Flexibility to accommodate mid-week movies is one of my favorite perks of the FIRE lifestyle. This past Tuesday, I took my youngest daughter to an advance screening of “Crazy Rich Asians”, including an Asian-American business pre-show talk, by Nielsen, and an Asian food-themed after-party. A few years earlier, I took my oldest daughter to an advance screening of “Today’s Special” including a talkback with the movie’s star and creator, Aasif Mandvi. This was a mid-week adventure during a school night, but it was a unique opportunity (we were huge Daily Show fans at the time) and educational in a different [...]

This week Caroline is speaking at the AAJA conference in Houston, TX, leading sessions on negotiation and difficult conversations, which are areas of expertise for her. Since my schedule is flexible these days and public speaking is one of the seven skills that enables travel, I tagged along, planning to split my time between working and exploring the city. Texas is #85 on our list of 100 travel destinations, so it is nice to check off one of the destinations! Our trip started with a JetBlue flight from JFK to Hobby Airport, negatively notable because one of the nice features [...]

I had been reading business and personal finance books and news since college, but didn’t focus on real estate topics. Once we realized real estate could be the linchpin of our FIRE journey, I did start reading more real estate news and resources. Here are my favorites.

I love to see news that re-affirms our selection of Costa Rica as the country outside of the United States we have chosen to invest in, and the one that we intend to spend some of our time in, once we are location independent. This weekend I saw in Q Costa Rica that JetBlue has announced they are adding their "Mint" service in Costa Rica. "Costa Rica’s Liberia becomes JetBlue’s first Mint city in Latin America and JetBlue will be the only airline to operate regularly scheduled flights with a lie-flat premium seat between Costa Rica and the United States." [...]

In part 2 of our FIRE drill in Jacksonville, we looked at the different beaches we visited, the ways in which we were able to experience the arts, cheap deals we found, and lastly the weather, as we tested out Jacksonville as a location to spend lots of our time once we are able to be location independent.

I almost missed this news, but thankfully I noticed this mention in my newsfeed, from Q Costa Rica. Today is Guanacaste Day! "In 1824, the Central American Federal Republic passed the law and signed it on July 25, allowing the Guanacaste province to become part of Costa Rican territory. Nicoyans decided to be part of Costa Rica instead of Nicaragua." Guanacaste is the province where Tamarindo is located, which is where we have our AirBNB rental properties.  One of seven provinces in Costa Rica, Guanacaste is located the northwest corner of the country. In fact, a good portion of Costa Rican Pacific coastline in [...]

We are a year away from having the ability to be location independent and more fully live the FIRE lifestyle. To that end, we spent a week in Jacksonville, testing out everything it has to offer, to try and confirm if we feel it is a location where we can spend lots of our time.

An article about a new collection of Google Street View photos of popular places in Costa Rica led me both on a discovery of the beauty and sights of Costa Rica, and also down the rabbit hole of Google Maps Street View.

When we started blogging on CostaRicaFIRE, with the FIRE piece standing for Financial Independence, Retire Early, my earliest readers (predominately family and friends, of course) thought I was so clever to come up with that acronym. I wish I had been that clever! FIRE is already a popular movement of its own with multiple blogs, Reddit groups, Meetups and other communities being built around it. It makes sense that my inner circle wouldn’t know about FIRE. I do not come from a family of entrepreneurs, though my mom was an early side hustler in that she always had additional work [...]