At the turn of the 20th century, there wasn’t a more cosmopolitan city in the world than Vienna, Austria. The city seemed to be brimming with thought leaders in medicine, science, and art. Ideas spilled out from this Central European country like an ever melting ice pack streaming down the Alps and flooding other nations with its ideas. Vienna at that time was the capital of the Austrian Monarchy, then nearly a thousand years old. But then it stopped being…
Sitting in commuter traffic can do all sorts of things to the psyche. One has time to reflect on life while behind the wheel of their vehicle for over an hour each day. It’s a sort of forced isolation. An education on patience. I used to ponder the inefficiency of it all. I used to try to avoid the insufferable Bay Area traffic. Try to find back roads. A different route home. A faster lane. Traffic made me mad and…
I worked this past New Year’s Eve, so when midnight rolled around later that evening, I found myself fast asleep on my living room couch. My kids came over and excitedly woke me ten minutes before the ball drop. I stumbled over to the room where my family was watching tv and watched as the minutes counted down. Fireworks erupted on the screen. The clocks on the west coast silently crossed into 2025. And that was it. Another year ticked…
It dawned on me on my way to work one morning that I’ve stopped giving a damn about FIRE. Driving through the darkness of the early morning freeways, lights of the San Francisco skyline and bridges glistening out past the windows, podcast on the History of Byzantium blasting through the truck speakers, the thought popped into my mind that I don’t really need an exit off this freeway I’ve found myself cruising down. I don’t need FIRE anymore. What do…
With markets pushing ahead full steam, inflation seemingly tamed, unemployment hovering at record lows, I can’t help but stop, look around, and just admire the landscape around me. For anyone pursuing financial independence, now is a damn good time to do so. Pretty much anything thrown into a broad domestic index fund will produce a return. For cash savers, 4%-5% interest rates don’t look so bad. I know I’m enjoying my HYSA after years on just avoiding cash. There was…
2025 was supposed to be the year we quit work. So my math kinda worked out as far as what I’d projected. The year isn’t over and we are 10% away from our FI number.
We just got back from a week of camping in Humboldt County. 3.5 hours north of San Francisco lies some of the most incredible Redwood forests I’ve ever visited. Cell service is sparse. The rivers are cool. And some of the trees are 1,200 years old. Walking through the shady forest floor amid ferns and clovers, I get the same feeling as when I walk through an old Roman ruin in Europe or Mexica pyramid in Latin America; except this…
The kids are out of school now. My oldest will be starting 5th grade next fall and my youngest will be going into 2nd grade. Both good ages. They run around the house, footsteps and laughter, sometimes cries, echoing through the house. They leave a mess everywhere. Remnants of their play. But it’s enjoyable. I tell myself that I will miss having a messy, noisy home once they are out of the house. Which is right around the corner if…
For a few years now I’ve been putting off replacing two columns in front of my house that hold up a roof overhang over my front porch. There’s a big tree in my front yard, a hackberry, that loves to spill its leaves each fall into my gutters. I’ve since screened over the gutters, but years of clogging the gutters, before I even moved here, had allowed water to overflow at times from the gutter. This overflow created water damage…
I’ve noticed a change to my daily routine that I can’t really explain and I’m not sure whether to embrace or fight. The problem started in January and has yet to resolve itself. The change is; I don’t get up as early as I used to. I sleep in an extra 45 minutes each day. Which doesn’t sound like much, but in the morning, when every minute counts to get on the road before the commute and be at the…