Mr. Tako's Adventures in Early Retirement (with Kids)
In this multi-part series we’re looking at Essential Skills for Early Retirement. The focus of this series is what happens after Financial Independence, and what are the skills are needed for a successful early retirement.
This time around, I’m going to discuss the not-so-pretty side of retirement, and why every early retiree needs to develop a thick skin. The thicker the better…
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If you read a lot of personal finance blogs like I do, eventually you begin to notice that all the posts look the same — Save money, get out of debt, invest in index funds, reduce expenses, 401k’s, IRAs …. and so on.
Once you’ve read that same advice a couple dozen times you tend to finally “get it”. Am I right?
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Haggling. It’s a word that conjures up exotic imagery of wet markets and distant locations around the globe….you know, the kind of thing you expect to do on vacation.
Unless you’re shopping for a car, or traveling overseas, “haggling” just isn’t a word that comes up frequently in the “first world”. Most people walk into a store, restaurant, or other place of business, and assume that prices are just fixed…
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Conventional wisdom tells us that kids are expensive. Really expensive. The world constantly bombards us with stories about just how much kids can cost — According to the USDA it costs $245,340 to raise the average child to age 18.
The personal finance community generally takes a negative view of huge expenses like this… a gigantic speed-bump on your way to Financial Independence. Nope, kids don’t get a lot of love from the personal finance community…
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Now that I’ve traded the chains of employment for the wide-open vistas of Financial Independence, there are very few things I miss from my working career. But along with the job, came steady pay increases. Most of the time these were really minimal — mere 3% cost-of-living increases.
So why do I miss those tiny raises?
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Have you ever traveled to a really different part of town? Maybe one that you’ve never seen before? Maybe it’s a neighborhood with a completely different socioeconomic status.
After joining local “free” groups (like our local Buy Nothing Group), I find this kind of thing happens to me all the time…
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Is winter over yet? I’m SO ready for Winter to be over…but sadly spring is still a long ways off in the Pacific Northwest.
Technically spring is supposed to start in April, along with the Skagit Valley Tulip Festival. Unfortunately, Old-man winter always takes a lot of convincing to leave.
In my mind, spring really doesn’t get started until May around here. Usually the snow and freezing rain have stopped by then…
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Travel has to be one of life’s best activities. Who doesn’t like to explore new places? Travel allows us to experience the sights, the sounds, and the flavors of another part of the world.
With any luck, it creates new and (hopefully) lasting memories that enrich our lives…. but travel clearly doesn’t enrich our pocketbooks.
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Most people want their investments to do well, that’s a given. The daydream of being able to live off your investments is one of the key tenets of the financial independence community. For many people, this simply means they want stock prices to go UP.
Unfortunately, there can be months, years, and sometimes even decades when stocks don’t “go up”…
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