Reaching Financial Independence

When people ask me about my FIRE goals, I typically say that I’m “soft” FIRE. That is, I don’t really have an end date in mind like a lot of the more hardcore FIRE folks in the community. I’m just saving as much as I can without sacrificing too much of my lifestyle. I’d be perfectly happy to be in a position where I’ve covered almost all of my living expenses from my savings and only need to earn $5,000 or $10,000 in a year in order to cover the remainder. That’s where Barista FIRE comes into play. The idea of Barista FIRE is … Read more

The Reverse Latte Factor is an important thought experiment about how impactful small amounts of extra money added up consistently over time can be to your finances. And the beauty of the Reverse Latte Factor is that it doesn’t require you to give up all of the little pleasures in your life … Read more

A brand of FIRE that everyone pursuing financial independence will have to hit at some point is Coast FIRE. Coast FIRE is defined as when you have enough money saved up that, without any additional contributions, the growth on that initial nest egg will be enough to fully support your lifestyle … Read more

I often think of Lean FIRE as a bit of a shortcut to financial independence – a way to pull the plug and escape the working world sooner, rather than later. The gist of it is that if you need less money to live on, you can hit your FIRE number sooner. Lean FIRE comes with an obvious tradeoff though … Read more

Today, if you ask me what my FI number is, my response is that I really don’t have one anymore. Let’s look at three reasons why I don’t have a FI number these days. Maybe some of these reasons apply to you too … Read more

Earlier this month, I gave a presentation at CampFI – Midwest that I thought might be worth sharing here in a written format. I titled the talk “Create Your Own FI” and the idea was one that I’ve been thinking about for a while – that financial independence (FI) isn’t something that we necessarily have … Read more

It’s an important thing to remember that I too often forget. One of the frustrating things about getting into the personal finance space is feeling like you’re so far behind all the time. I’m pretty much at the beginning of my financial journey and it’s sometimes disheartening to see people the same age as me who are already nearing or at financial independence … Read more

One of the things I’ve been thinking about recently is how quitting my job has really changed the way I think about work, and specifically, how I think about the way work fits in with my life. Take my current schedule as an example. Last week, my wife and I went on a week-long trip … Read more

A few days ago, I broke some big news on this blog. After 3 years of law school and 5 years of working as an attorney, I made a huge move, choosing to opt-out of the clear career path and instead make the move to the wholly unclear path of self-employment and gig work. It’s … Read more

For pretty much all of my life, I was taught the same basic script – study hard in school, get good grades, and get a good job. It’s something that pretty much all of us were taught to do from a young age. There’s nothing wrong with this script, and indeed, it’s the same advice … Read more

One of my favorite comic strips of all time is Calvin and Hobbes, the story of a precocious 6-year old kid and his stuffed animal tiger – seen as a stuffed tiger to everyone else, but very much alive when viewed through Calvin’s eyes. It’s a comic that really spoke to me from the moment … Read more

I sometimes get into conversations with friends of mine who wonder why I’m trying to save so much money. When I tell them that I’m doing it because I’d love to be able to retire early, I’m often met with the same response: “I couldn’t imagine myself not working. I’d get too bored.” I’m sure those of you on the path … Read more

One of the things I wish I had done differently was to not be in such a hurry to rush into a career. For some reason, when I was 22-years old, I felt like I had to figure out what I was supposed to do with my life right away, and that if I didn’t … Read more

Sometime not too long ago, my wife and I had lunch with my brother and a friend of his. It was our first time meeting this friend, so we got into all of the usual pleasantries that come with meeting someone – what do you do, where do you live, and other things like that … Read more

One of the things I always tell people about debt is that there isn’t any secret to paying it off quickly. There’s no magic method that will make your debt disappear. No secret tricks that will crush your loans any faster. And you probably shouldn’t count on someone else paying your debt off for you. In the end, paying off debt really just comes down to a single basic principle … Read more

One of the things that surprised me when I began my student loan payback journey was how much interest I had to pay when I started making my payments. What was even more surprising to me was how much interest my loans had accrued while I was in school (and making no money). In fact, when … Read more

I think that wealth, much like temperature, is relative too. One person might feel wealthy making a certain amount of money while another person, making the same amount of money, might feel like they’ve only got pennies to their name. Some of us might scoff when a doctor or lawyer says … Read more

I’m sometimes convinced that the reason a lot of people become doctors or lawyers is due to the fact that the path to those jobs is laid out pretty well. There’s sort of a blueprint you can follow – go to college, get good grades, do well on some standardized tests, and so forth, and … Read more

