Given that all our online behavior is tracked, I must be tagged as a cynic, pessimist or doomsday thinker because several posts about the negative aspects of the FIRE (financial independence, retire early) movement were suggested to me: Fortune wrote about early retirees feeling lost and unfulfilled. Gobankingrates.com was even more to the point with their take: I Retired Early And Regret It (subtitle: Why I Went Back To Work [...]
I loved seeing this post on Business Insider featuring five different real-life examples of house hacking House hacking is renting out part of your home to cover your mortgage and potentially even make a profit. In the post, you’ll see owners who took on roommates for spare bedrooms or bought a duplex to live in one unit and rent out the other. One owner renovated an unfinished basement to rent [...]
In 2008, Dr. Regina Lark was laid off from her role as Director of the extension program at UCLA. A PhD in women’s history, Lark had worked in the university system since she graduated and was 50 years old when she was laid off. Yet, instead of finding another role in academia, Lark founded A Clear Path, a professional organizing firm based in Los Angeles, which now has 13 employees, [...]
According to a press release from the Independent Publisher Book Awards (known as the IPPYs), 500,000 new books are published each year in the US alone, with millions of new titles worldwide. The pitch I received also highlighted that 80% of people have considered writing a book! 80% seems really high, given that Statista calculates the mean number of books read in the US at just over one per month [...]
Analysis of Google search data, courtesy of luxury real estate platform RubyHome, shows that searches for ‘HELOC’ – the acronym for “home equity line of credit” -- more than tripled in the United States as of July 2023. This is the highest level of search interest in internet history for the topic. The report suggests that the increased interest is due to people looking for relief from rising costs and [...]
I read a lot of personal finance, but somehow missed Morgan Housel’s The Psychology of Money when it debuted in 2020. I learned of Housel when a blog of his was spotlighted by Todd Tressider at Financial Mentor, one of my favorite personal finance resources: Is the goal financial, or is it just to become independent? Do you want more money, or do you want to no longer need to [...]
Becoming a digital nomad can be a shortcut to achieving financial independence because of geo-arbitrage – earning in a high-paying geography, while living in a lower-cost base. We bought a property in Costa Rica to secure that lower-cost base (see our budget for a month-long stay), while retaining predominately US clients paying US rates. Our move to Jacksonville, FL is less extreme geo-arbitrage, but still a good example given the [...]
The other day I received a press release highlighting what Elon Musk could have bought instead of Twitter. One of my favorite perks in writing for Forbes.com is that I get story pitches from business owners, PR firms, authors and others looking for coverage. Much of what I see isn’t relevant to my beat or newsworthy, but sometimes I get an interesting survey or an advance copy of a book [...]
After posting to Costa Rica FIRE multiple times each month for over four years, I resolved to take a break in fall 2022. However, I ended up taking off much more time than one season -- my last blog post was almost a year ago! As a career coach, I see these longer-than-expected gaps pretty regularly, when a job search or career pivot takes longer than expected. It’s one reason [...]
Having my own business gives me flexibility in my day-to-day schedule, my location and the projects I take. But my favorite type of flexibility that comes with self-employment is the flexibility to build out bleisure trips – traveling for work and mixing business with leisure. This year, I happen to have four business opportunities in the same place – Los Angeles. We can’t always tack on leisure segments, but for [...]
