of these expenditures may not seem health-related, but we see them that way, and that makes them worth it to us.

on not following a budget

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for us, trying to follow a line-by-line budget feels both overly restrictive, and too much like a diet in which you’re tracking calories. it’s not sustainable. following a budget makes us constantly want to cheat, or wonder when the diet is over. but we’re doing just fine without a budget!

moving on from badass

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the word “badass” gets thrown around a lot in personal finance/financial independence circles. that’s not the full story. all of us who are working toward or have achieved financial independence have one big thing in common. we’re lucky.

impermanence and freedom

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everything in our house that needs fixing or replacing means fewer dollars into our retirement savings and is, in other words, a direct assault on our escape plan, our freedom. but now, we’re trying to think of this as a lesson in impermanence.

a two-part retirement

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we’re going to live like cheapskates for the first 18 years of our retirement, and then if the markets cooperate, we’ll live a little larger in our later years, once we can tap our 401(k)s. for us, this plan is perfect. live cheaply when you’re young and resilient.

banking for the future

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we advocate taking a fanatical approach to banking airline miles. most airlines require five coast-to-coast roundtrips to earn a free domestic ticket. if you take those trips on different airlines, they add up to essentially nothing. it’s only by concentrating your travel on one airline that you get the benefit.

backup plans

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at least one of us is not a gambler by nature, preferring things to be predictable, controllable and known (even if those concepts are themselves just illusions). but this is, for us, that rare thing in life that’s so worth doing that it’s also worth a pretty substantial risk.