Tag: financial planning

Learning not to let the markets affect you // Our Next Life // early retirement, financial independence, work optional, investing, stock markets

Learning Not to Let the Markets Affect You

It seems that the period of stock market volatility we’ve been in the past few months is here to stay for a while. Does that have you feeling anxious? If so, you’re normal, but you don’t have to stay that way. Learning not to let the markets or their machinations affect you is surprisingly easy to do if you make that your intention. Let’s talk about how.

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)

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.

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.

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

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.

Protect your early retirement from sequence of returns risk // Our Next Life // early retirement, financial independence, investing, financial planning, retirement

Protect Your Early Retirement From Sequence of Returns Risk

Do the roller coastering markets have you concerned about the your early retirement plan? Sequence risk is by far the biggest risk early retirees face, and that risk can come from market crashes, long-term mediocre returns and even rising health care costs. Fortunately, though, we can all put ourselves in a good position to head off that risk, without lengthening the timeline to early retirement, by making some smart choices with asset allocation and behavior.

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.

Our Early Retirement Charitable Mission and Donor Advised Funds

Just as we have a mission in early retirement to figure out what we want to do when we grow up, and to adventure more, we also have a mission to be more charitable, both by volunteering and by giving money directly to important causes. Which may seem harder when we have less cash flow coming in. But there are some good ways to build charitable giving into your retirement financial plan, including with a donor advised fund. What’s your charitable mission?

Why We Aren’t Banking on Social Security for Our Retirement — But Why You Might

Today we’re continuing the mini-series on Social Security and Medicare by looking at whether or not you should build Social Security into your retirement plan. We’re not counting on it, in part because we don’t need to, but also for some big reasons that are worth considering for everyone who wants a secure financial future. Give it a read and then let us know what you think!

The Final Approach // 2017 Q3 Financial Update

Holy moly — it’s our *very last* quarterly financial update before we retire early in a little over two months from now! (Can I just keep typing exclamation points and have that count as an intro?) !!!!!! The third quarter was a good one for us, and it’s looking like we have a good chance of hitting our stretch “magic number” goal. Come see where we are, and then share your Q3 progress with all of us!

Embracing Both DIY and the Suboptimal // PLUS The Pre-Reveal Contest!

It’s a two-for-one post today! First up, an examination of the joint urges among FIers to DIY our lives and finances, but also to optimize as much as we can. Let’s discuss how compatible those joint impulses really are, and the joy that comes from embracing the suboptimal. And then, it’s pre-reveal contest time! Check out the DIY swag I made just for the lucky winners, and enter your guesses for where we live, what we do for work, and any other fun facts you want to throw out there. Good luck!

The Three-Part Formula for Success That Works for All Major Life Goals Including Early Retirement or Financial Independence!

The Three-Part Formula to Achieve Any Huge Goal, Even When Advice Doesn’t Fit

There is plenty of financial advice out there, including some very prescriptive advice about how to achieve financial independence or virtually any big goal you can think of. The only problem is: that advice, while great for some, is guaranteed to be bad advice for others. Rather than trying to follow advice to the letter — or give it out in a prescriptive way — let’s focus on the formula instead, a formula with three key ingredients that can get anyone in nearly any life circumstances to achieve big goals.

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.

The Dose Makes the Poison // Radical Moderation in Frugality, Saving and Spending -- not trying to save too fast or spend too perfectly en route to financial independence or early retirement

The Dose Makes the Poison // Radical Moderation in Frugality, Saving and Spending

There’s a principle in medicine that the dose makes the poison. Which means, very few substances are good or bad for us no matter what. Instead, what matters is how much of them we take. And it’s exactly the same with money. It’s easy to make symbols of things like buying lattes or paying for cable, but those behaviors aren’t objectively a problem. What might be the problem, however, is the dose. Why we’re big believers in focusing on the dose, in context, and embracing a sense of radical moderation.

Quarterly financial progress report toward early retirement and financial independence

Magic Numbers, Padding and Panic // 2017 Q2 Financial Update

It’s time for our second quarter early retirement progress report — our second to last! — complete with charts galore. This quarter we hit another milestone that’s both wonderful and a relief, and we’re setting our sights on building up a sizable cushion by year’s end for future health care unknowns. Plus: we’ve launched a reader survey and we’d LOVE your input.

Does your exit plan have an exit plan? Why you need to be able to change your mind in early retirement -- about where and how you live, about work, and about anything else. Make sure you build in the resources to keep your options open.

Does Your Exit Plan Have an Exit Plan? // What If You Change Your Mind?

Today we’re talking options, and keeping them open. Early retirement isn’t an ending, after all — it’s a beginning. And if we go into that beginning with a limited set of options, and no ability to change our course, we could be setting ourselves up for a less-than-ideal future. Here’s why it’s so important to have an exit plan from your exit plan, which really just means you’re giving yourself the financial and logistical resources to change your mind.

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

The Before and After Early Retirement To Do Lists

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!

Want Adventure AND Security? Just Change Your Timeline

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.

When the Crash Comes // Recession-Proofing Our Retirement Plans

We’re generally optimists about things and — though it seems like a paradox — we become most optimistic when we’ve delved into all the bad stuff that could possibly befall us. That’s the only way we can really know that we’re well prepared — and it’s easy to be optimistic when you’re prepared. And it only makes sense to prepare for market crashes, because they’re inevitable and inescapable. Here’s our game plan for dealing with them.

OurNextLife.com // Transitioning Our 401(k)s After We Retire // What To Do with a 401(k) post-retirement, How we'll shift our assets after we retire

Transitioning Our 401(k)s After We Retire

As we promised in our recent pre-retirement to do list post, we’re dedicating a whole post to the question of what we’ll do with our 401(k) accounts after we retire next year. Our 401(k) accounts make up a major part of our portfolio — and up to 100% of what we’ll live on after age 60 — so we want to be sure they’re taken care of.