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 why achieving financial independence is so important. 1 - Financial independence as disability insurance In my case, I was shifting my writing focus to my Forbes.com column, but once I [...]

I am a runner. Not a fast runner in the grand scheme of things, but a runner nonetheless, who enjoys the challenge of distance running and particularly the marathon distance. My running log goes back to Dec 26 1998, and in the intervening years I've covered 13,150 miles over 2,547 runs. That includes 218 races of every conceivable distance between the mile and the marathon, with a few triathlons mixed in for good measure. Three summers ago, I even ran 31 days in a row. My latest running feat is completing 2 marathons over the course of 15 days. Completing [...]

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 our first trip out, we combined four days of work/some fun in Los Angeles with four days of fun/some work in San Diego. Los Angeles in the distance on approach [...]

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 Florida to Ohio, we hit: Florida Georgia South Carolina North Carolina Tennessee Virginia Kentucky West Virginia Pennsylvania Ohio With the marathon leg, we added: Indiana Illinois Wisconsin On the way [...]

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 secure. My first career was in banking and consulting, two highly paid industries where you have little to no personal life. I wanted to be self-sufficient in New York City, [...]

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 bank and various furniture stores, with several sunsets, walks on the beach and delicious comfort food. Typically, we fly NYC/Liberia and then taking a one-hour shuttle ride direct to our [...]

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 I may have been overly optimistic in my rental income numbers. I've been going through all of your Costa Rica RE posts and the Langosta property is so similar to the [...]

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 but lost out to someone else. When this unit came on the market, we weren’t looking to buy, but we are always open to buying for the right deal. We [...]

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 memory. My favorite retirement calculator is courtesy of Financial Mentor, and one of the variables you can model is inflation rate. Try it for yourself, and you’ll see that an [...]