I didn't make this up. Costa Rica is literally Champion Of The Earth! Champions of the Earth is the UN’s highest environmental honor, and it celebrates outstanding figures from the public and private sectors and from civil society whose actions have had a transformative, positive impact on the environment. Costa Rica was named for 2019 in the policy leadership category. We recently started a series on the blog where we outline the various things we love about the country of Costa Rica. But this news definitely takes the cake! As New Yorker's, we have long been familiar with the late [...]

The Flight Network, a deal-focused travel provider, polled over 1,000 travel writers and agencies (including Costa Rica FIRE!) to come up with its 2019 list for the 50 most beautiful cities. And the top 10 winners are: ParisNew YorkLondon Venice VancouverBarcelonaCape TownSan FranciscoSydneyRome Downtown New York City from Governor's Island In addition to our hometown New York City, I voted for Tamarindo, though it’s really a town, not a city. The five South and Central American cities that did make the list included Rio de Janeiro in Brazil (15), Buenos Aires in Argentina (20), Quito in Ecuador (32), Cusco in [...]

CNN Health reported on a new study out of Heidelberg University in Germany, which found that parents are happier than non-parents in old age, but ONLY if their kids have moved out. We are a sample size of one: we dropped off our youngest to college in late August and were on a plane to Costa Rica within the week. While our oldest still lives at our official home address, we plan to travel for most of the next year, so we’re essentially childless. Are we happier? Happiness could be the result of empty-nesting or of Pura Vida We are certainly [...]

We’re staying in Costa Rica for a full month, so it’s a great experiment in day-to-day living. One of my goals for our stay this time was trying out the health care. I decided to start with a visit to the dentist since I am in-between dentists at home. My regular New York City dentist was on a sabbatical. I tried a neighborhood dentist in Riverdale but wasn’t 100% convinced to switch over. I wanted to try out a Costa Rica dentist now since I may need expensive work done sooner than later. I could have bought a car for [...]

About one year ago, we started exploring selling our Indianapolis portfolio. You can see the property details on all five rentals here, and our sell v. hold analysis here. In a nutshell, this was our highest cash-flowing geography (compared to Asheville, Jacksonville and Tamarindo), which is why we bought in this market. But it was also our biggest management headache – while we worked with local property managers in Indy, we went through three of them in under four years and were never fully satisfied. Shortly after listing the portfolio for sale, we received an offer but ended up declining [...]

Caroline and I just finished up our first week in Costa Rica. We will be here for just about a month in total. Our prior trips have all just been a few days. Normally at that point we'd be heading home, but since we are now empty-nesters, there is no rush, and we are happy to still have more than 3 weeks remaining in this trip! We are not adventure seekers, and pretty much stick to walking around town from our condo to the beach and to various restaurants. But in Costa Rica, there are many opportunities to run into [...]

Continuing our posts on your FIRE questions, such as when you are late to saving, when you and your spouse disagree or when you don’t want to pinch pennies, we come to another savings obstacle – the high cost of elder care. How do you insure for long-term care?How do you budget for the unknown costs of elder care – your parents and your own?How can you use geo-arbitrage when your parents, spouse’s parents, or both are located in a high cost of living area? Elder care requires time, energy and attention, not just money I had a colleague whose [...]

Thanks to the feedback we received on your FIRE questions, we have tackled how to make FIRE possible when you and your spouse disagree or when you don’t want to pinch pennies. Now, we’re tackling another question, this time about retirement in general, not just early retirement: How do you make FI possible when you’re later in life and still haven’t saved enough for retirement? Specifically, the questioner shared that they: Are a 60-year old married coupleKeep expenses low and are close to prepaying their mortgageHave one stable job with benefits, and one established freelance career (though a major project [...]

The purpose of our visit to Cleveland was to attend the Real Wealth Network Income Property Showcase event. You can read all about that event over here. We added a 2nd day to the trip so we'd have more time to sample what Cleveland has to offer! Fun fact about the hotel hosting the Real Wealth Network event: it was also host to the National Yo-Yo Championships! Unfortunately, we didn’t have time to watch any of the competition, though Scott did catch some of the players warming up in the hallways. Serendipitously, the Real Wealth Network event kicked off with [...]