Common advice from life coaches and career gurus is to build a career you love so much you don’t want to retire. I appreciate this advice and wish I’d followed it more in my 20s and early 30s. But genuinely loving what you do is a rare privilege. Most people don’t love their jobs, let…
Early retirement is a loaded phrase that ignites internet skepticism. We can partly blame the mainstream financial media for picking up stories about “early retirees” that run six and seven-figure businesses. Inconsistent messaging among early retirement bloggers doesn’t help, and I suspect the phrase is tossed around liberally on YouTube and TikTok. The FIRE crowd…
When I lost my job in 2017, my former employer didn’t have the means to pay me a severance. Our family had emergency savings, but our multiple income streams kept us afloat. Five years earlier, a job loss would have been much worse. But since I saved and invested while times were good, I could enjoy…
Risk-free government Treasury yields have risen dramatically over the past year. The increase is a direct result of the Federal Reserve rate increases that started in 2022. Higher short-term yields are good for retirees and give us multiple options to earn risk-free returns on idle cash while maintaining liquidity. But the fast pace of the…
I spent the summer of 1996 tending the 13th street beach stand just off the boardwalk in Ocean City, MD. Beachgoers came to me for rentable beach chairs, umbrellas, and bodyboards. On a good day, I’d sell about $500 and receive 20% as pay. It was an excellent summer gig compared to the $7.77 that…
The Atlantic writer Derek Thompson wrote an article about the best career advice he’s come across that “might be marginally useful.” Your Career Is Just One-Eighth of Your Life was applicable to my situation back in September 2022 when I was approaching my career departure date, and it’s still relevant today as a self-employed blogger….
NewRetirement is an online retirement calculator and planning tool. It’s the most comprehensive financial tool I’ve ever used — miles better than any elaborate spreadsheet. I’ve been tinkering with NewRetirement since 2017, when I met the Founder, Stephen Chen, and explored the tool for some articles I was writing at the time. I used the…
My Uncle gifted me one share of Chevron stock in 1995, seeding my lifelong dividend stock investment portfolio. But I didn’t start living off dividends until I left my IT career in 2022. There were no online brokers or index ETFs making it easy to start investing in 1995. Trades cost $30+. IRAs and mutual…
I recently left my 20-year information technology (IT) career to be a full-time blogger. Most of my career involved partnering with a large government customer to modernize its massively-complex and outdated IT systems. My teammates trusted me. Managers gave me challenging assignments, and I exceeded expectations. The client was always happy with my work. But…
Financial advice can be free (google it) or expensive (hire an advisor). But financial advice tends to be tactical — buy this investment, optimize that tax advantage — instead of behavioral — think this way, stick to the plan, and be patient Success in building wealth is less about how much you know (or can…
Happy New Year! The turning of the new year brings two things to mind for a lot of us: Whoa, I spent too much money last month/year How can I improve my finances this year? I’m not a big fan of new years resolutions (most don’t stick). But I believe in habitual change — deciding…
Inflation is eating away at our wealth quarter-by-quarter. It appears to have peaked in May 2022, thanks to the Federal Reserve’s aggressive rate increases. But the chart below shows how the products we consume have recently become more expensive. Source: https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/inflation-cpi The Federal Reserve is mandated to target 2% annual inflation as measured by the…
After 20 years in information technology (IT), I decided to change careers to be a full-time blogger in early December. It’s an exciting milestone I’d been planning for about five years. Monday morning, after my last day at work, I sat down at a different computer without the looming threat of Microsoft Teams meetings. I…
Traditional retirement is a suboptimal goal. Building a career you genuinely do not want to retire from is better. Writing those words here or in a 240-character tweet takes little effort. But it’s an enormously complex concept for most middle-aged workers. To say: Hey, all you people aged 30-55, with kids, a mortgage, not-enough retirement…