Caroline

One of our readers wrote in with a question. It was lengthy and had personal details he didn't want to share, so it is summarized. In a nutshell, he owns a plot of vacant land in a prime area of Costa Rica but won’t be using it full-time. He was all set to start building a house on the land in March, but lost his job at that time due [...]

How would you advise this reader on her rent or buy question? I recently turned 50 and got divorced after almost 20 years of marriage. I have not worked for over 15 years so I will be living off of the alimony settlement, while I retrain for a new career. I know I want to return to New York City, where I’m from, and specifically Manhattan. Based on the assets [...]

What is the right amount of support to give your adult kids? That's a question we think about a lot, and related to another topic we recently wrote about: how we have approached financial fairness with our own kids. Let us know what family-related expenses are testing your financial plans, in the poll at the bottom of the post. A majority of young adults in the U.S. live with their [...]

About five years ago, a finance friend of mine mentioned that his much wealthier colleague was buying property on a high elevation in Singapore as a climate change hedge. (This same climate change hedger was also stockpiling gold – not just shares of a gold ETF, but actual gold – and this was well before the pandemic.) I filed that factoid about the Singapore purchase away, but it certainly planted [...]

When we got serious about real estate investing starting in 2013 as a way to propel our FIRE journey, we turned to turnkey real estate companies to accelerate our growth. Scott was working a big corporate job, and my business was in growth mode. We felt maxed out on how many cash-flowing rental properties we could find ourselves, and so turnkey was alluring because turnkey providers do a lot of [...]

Most people I know think of Labor Day mainly as an excuse for a long weekend or the unofficial end of summer. But the history of Labor Day is that it was born out of the labor movement as a tribute to workers. This pandemic and the demands it has placed on frontline workers should make this Labor Day particularly meaningful. I’m a cynic and assume that people will be [...]

An important concept that makes achieving financial independence even more urgent is artificial intelligence. The keyword here is urgent….many times we procrastinate the notion of saving money because we think we have many years to build up our mountain of assets – from Overcoming AI by Scott Gamm But you might have fewer earning years than you think, so that quote sums up the thesis of Scott Gamm’s upcoming book, [...]

Is it better to have a product or service to offer as a small business? There are pros and cons to each. Frankly, being a small business owner is difficult enough, regardless of the business you choose, that the best answer to the product v. service debate is whichever offering you care most about. There are so many times when you’re in the thick of your business that you’ll want [...]

The 2020 IMN Single Family Rental (SFR) Virtual Forum was a two-day event that featured 2,000 attendees and 80 speakers in keynotes and breakout sessions. I was only able to attend Day One, since the next day we were en-route to dropping off our youngest at college. There were many sessions to choose from. I elected to listen to: the keynote, which gave a state of the SFR industry;a financing [...]