Jordan Grumet (aka DocG) is a long-time thought leader in the financial independence and retire early (FIRE) community. His podcast, The Earn & Invest Podcast, is nearing its 600th episode. He’s interviewed just about every blogger, author, and intellectual authority in the personal finance and retirement space (check out my interview, #580). An article I…
I moved in with my parents when I was 27. The football wallpaper in my bedroom was gone, and the bed was bigger. But it was still the room I slept in for the first 18 years of my life. While most of my friends were married and starting high-salary jobs after years of graduate…
The Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge attraction opened at both Disneyland in Anaheim, CA, and Walt Disney World in Orlando, FL, in 2019. Despite the long-awaited openings, Disney stock analysts were disappointed to see overall theme park attendance down 3% in the fiscal third quarter. Visitors to the planet Batuu meet face-to-face with the Millennium Falcon…
Famed investor Charlie Munger and diplomat Henry Kissinger both died within a day of each other in November 2023. Each lived to 100 (Munger was 34 days short, but we’ll give it to him), and both put on suits and went to work until their final days. One wonders: Did their continued work, curiosity, and…
Retirement is a fuzzy line these days. It seems increasingly rare for older people to cross the threshold from career worker to retiree on a single day and remain retired indefinitely. My Dad did that. So did a few of my extended family members and former coworkers. But when I ask retirement-aged people about their…
Yep, I’ve been writing this blog for 10 years. But instead of rewriting what’s already been written, I want to focus on today and the future. Today’s post is a personal update about my current situation and how my life and business are moving toward closer alignment with “the why” of the early retirement goal…
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…
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….
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…
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…
The 2022 HBO documentary Tony Hawk: Until the Wheels Fall Off is a fascinating biography of the skateboarding icon. As told through interviews with his Bones Brigade peers — all trailblazers themselves — Tony’s life is a story of risk-taking, failure, persistence, and entrepreneurship. Excelling to the top levels in any sport takes a natural…
I fell into my career at age 23. A childhood friend worked for a nearby information technology (IT) consulting company in a hiring frenzy. It was 1998. Dot-coms were booming. Y2K loomed. The U.S. government had a revenue surplus, and we lived in the northern Virginia suburbs of Washington D.C. Experienced talent was scarce, opening…
A former manager was into office gift-giving. Most of the team was over 50. As a joke, she gave everyone a pocket guide to texting acronyms. The “older folks” were still learning about terms like LOL, TL;DR, LMFAO, OMG, and WTF. This was around 2014 before we had our third child. Flipping through the pages,…