August is National Wellness Month, and we are celebrating all month with posts related to wellness and self-care. ===================== Well, I did it. Ran every day in the month of July! 31 runs and 147.9 miles. Early in the month I wrote about why I was attempting this challenge, and why I wouldn't be upset if I didn't finish. But I did finish! Here's the proof - 31 days of running! My average was 4.77 miles per day. Even though the challenge called for 3.1 miles as the minimum run, the minimum I ran was 4.2, and the most was [...]
When we signed the closing paperwork last year to sell our entire Indy rental portfolio, I happened to be speaking at a business conference. When my colleagues figured out that I was dashing in and out from my presenting duties to take care of a closing, I was met with several high-fives and other forms of congratulations, since for many people, a real estate transaction is a major milestone. Unfortunately, I was so flustered with the multitasking I didn’t take any time to savor. Since then, we have hit other milestones – we finally updated our estate planning starting last [...]
HELOC, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways: Using a HELOC for investment property so you can look like a cash buyer even when you’re financingSmoothing out cash flow when you’re a small business with lumpy earningsHaving money to tap for emergencies in lieu of a rainy day bank account earning negative return after inflation Apologies to Elizabeth Barret Browning for swiping a line from her beautiful sonnet, but if I had to write a love letter to a financial instrument, it would probably go to the HELOC. We have tapped our HELOC for all of the [...]
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 — [...]
