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 [...]
Scott has a goal to run a marathon in all 50 states (there’s even a club for people dedicated to this!). He added Utah to the list this past January, and most recently Wisconsin this past August. Wisconsin was an opportunistic add-on to a trip we were already making to Ohio. Our youngest goes to college near Columbus, and we were dropping her off for her senior year! Traveling from [...]
I thought that when we reached a base level of financial independence (living in Florida is Stage 2, where we can pay our minimum living expenses by moving to a cheaper location), I would gain more clarity about how to spend my time. I have always been money-focused – not driven to make a lot of money, but I equated money with security and had a high bar to feel [...]
We celebrated our 28-year anniversary with a week in Tamarindo. It was a true bleisure trip (business + leisure) because we booked the trip to renew our Costa Rican bank card and jumpstart a kitchen renovation. As luck would have it, the best airfares and the most opportune time in-between other commitments turned out to be our anniversary week! So, we were able to bookend very unromantic trips to the [...]
