This post is inspired by a back-and-forth I had with Accidental FIRE about his post on Earning More and Spending Less. Accidental Fire wrote about the tendency to spend more as income rises, which causes a surprising amount of credit card debt among high-net-worth households. I then commented about how dual-career couples with kids often experience increased costs, not just because of lifestyle inflation, but also the steep costs associated [...]
If you don’t know about Jeff Bezos’ take on decision-making – specifically what he calls Type 1 v. Type 2 decisions – it is definitely worth checking out. There are good summaries in Inc, Business Insider and Forbes. To quote Bezos directly from a letter to Amazon shareholders: Some decisions are consequential and irreversible or nearly irreversible – one-way doors – and these decisions must be made methodically, carefully, slowly, [...]
I have worked from home for 12+ years now, so the shelter-in-place orders didn’t change my work routine too much. The biggest change is a more crowded household -- our empty nest stage was short-lived, as our youngest is now attending college virtually. That said, I do find myself on many more video calls than before. Click to pin me! Now that everyone else is #WFH, even a typical phone [...]
Even though I left a lucrative corporate career in my mid-30’s for the unknown of going into business for myself, I’m actually a risk-averse person. My risk aversion just means that I don’t like taking risks – I still take risks, as long as I can manage them. Going into business for myself was a manageable risk because I was making money from something I already knew. I had been [...]
Our business income (mainly income from my HR consulting activities) is the first money we tap to fund our day-to-day living expenses. Other streams include our long-term rentals in the US, vacation rentals in Costa Rica and our paper assets. However, with the stock market volatility, Costa Rica border closures and a slowing economy potentially impacting our tenants, we see the business income as our most reliable income stream right [...]
We recently received a reader question asking if now is the time to buy real estate in Costa Rica: Do you think that based on everything that is happening right now, it may be a good time to buy? Are there more properties on the market now in light of the pandemic? I know that this is a broad and likely unanswerable question, just wondering your thoughts on the timing.- John [...]
This COVID-19 pandemic, with its widespread and uncertain fallout, is giving me flashbacks to the Great Financial Crisis of 2008, when the big banks were subject to stress tests to ensure they had enough reserves. I was doing HR consulting for a big global bank that had their stress test deadline coming up. In better times, they probably would have assumed they were too big to fail, except that Lehman [...]
One of the linchpins of our FIRE plan is that we’re not relying on just one pool of money to get there. I have always been fascinated by multiple streams of income – it made sense to me, so it was an easy beacon to follow. The four pillars of our FIRE plan, and how they have been affected by COVID-19, are: 1) rental real estate – the effects are [...]
I had written before about how the coronavirus pandemic has affected our FIRE plans, and this was before a continued spike in cases worldwide and Costa Rica closing its borders. Costa Rica indicated the border closings were through April 12, but the pandemic appears far from abating. Estimates for a vaccine are 12-18 months away. Who knows if the border closure will be extended? Even if Costa Rica does reopen [...]
Recently, I bumped into a colleague at one of my clients and discovered we had more in common than just working at the same place. Like me, she had an international vacation rental business, only this time in the Dominican Republic (DR), and she’s only 27! Of course, I had to know more about how this New York City millennial balances a full-time job with real estate. Meet Manuela Rodriguez [...]