One of the interesting things I find when people share their debt free stories with the mainstream media are the comments that result. Some commenters praise these articles and talk about how they’ve been inspired. But more often, you notice the negative comments. These are the people who say that the story being shared … Read more

The other day, I was talking with my dad and we got to talking about my new job. I told him how I was doing – I liked it, I was way less stressed and anxious, and overall, the new job seemed like a better fit for me and my personality. Yes, it was another … Read more

One of the interesting things I’ve noticed is that when you start telling people to do things differently, a lot of people start coming out of the woodwork to tell you why whatever it is you’re telling people to do can’t be done. The reasoning varies slightly, but the end result always seems to be the … Read more

I recently read an article on Marketwatch about some kid that lost his life savings doing some fancy stock market thing that I didn’t really understand. According to the article, this dude lost his life savings trading something called a “contract for differences.” Whatever that is, it predictably ended up not working out and he … Read more

I was recently talking to a buddy of mine about personal finance when we ended up on the topic of saving money. He knew he needed to save more money, but was having trouble actually doing it. To him, saving money came down to self-control. As he explained it, he was struggling to save more because … Read more

Anyone with debt and a decent cash flow will eventually find themselves with a choice. What should be done with all of that excess money? Assuming your goal isn’t to spend it all on buying things, you’re basically left with two choices. Pay off your debt aggressively. Or invest the surplus. The pure mathematical answer is … Read more

One of the things that I think holds a lot of people back financially is this total aversion to even a moment of discomfort. Sure, being successful with money requires an ability to handle money well – that’s probably a prerequisite. But I think there’s more to it than that … Read more

If you spend too much time listening to what most people tell you, it can often feel like we don’t have much room to make mistakes. I know that’s how I’ve often felt. For most of my life, I was taught that you needed to do things a certain way – go to a good … Read more

It’s pretty easy to become complacent when it comes to our paychecks. We collect them every two weeks and just assume that whatever amount is on that check is the amount we need to survive. It’s funny how your expenses always seem to match up to whatever amount is on your paycheck. I think of this as paycheck complacency … Read more

When I look back at my life, I think there’s one thing that has guided a lot of my decision-making – fear. It’s a powerful emotion, one that I think pushes many of us onto the paths that we find ourselves on – whether we know it or not. Of course, a healthy dose of … Read more

Thanksgiving is now behind us and with its passing comes the official start of the holiday season. I’ve always thought it helpful around this time of the year to remember how fortunate most of us are. If you’re reading this, chances are that you live in a developed country. You probably also make a decent income … Read more

One thing that I absolutely HATE is when someone tells me that paying off debt is easy if you’re making a good salary. Maybe I take it too personally, but it feels like a knock on my accomplishment. After all, I paid off $87,000 worth of student loans, but I also had a good salary that allowed me to … Read more

Lifestyle inflation is what happens when you earn more money, and in turn, spend more money. It’s a natural part of life, but one that is often viewed as a negative to wealth building. And it’s true. If your income grows, but you spend all of it, you’ll never be able to build wealth. In … Read more

When it comes to the different sub-genres of FIRE, my favorite is probably what has been coined Barista FIRE. I wrote about Barista FIRE several years ago in a post I titled The Dream of Barista FIRE. In that post, I thought about some of my favorite jobs I had back when I was in … Read more

There’s a concept that I’ve been thinking about over the past couple of years, especially as I’ve made this transition from a full-time, professional, real job, to a quasi-fake job as a blogger and gig economy worker. It has to do with a concept you could call the relative value of money. When I think … Read more

About a year ago, I had a really bad day at work – so bad, in fact, that before I left work that day, I put an important event into my Google Calendar. I picked a date exactly one year into the future and wrote the following: It was an audacious thing for me to … Read more

A friend of mine recently remarked to me about how much his Amazon stock has grown over the past two years. He bought his shares back in 2015 when Amazon was selling at around $400 per share. Today, Amazon sits at over $1,400 per share. As my buddy made clear, that’s well over a 200% increase … Read more

Part of the duties of my current day job involves going to a bunch of lawyer conferences. As a result, I’m often surrounded by really successful lawyers. These are lawyers who have done pretty much everything right in their legal careers – top grades, good law schools, big-name law firms. One thing they all definitely … Read more

