Have you ever been part of a group where you did not know anyone? Maybe a tour group in another country or a project team at work or in a volunteer organization? One of the ways facilitators try to form some cohesion in situations like that is to ask everyone to introduce themselves and to …
If I had to rate my financial performance across my considerable span of years lived, I would, so modestly, give myself an A. Realizing of course that it’s not that different from high school where I was one of the smartest kids, and was able to pull A grades without studying. So giving myself a …
It was quite the week. The last seven days we put over 2,000 miles on the car, traveled through seven states, hiked many miles of mountain trails, rented a VRBO with a pool that we shared with some of our grown kids, rented a side by side ATV and did some serious off roading, had …
If you’re an occasional reader of my blog you may remember I had some fairly dicey surgery about a year ago. Fortunately I found a world class surgeon who was able to make some internal repairs that my local doctors said were impossible, and a life threatening situation was completely, and hopefully permanently, corrected. At …
I have always maintained that the success I’ve had in my career, my retirement, my marriage and family has been largely the result of good fortune and not due to any hard work on my part. Because I’m not really good at hard work. In other words, I’m lazy. Yet I’ve done fairly well at …
I hate to even take up the space to define this, I suspect you know the drill as well as I do. Numerous studies (Trinity, Bengen, etc.) determined that if you take the invested assets in a diversified portfolio you can withdraw 4% of the total value your first year of retirement. Each year after …
My wife and I were married 44 years ago today. She is just as amazing and patient today as she was when we were dating in college. Neither of us had any money when we graduated. I was debt free, except for my car loan on a very used oil drinking Toyota Celica. She had …
The company I spent nearly 40 years working for is having their 100th anniversary party this month. Five different entities have owned the corporation over the years, alternating between private ownership and Fortune 500 companies, and I was privileged to work for three of those during my tenure. I started as a summer intern and …
This is a risky post. Risky because I’m going to violate one of my own rules of blogging. Don’t write about something you haven’t experienced because if you haven’t lived it, you probably don’t understand it. Grandkids fit into that category for me. While my wife and I have three great grown kids, two married …
My wife and I enjoy National Parks. Particularly the remote and uncrowded ones like Big Bend in Texas, which we visited last month. We are hikers and most of the parks have extensive hiking trail systems. We love experiencing the varied terrain and flora and fauna in quiet settings and if you stick with trails …
My wife and I love to hike and love places that you can explore on your feet. This last week we drove and hiked a park we had never been to but that had long been on our list of things to do, Big Bend National Park. The first thing to understand about Big Bend is that …
When I was a full time worker my life was constrained by what was happening with the company. Whether it was winter or summer my biggest concerns were the same. How was the billion dollar manufacturing facility I managed performing? What were our profit margins? Were we on budget? Were we keeping all seven hundred of our people safe …
If you’ve read my posts you know I have been retired a lot longer than one month. In fact I’ve been retired six years. One thing this gives me is a kind of perspective many of you do not yet have, because you have never experienced retirement. I remember six years ago being very uncertain about entering this …
I’m a mentor on the Millionaire Money Mentor's forum and we were discussing a post by adimesaved that had some very interesting takes on millionaires. In fact there were 16 of them and four in particular caught my eye. These are all characteristics that Chris Hogan, formerly of the Ramsey clan, and Tom Corely, the uber …
For my entire adult life I never saw the value in having a vacation getaway house on the lake or a cabin in the woods. It seemed impractical to maintain two places and would tie you down to just mostly going there when we like going everywhere. Some of my friends have multiple homes or apartments and …
Work is funny. Not fun, but odd and weird and strange. This epiphany came to me just minutes ago after I got off of a phone conversation with an urban planner at an engineering company. But first let me place this in context. I stopped working a meaningful number of hours a week nearly six …
Do you ever tell yourself that you really need to do something yet find months passing and you have taken zero steps to accomplish it? Guilty here. But this week I finally did knock something out that had been on my mind for a while. I bought I bonds from the US government. And it …
Pride is one of the seven deadly sins. Yet low self esteem is considered to be closely linked to forms of mental illness. It is a classic yin and yang paradox. You want to be proud of yourself, you want others to be proud of you, yet you do not want to be arrogant or narcissistic. You do not …
I wrote about serendipity regarding a volunteer project I’m doing and wouldn’t you know it has just happpened again. ESI Money announced a contest to give away $500 via his readers. He sent the “winners” (with the best stories related to what they’d do with the money) each a $50 gift card. But it isn’t for the …
Webster defines serendipity as “Luck that takes the form of finding valuable or pleasant things that are not looked for.” I’ve had that on two occasions on morning runs when I found ten dollars laying on the sidewalk. When, a year or two after my dad’s death I decided to do a lost money search on our …