Last I posted, we were in the middle of a road trip to New Mexico. The first entry in the series was all about why we decided to take this trip and how we planned it, and the 2nd one covered our first day on the road, and visiting Memphis. At the time we planned the trip, we hadn't looked that closely into the quarantine situation in New Mexico. It turns out they have had a quarantine in place for travelers entering the state. We discovered this early in the trip, but we weren't very concerned because our plan was [...]
We have kicked off our road trip to New Mexico. Tuesday was day 1, and we drove to Memphis that day, where we are spending 3 nights. Previous Post: New Mexico Roadtrip: Planning Tuesday was spent driving. All day. The total distance turned out to be 720.6 miles. We started around 7am eastern time, and checked into our AirBNB around 8:45pm central time, which is almost 15 hours door to door, with the time change. We have taken many long road trips, and we've found that 750 miles for the day is about our limit. It's usually 15 hours on [...]
We love to travel, and that is one of the reasons we are working on financial independence and a lifestyle that affords us the flexibility to work from anywhere, and therefore travel whenever we want to. This week we are embarking on a 3-week road trip to New Mexico, and this post kicks off a new series about this trip. ============ A little over a year ago, our youngest went off to college, and we became empty nesters. In the months following, we travelled to Costa Rica (twice), Los Angeles, Arizona, and the Philippines, and that doesn't include several road [...]
How would you advise this reader on her rent or buy question? I recently turned 50 and got divorced after almost 20 years of marriage. I have not worked for over 15 years so I will be living off of the alimony settlement, while I retrain for a new career. I know I want to return to New York City, where I’m from, and specifically Manhattan. Based on the assets I received in the divorce settlement, my financial advisor confirmed I could safely spend up to $1.25 million on an apartment, which would get me something in the neighborhood I [...]
What is the right amount of support to give your adult kids? That's a question we think about a lot, and related to another topic we recently wrote about: how we have approached financial fairness with our own kids. Let us know what family-related expenses are testing your financial plans, in the poll at the bottom of the post. A majority of young adults in the U.S. live with their parents for the first time since the Great Depression – Pew Research Parents interviewed for a Money.com post reported their grocery budget went up 250%, from $400 per month to [...]
About five years ago, a finance friend of mine mentioned that his much wealthier colleague was buying property on a high elevation in Singapore as a climate change hedge. (This same climate change hedger was also stockpiling gold – not just shares of a gold ETF, but actual gold – and this was well before the pandemic.) I filed that factoid about the Singapore purchase away, but it certainly planted a seed. Should climate change dictate where you buy real estate? Wherever you fall on the climate change debate, environmental disasters are taking their toll. Reuters covered how the West [...]
When we got serious about real estate investing starting in 2013 as a way to propel our FIRE journey, we turned to turnkey real estate companies to accelerate our growth. Scott was working a big corporate job, and my business was in growth mode. We felt maxed out on how many cash-flowing rental properties we could find ourselves, and so turnkey was alluring because turnkey providers do a lot of the work for you. (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); Turnkey real estate investing can be defined simply as buying an investment property that doesn't require any additional work to become [...]
Most people I know think of Labor Day mainly as an excuse for a long weekend or the unofficial end of summer. But the history of Labor Day is that it was born out of the labor movement as a tribute to workers. This pandemic and the demands it has placed on frontline workers should make this Labor Day particularly meaningful. I’m a cynic and assume that people will be too wrapped up in election news or the zig zag volatility of the stock market to give workers their full due. Another factor vying for attention is labor-related but not [...]
An important concept that makes achieving financial independence even more urgent is artificial intelligence. The keyword here is urgent….many times we procrastinate the notion of saving money because we think we have many years to build up our mountain of assets – from Overcoming AI by Scott Gamm But you might have fewer earning years than you think, so that quote sums up the thesis of Scott Gamm’s upcoming book, Overcome AI: How to Build a Secure Financial Future in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. (I think the subtitle of the book should actually have been the catchy title of [...]
Is it better to have a product or service to offer as a small business? There are pros and cons to each. Frankly, being a small business owner is difficult enough, regardless of the business you choose, that the best answer to the product v. service debate is whichever offering you care most about. There are so many times when you’re in the thick of your business that you’ll want to quit, and genuine desire for the product or service you offer can really help you stick with it. Having been in business for 13 years and counting, I have [...]
