Busiest Time of My Life
As I watch the clock tick to 2:30pm, I hastily leave the office early, dropping what I’m working on to stuff my backpack and hurry home from work. I can’t help but think I’m busier now than any other time in my life. When I was younger, in my twenties and even early thirties, I…
The Journeyman
I had a job walk the other day with some visitors to the project I’m on. As we neared the end of the walk, one of them asked me how long I’d worked for the company. I told him I’d started in 2004, but came up through the trades, becoming a superintendent in 2015. “You…
Correction Mode 2025
Exciting times ahead, I’m heading to Japan in a few short weeks. While I’ve been budgeting carefully, this spring has been an expensive one. I bought the airline tickets back in December for around $4500 roundtrip, and have been sporadically booking and paying for accommodations every few weeks. Since we’re timing vacations with our kids’…
The World of Security
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…
Commuter Traffic Zen and Everlasting Capitalism
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…
Happily Disengaged In 2025
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…
Why I’ve Stopped Caring About FIRE
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…
Stop and Enjoy The Journey to FIRE
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…
Why I’m Submitting to One More Year Syndrome
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.
A Post From The Boring Middle of FIRE
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…