Some people are hesitant to FIRE (or even retire at all). They’re concerned about losing their physical or mental health, their purpose in life, or simply being bored. Fortunately, Allison and I haven’t had any of these problems since FIRE’ing in early 2015. Our biggest challenge seems to be trying to whittle down which projects we want to focus on! In early 2019 we wrote a blog post titled “10 Cool Things We’ve Done Since Achieving FIRE (& 5 We’re Planning).” At the time, we were celebrating our 4-year anniversary of achieving FIRE. Fast forward to 2022, and we’ve done even more “cool” s ..read more

It’s been a few months since our last post, Our 2022 Game Plan: Re-emerging from the Ice. As you can see from this post’s title we've been quite busy. We went to Puerto Rico, I got COVID, we wrote our third book, and we even got to meet the Mayor of Oakland!  In our 2022 Game Plan post, we laid out a number of goals for the year in the categories of Projects, Health, Connecting, and Finances. While not perfect, we’ve actually met or exceeded many of our goals, and expanded on some of our future targets.  Here’s what we’ve been up to…   Travel We had been putting travel into th ..read more

At the beginning of 2021, we made a list of 12 goals for the year. We divided them up into four areas of life: projects, health, connecting, and finances. When the year was over we took inventory on how well we met our goals. While we managed to do well with some (working out and travel), we missed the mark with others (self-improvement projects). Well it’s a new year, and so it’s time to set new goals for 2022 (using the same four buckets)! One wildcard is the COVID-19 pandemic, but we’re cautiously optimistic. We plan to hunker down for a couple of months and then re-emerge from the ice by ..read more

The year 2021 certainly was a mix of highs and lows. Between vaccines, Delta, boosters, and Omicron, it was quite a rollercoaster. Like everyone, our 2021 was up and down and all over the place. Along the way, we did hit some nice milestones: I turned 50, and we celebrated our 20th wedding anniversary. At the beginning of the year, we put together our plan of 12 ways to make 2021 great. We divided up our goals into four buckets: Projects, Health, Connecting, and Finances. While we hit a number of our targets, we also came up short on several of them. Overall, I would give us a Grade of B. &nb ..read more

How much money do you truly need to achieve FIRE (Financial Independence / Retiring Early)? This is probably the most common question and biggest concern of those pursuing early retirement. Most people use the popular Multiply by 25 Rule and its companion, the 4% Rule, to help them determine their “magic” number. The Multiply By 25 Rule states that you should have at least 25 times (a.k.a., 25X) your early expenses in your investment portfolio. In this case, 25 is your “FI Number.” The 4% Rule claims that if you withdraw 4% (or less) of your invested assets to pay your annual expenses, you ..read more

Allison and I attended our first FinCon, the self-proclaimed “money nerd” conference, in 2018 (in Orlando). I had an opportunity to be a speaker, and we met lots of influencers in the FIRE space. We also combined it with a week at Disney and Cape Canaveral. Needless to say, we were pretty hooked at that point! We followed up Orlando with FinCon19 in Washington D.C., where we again made a larger trip out of it. We toured the Capitol and the Pentagon, which were both awe inspiring. Then we headed up north to spend time with family and friends in New York and New Jersey. FinCon20 was supposed to ..read more

In April of 2021, we set up an interesting experiment by investing $10K that we had sitting in cash. We put it into five $2K stocks / ETFs that we thought would be worthwhile investments over the next 12 months. It was partly for fun, and partly to see if we could come up with investments that would outperform the overall stock market (using VTSAX as the benchmark). We also wanted to see if we could predict how well each investment would do by ranking them from 1 to 5. Note: we had planned to provide an update every three months, but our 12,500-mile road trip took over for a couple months (at ..read more

When Allison’s sister rescheduled her wedding from September 2020 to June 2021 due to COVID-19 (like so many other people), we had two choices. We could either fly from Oakland to NYC and double mask on the plane (since vaccination rates were very low at that time), or we could use it as an excuse to drive across the USA. Since we always wanted to do a cross-country road trip, we decided to go for it. It would allow us to get out of the house after being cooped up for so long and see much of the country we’ve never seen before. Once we got our coronavirus vaccines, we felt we were ready to ge ..read more

Do you have cash stashed away somewhere that you’ve been hesitant about or unsure what to do with? Maybe you have a random savings, checking, or money market account that you forgot about. For us, that would be $10K that’s been sitting in a Vanguard money market account for a couple of years. (Note: this is separate from our regular emergency cash account). We meant to invest it, but never quite knew where to put it. Yes, we know this is a first-world problem. The question is where should we invest this money now? Conventional FIRE wisdom would say “just throw into VTSAX and forget about it ..read more

Allison and I got laid off from our jobs in January of 2015. At the time, we had no idea it would be the last time we would ever work “real jobs” again. We were in our early 40s and “retiring early” wasn’t even on our radar, especially in the SF Bay Area (the highest cost of living area in the country). We had never heard of the concept of FIRE (Financial Independence / Retiring Early). Fortunately, the timing was good. One year earlier we had significantly reduced our housing expenses by moving from San Francisco to Oakland. We didn’t realize it at the time, but moving just 10 miles (using g ..read more