Spending the last seven months away has given me time to reflect on my career: What did I like? What didn’t I enjoy? When did the next rug of the ladder go from a consuming desire to something I'm not interested in? When did financial independence and retiring early come into my mind? The biggest question I've thought about though is at what point did I give up my goal of corporate advancement and no longer wanted my boss's job?…
Considering how much money we needed to retire early was a debate that stirred inside me since 2013, the year I discovered Mr. Money Mustache and the early retirement budget based on having $600,000 plus a paid off house. We achieved this number sometime between 2014 and 2015 depending on the housing requirement, but I continued to work for an additional four years. One of the biggest unknowns was how much money would we spend in early retirement? Where did…
Job Spotter is an application from Indeed.com that lets you earn Amazon gift credit for taking pictures of hiring signs. This has been a fairly simple way for us to make an extra $20 - $40/mo without much effort by taking pictures of hiring signs at businesses you frequent or may walk past. What Is the App and How Do I Use It? Job Spotter is an app from Indeed.com, a recruiting and hiring service. Indeed sells their recruiting and…
Dividend income is part of our early retirement plan income and this report includes dividends received across both our regular and tax advantaged accounts. October is traditionally a slow dividend month coming off a much larger September but there was still some news in the portfolio and dividend payments received. Lets see what happened for the month: Related: Disclosures Total Dividends Paid in October: $1,397 Monthly Dividend Payers: Entertainment Properties Trust and Stag Industrial. These are two real estate investment…
This post may contain affiliate links. Please see Disclosures October has been a great month for content around the web. Shamelessly I'll start by mentioning a podcast appearance from yours truly on the What's Up Next Podcast: https://diversefi.com/2019/10/21/whats-up-next-podcast-episode-59/ We spent some time on the question of is financial independence for everyone? I don’t think that really matters. The principals of financial independence can be for anyone. One of the fellow panelists reminded us of this in the discussion and wrote…
Our household shares a contentious relationship with residential housing. We moved a number of times for work and twice bought more house than we needed, leading to some painful losses in real estate due to poor decisions and the market cycle. At the time of this writing, we are currently renting and thinking through if/when we should buy our next home. In previous posts about housing, I've shared: Home Ownership Cost Us $60,000 In a Great Housing MarketHow Rental Value…
October 19th marked six months into the adventure of walking out of the only professional employer I've known with the declaration of early retirement. What has this looked like since I left work? The "Vacation" Part Only Feels Like The Last Three Months The first three months of the early retirement adventure was busy, outside of a trip to Moab, the time was focused on managing our home sale process and finding a new place to live, then packing up…
Dividend stocks are part of our early retirement plan. I've owned a number of dividend paying stocks for years and I'll have the opportunity to harvest some gains accumulated next year thanks to capital gain harvesting. Today I want to explore one of my largest holdings that I need to make a decision on next year: Cracker Barrel. Do I immediately buy back the same stock or invest in that same stock? Should I sell it and invest in something…
October 9th marked the two year anniversary of Stop Ironing Shirts. This site was founded after I lurked in the financial community for years, posting on the Clark Howard message boards for years then eventually finding my way over to the MMM forums. In early 2017 I started discovering the number and diversity of financial independence blogs out there - This plus a little help from early interviews on the ChooseFI podcast sent me diving into content consumption. Health circumstances…
The third quarter was an eventful past three months for the Shirts retirement portfolio. I was able to extract my old 401k into Fidelity and slowly deploy the funds over the duration of the quarter. This allowed me to purchase a number of individual stocks, get our cash/bond target allocation right, and learn all about investing in US Treasury Bonds. We have been following the Equity Glide Path for our stock/bond allocation to reduce sequence of return risk and ended…