We recently signed up for a course on making printables. My main business is career coaching, so I do a lot of writing, keynotes and training – activities which lend themselves to printable quotes and exercises. We had been thinking about adding a product in our business to give it another stream of income. While most of my work was already virtual, I still did a significant amount of live events, which have been postponed or cancelled outright and need to be replaced. Having multiple streams of income is an established trait of the wealthy – Jay-Z and other celebrity [...]
A good friend of mine had a rent-to-own agreement on the house she was living in, but her application for a mortgage was denied so she was unable to meet the purchase deadline. A rent-to-own agreement is what it sounds like – it looks like a typical lease, except at a specified date, the tenant has the right to purchase the property for an already agreed upon price. For my friend, it was a chance to lock in the sales price while she saved up for the down payment and closing costs. For the seller, he got a buyer – [...]
I do a lot of running. I've been running very regularly since approximately the summer of 1994, which is the year after I finished college. My running log in Excel goes back 21.5 years, all the way to Dec 26, 1998! During my 21.5 'running log' years, I've run 11,495.2 miles (as of July 5 2020), completed 22 marathons in 17 states, 34 5k's, and covered and raced every distance in between. I've also had countless injuries, and endured long stretches of time where I've either not run my best, or not run at all. But one thing missing from [...]
I was recently speaking at a pan-Asian media conference (supposed to be hosted in Singapore in March but unfortunately moved to a June virtual event due to the pandemic), and listening to the keynote by Maria Ressa. She is the founder and editor of Rappler, but also recently convicted in a Philippine court for cyber libel. Her talk really made me appreciate the freedom of the press that we have in the United States. While there have been some distressing instances of journalists coming under fire in this very country during the recent protests, there are still strong protections for [...]
As part of our recent estate planning, our assets will be split 50/50 between our kids. That seems fair, but how equally have we provided support, or will we provide support, during our lifetimes? “…if that scorecard of lifetime gifts isn’t roughly equal at the time of the parents’ death, then there’s a problem. Not a legal problem — a family problem.” So says Jeffrey Condon, co-author of Beyond the Grave: The Right Way and Wrong Way of Leaving Money to Your Children (and Others) and co-founder of Condon and Condon law firm in Santa Monica, CA. Financial fairness when [...]
I recently finished a new personal finance book, Beyond The Basics, by Sammy Azzouz, a financial advisor out of Massachusetts, and one of his investment topics “beyond the basics” is real estate. Azzouz’ premise is that for most investors their basics will be three things: career, because that provides your earning potential;savings rate to ensure there are earnings left over to invest;building a risk-managed paper portfolio that you can stick to in good markets and bad. After Azzouz set up these basics, he introduced the benefits of adding real estate to a portfolio. This got me thinking: Should everyone add [...]
Costa Rica FIRE made a guest appearance on the Real Wealth podcast, which focuses on real estate investing. We were excited to be invited onto the show because we look to Real Wealth as a source for real estate news and ideas and even traveled to their income property showcase in Cleveland last summer. (It was a great example of one of our bleisure trips, where we mix business and pleasure – Cleveland was a blast!) The episode is titled, Becoming Job Optional In Your 40’s, and the synopsis opens with the tantalizing premise: They’ve come a long way — [...]
A few months ago, Scott and I updated our estate plans to switch from a will to revocable living trust structure, as well as update key documents to reflect that both of our kids are legal adults (i.e., age 18 and over) and that our primary residence is now Florida. We are almost done with all the moving parts, but it will still likely be a couple of months before finishing everything. It has been an adventure and taken a lot longer than expected, so if you haven’t yet done any estate planning and you have kids or other people [...]
This is part of an ongoing series where we highlight things that we love about Costa Rica. Despite the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, Costa Rica has become the first country in Central America to allow same-sex marriage. This process has been a long time coming - it was back in January 2018 that Inter-American Court of Human Rights ruled that all of it's signatory countries (which includes Costa Rica) must grant same-sex couples the same rights as opposite-sex ones. In August 2018, Costa Rica gave themselves 18 months to act. No new laws have been put into effect, but the laws [...]
We are not financial advisors so nothing in this post should be construed as specific financial advice. However, with $3 million being the new recommended retirement target, I was intrigued by a reader’s retirement plans. Stephanie, currently a US resident in her early 50’s, wrote to us with questions about Costa Rica, as she is investigating possibly retiring there and on much less than millions of dollars: We own our home, it currently has a mortgage but we have about $130-150k in equity… I do have a small 401K with about $27k in it now, that will increase to about [...]