One of my more financially interesting friends is my friend Jay (not his real name). While the rest of us are beginning or in the middle of our “real” careers, Jay still works as a bartender at the same restaurant he worked at while we were in college. He recently turned 30 years old, and if my calculations … Read more

As we close out 2016, I thought I’d issue probably the easiest call to action out there – the 52 Week Money Challenge. This is by no means an advanced money concept. Still, I think it’s a good thing for anyone to do, no matter where you are in your financial journey. We all should have … Read more

Not too long ago, I discovered a Twitter account that looks at some of the cringy financial Tik Tok advice out there. It’s a lot of the things you would have seen (and still see) on YouTube and Instagram. Young, mostly white, mostly male influencers peddling crypto, NFTs, options trading, and various other get-rich-quick schemes … Read more

A few days ago, a friend of mine texted me to tell me that the NFL released their schedule for the upcoming season, and as luck would have it, our hometown team, the Washington Redskins, would be in Minnesota to play the Vikings. We’ve always tried our best to attend games when DC teams come … Read more

When I graduated from college back in 2009, the country was in the midst of the biggest recession since the Great Depression. During that two or three year span, the market lost nearly 50% of its value, and it didn’t fully recover until well after 2009. Luckily for me, I was a broke college student … Read more

Earlier this year, I left my high paying, big law firm job and took an attorney job with the state. I did so for a variety of reasons. The hours weren’t great, the work was stressful, and the atmosphere was overall pretty unpleasant. It just wasn’t a great fit for me. I pretty much knew … Read more

One of the assumptions a lot of people make when thinking about their income is that it will always go up. There’s this general belief that the amount you are earning today will just naturally increase. Each year, you’ll do better at your job, you’ll get a raise, and you’ll just … Read more

There’s a little-known fact about investing that most people don’t appreciate until they really think about it. That fact is this: if you give yourself enough time, the amount you have to save in order to end up with a large sum of money is actually very reasonable. Perhaps nothing … Read more

When I quit my job earlier this year to go all-in on this blog, I knew that I had a few housekeeping tasks that I needed to complete. This included rolling over my 403b to my Solo 401k and getting health insurance before my 60-day COBRA retroactive period came to an end. Of course, both … Read more

My first year of law school was probably the craziest and most stressful year of my life. That’s because, in the legal world, a lot of your future career prospects are based on the grades you get in your first year. To make things even more stressful, almost every class I had that year calculated … Read more

My wife and I are currently in the market for a new house. We have plenty of money saved, have a high household income, and after a decade of living well below our means, we think we’re ready to start inflating our lifestyle a bit more (or a lot more if we’re being real). I’m … Read more

Welcome to Part 3 of my series detailing how I invest in my employer sponsored retirement plans. Today, we’re going to look at the exact funds I contribute to in each … Read more

I’m not financially independent – not even close. To support my lifestyle, I have to actively earn income, whether that’s by writing, side hustling, or doing whatever else it is I do for a living. Here’s the interesting thing though. Even though I’m definitely not financially independent, some people seem to think that I am … Read more

Every once in a while, I like to listen to a little Dave Ramsey. And while I don’t agree with a lot of the things he says, I do concede that he does a good job of motivating people to pay off their debt. His secret is how simple and doable he makes paying off … Read more

One of the best things I did coming out of law school was to pay off my student loans as fast as I could. Doing this gave me a ton of flexibility in the type of money I had to earn. With my loans gone, I didn’t need to work in a job earning a certain amount of money, all so that a portion of it … Read more

I’m not financially independent, so I can’t say what financial independence really feels like. But what I do know is that the things that made me happy in school are pretty similar to the things that I want out of financial independence. Here are a few things that come to mind … Read more

We should all have some amount that we aim to save every year. The great thing is that in the United States, the government basically gives you an amount to aim for each year in the form of retirement accounts. Since the government limits what you can put into each of these … Read more

If you had to ask me what the single most important thing you can do for yourself financially when you finish school, my answer would always be to live like a student. It seems so obvious, and yet, despite being so obvious, very few people actually follow this advice. I live in a college … Read more

My brother has a knack for making and saving money. At just 28 years old, he’s managed to build up a sizable net worth – far higher than mine or many other young financial bloggers. If he was involved in the financial blogosphere community, he’d be one of the success stories out there. At his current rate … Read more

Sometimes, I like to go on LinkedIn and see what people are up to. I like LinkedIn – I think it’s more interesting than Facebook or Instagram. Looking at what someone shows you of their life is one thing. But seeing someone’s career progression over the years is more insightful. After all, we spend most … Read more