This year has been flying by, and we can’t believe it’s already time for our first quarter update. And it’s not just numbers on our minds — getting this close to retirement has us feeling all kinds of contradictory feelings, and the recent market boom has us in a state of disbelief.
Monday’s post spurred so much great discussion around what constitutes “retirement,” so I thought we could take it a step further, and do some exercises around what actually constitutes retirement, and what that’s based on. There’s no right or wrong answer, so come weigh in!
An interesting thing happens with a lot of financial independence bloggers. As your audience grows, you suddenly have this incredibly opportunity not only to reach more readers, but to earn more from the blog. Which is wonderful! Except when it means you’re only telling part of the story. Here’s why this matters, and what we should all keep in mind as we read FI blogs.
Reaching financial independence is, more than anything, a waiting game. Especially for those who follow a passive investment strategy like indexing, there’s very little thinking to do once you set your plan in motion. But, the journey still takes years, often many years. Here’s why it’s so critical to pace yourself on that journey.
The fact that we are retiring at the end of this year is getting more and more real for us, and some of that feels scary. But it also feels crazy exciting for obvious reasons, and for less obvious ones like the forthcoming opportunity to re-engineer our lives to reinforce better habits and avoid triggering the bad ones associated with our current work lives.
It’s so fun and exciting to plan for financial independence and early retirement that it’s easy to focus only on what happens when things go well. But it’s important to pressure test our plans to make sure they will still hold up even if (or when!) things don’t go as planned. Here’s our suggestion on one way to do that.
Something we’re starting to realize is: What we all call retirement planning isn’t really true retirement planning. Money is only a tiny piece of this, and not what most of us will be thinking about daily once we stop working. Real retirement planning is planning for all the rest of life that comes post-career, and for us, a big part of that is travel. So we’re shifting now into *real* retirement planning, and thinking through those big travel questions like how long to stay out, and where to go first.
Today I’m on the Mad Fientist podcast! To celebrate the occasion, we’ve got a monster post with the full rundown on every aspect of our financial plan and financial philosophy, so new readers can get a better sense of us, and long-time followers can see everything all in one place.
Though early retirement feels like a big goal in and of itself (and it is!), it’s not an endpoint. For most of us, it’s just the beginning, and it’s worth thinking in advance about what your next big audacious goal will be after FIRE. We offer some suggestions here!
For a community that’s so into freedom, the financial independence blogosphere can be an awfully strict place with tons of rules. It can be hard to believe that we have the right to do some things just because we feel like it. Today, we give you permission to do exactly that, and share some of our most bratty financial decisions.
Living in the mountains has taught us that catastrophe comes quickly — wildfires can wipe out whole communities in the blink of an eye. While the world is still the safest it’s been since the dawn of civilization, there are many good reasons right now to up your savings game, both for your own safety, and for that of others.
Today is our second blogiversary! In some ways, nothing has changed — we’re still slogging toward that big goal. But in other, more important ways, SO MUCH has changed in our lives, driven in large part by this blog and the awesome people who read it. Today we take a look at where we’ve been, a look at where ONL is headed, and we answer your questions.
Thanks to some recurring power outages, we’ve had a lot of time lately to talk about what’s on our minds. And something that keeps coming up a lot is anxiety about what it will be like when we quit — not our post-work life, but the actual act of quitting itself. We know this feels tougher to us because we’ve been in our jobs a long time and are invested in them. Today: When loyalists contemplate quitting.
I never took a break between high school and college, or between college and starting my career. And so for years, I thought I’d missed my chance to do something awesome, as though that’s something only young 20-somethings can do. But seeing people in our mountain town piecing together lives of adventure in all different ways made us realize: we haven’t missed out on anything. In fact, we’re probably doing this the better way, because our life of adventure will be built on solid financial footing.
Today’s post is more philosophical, looking at what has happened (at least for us) as our numbers have grown over time. It has been wonderful to celebrate a steady string of financial milestones over the years, but outside of those moments of celebration, it all actually feels less real, not more real. Is it just us? Let’s discuss!
Paying off our mortgage last week has gotten us thinking a lot about debt, and how differently we all think about it — but also how we *feel* about it. Today we’re diving into those thoughts and feelings, and — because we got so many questions about it — diving into why we did pay off the mortgage on our house but why we’re not paying off the mortgage on our rental anytime soon.
Today, an amazing thing happened. We woke up in a house that is completely ours. We’ve always planned to pay off the house before we retired, but we’d never imagined we’d hit this goal so soon, nor could we have expected how incredible it would feel. Here’s why we did it, and what it means for our home stretch to early retirement.
Today’s a biggie: the culmination of so many discussions and decisions! Will we pay down the mortgage or pad our taxable accounts? How did our 2016 look in the end? When will we retire in 2017? It’s all here! (Plus, happy holidays! Sending lots of holiday love!)
Anyone aspiring to retire early can list off a million reasons why we want to quit working, but what’s interesting is that most of those reasons have to do with work culture, not with work itself. On some level, we all crave the meaning and satisfaction that come with work, but the realities of modern work are very different from that work ideal. Learning to recognize the difference between work itself and work culture — and likewise the difference between job burnout and a true dead end career — can help us zero in on why we want to retire early to begin with.
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!
