(Meet me at the Real Estate & Entrepreneurship Conference for Physicians September 26-28, 2024 in Dallas Texas. Send me a message if you are coming so we can meet up. I would love to meet you in person. Today’s guest post comes to you from David Rosenstrock, who is a certified financial planner with an MBA and ... Read more ..read more

(Meet me at the Real Estate & Entrepreneurship Conference for Physicians September 26-28, 2024 in Dallas Texas. Send me a message if you are coming so we can meet up. I would love to meet you in person.) My wife and I just finished a month-long trip visiting areas of New England we have never seen. We booked three weeks of back-to-back timeshares followed by a cruise of the islands south of Cape Cod. Many people don’t realize how nice the accommodations are and how inexpensive a timeshare can be for those who qualify to own one and learn how to use it. We have owned a single week in New O ..read more

Every time I speak or write about retiring at age 54, someone feels the need to tell me “I could have done that too if I was a Specialist like you. I’m just a pediatrician.” Or they are one of the other specialties that tends to rank lower in income than general surgeons. The implication is that if they had the same income as me, they would have had the same results. This is not a correct assumption. As they converse with me, their income frequently comes up in conversation. Often, they are earning more than I ever did, but I don’t bother pointing this out as they won’t believe me anyway. The ..read more

(The picture with this article is the New Hampshire timeshare my wife and I are currently staying in the week I wrote and published this article. The room has four beds, two bathrooms, a kitchen and a living room. The grounds have two clay tennis courts, indoor pool, indoor and outdoor hot tubs, great fitness room, two game rooms, a theater with a live production of the play Harvey, fishing, hiking trails, and an onsite restaurant. It cost us $591 for the week ($60/night) to trade my timeshare for this one. This cost includes our original purchase price of my unit in New Orleans, yearly mainte ..read more

As years go by, we learn many lessons from the school of hard knocks. Although some of these lessons we could have learned from someone who had previously learned the lesson, such as don’t grab an electric fence. If we learn from someone else’s experience, we won’t get the hard knocks that come with learning the lesson.  Other lessons we must experience for ourselves because we don’t believe that the situation pertains to us when given the warning, such as life is a lot more enjoyable with less on our schedule. We think the person who gave this advice couldn’t handle a busy schedule. But ..read more

(Today’s guest post comes to you from David Rosenstrock, who is a certified financial planner with an MBA and the Founder of Wharton Wealth Planning, LLC.) Most people want to help ensure that the financial advice they receive is unbiased and truly in their best interest. A financial advisor’s compensation structure can make a significant difference in the recommendations they make. Fee-only financial advisors are independent of brokerage firms or insurance companies and are legally held to the fiduciary standard. The fee amount and structure for a fee-only advisor is transparen ..read more

My son, brother-in-law, wife and I recently completed a bicycle ride across America from San Diego, CA to St. Augustine, FL. The details of our journey are chronicled in my last eight blog articles. During this 49-day adventure, many life/financial lessons came to light. We can all benefit from the pearls I learned. No, you can’t eat anything you want just because you are burning tons of calories exercising. It’s amazing how many times I have heard someone say, “You are burning so many calories when riding that you can eat anything you want.”  I found this statement to be false. The first ..read more

Day 48, May 20, High Springs, FL to Putnam Hall, FL, 63 miles. Today we did not have a free breakfast at the motel, so we used our microwave to make oatmeal. Keith opted for peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Then we started our ride right out of the motel.  The weather was partly cloudy and hit a high of 83. A nice change from the 90+ heat we had been experiencing. We only rode a few miles when I noticed a clumping sound coming from my back tire every time the wheel went around. I signaled for the guys to stop, as I was leading at the time. I spun my wheel around to find a ¾ inch shee ..read more

Day 41, May 13, Gulf Shores, AL to Milton, FL, 67 Miles. Late last night we had some excitement. At about 11pm the fire alarms went off in the motel. Paul and Keith were out of the room making phone calls to their wife and girlfriend. I went out in the hall to see if there actually was a fire. I saw no smoke and all the other motel guests were looking out their doors also. As I watched what was happening in the hall I noted that we could escape in either direction down the hall, or out our room’s first floor window. As I waited, the alarm stopped. The fire officials had come, checked out the ..read more

Day 34, May 6, Bunkie, LA, to New Roads, LA, 73 Miles. Today’s free breakfast was a sack breakfast that we took from the refrigerator in the breakfast room. It consisted of a sausage biscuit sandwich, which we heated in the microwave in our room, a Danish, and a tiny 4-ounce carton of orange juice. Not the best meal to start a long ride. We rode out of the motel into the back country through several very small towns. We had one extremely rough road for several miles that really beat me up. The roadkill we saw on the road today was close to 100 dead snakes. We got chased by a pack of about ten ..read more