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 [...]
This reader is looking to buy in Tamarindo, Costa Rica, and wants to know how much anxiety is too much when embarking on a real estate purchase. What would you advise? I just happened to come across your blog post from 2018 on why you decided not to purchase in Langosta. I am literally about to put in a purchase offer on a property in Tamarindo…and am having second thoughts. I think [...]
We sold three of our real estate properties in the last year, just so we could have a more liquid and balanced portfolio. Yet, we recently closed on a new purchase – a studio apartment in Jacksonville, FL with a view of downtown. We had been looking at units in this particular downtown building for a couple of years now. We even bid on a penthouse studio late last year [...]
Multiple companies, such as Tesla, Coinbase and Redfin, are announcing layoffs. Some companies have rescinded previously made offers (Coinbase again! also Twitter), while some are decreasing hiring (Netflix, Peloton, Facebook). You also can’t visit any news site without seeing a post on crypto winter, which impacts not just crypto values but also the job market at crypto firms. At the same time, we’re facing the highest inflation rate in recent [...]
In my very first job post-college, I worked as a management consultant. This involved working onsite at clients around the US, and for one project, in Toronto Canada. I spent March/ April 1995 in Toronto, and while I was working too long hours to enjoy the city, I remember liking Toronto very much. Fast forward 27 years later, and we were back in Toronto for a quick overnight. The trip [...]
