Funding the Adventurous Life
Recently, I sent a mini-post to my newsletter subscribers about reclaiming financial independence as a tool for deeper engagement—using it to connect, create, and contribute instead of opting out. Today, I’m reflecting on your feedback.
Continue reading ““I Quit” Is the Wrong Legacy (And Here’s a Better Future)”
We chase financial independence and early retirement, believing these achievements will provide a better life. But what if the pursuit of such goals is actually trapping us?
Continue reading “A Midlife Crisis Without the Sports Car”
David Champion retired early at 53. In his own words, the first five years were “magnificent,” with endless opportunities for climbing and adventure. However, he knows the next five won’t come so easily.
Continue reading “David Champion: The Psychological Challenge Of Early Retirement”
Escaping the grind is wonderful and often needed. But life is long and money scarcity motivates us to do hard things that make life rewarding.
Continue reading “Life Without Money Scarcity Might Just Make You Lazy”
In normal times, rent prices, like most everything else, slowly yet surely increase at about 2-3% per year. This is inflation. But in terms of the housing market, these aren’t normal times. In the pandemic era, as demand surged in supply-restricted markets, both sale and rent prices soared, with year-over-year inflation rates at 30% or more in some markets. To speak generally of the world of pricing, what goes up might come down. So, when I approached our landlord a few weeks back about lowering the price of our rent, she wasn’t so surprised.
Continue reading “Is My Rent Too High?”
For four years I’ve watched something slowly bloom. In my old life, the “before time” you might call it, I moved from task to task. If I wasn’t working, I unknowingly made a practice of turning recreational or hobbyist pursuits into something that, from an outsider’s perspective, looked an awful lot like work. Goals and accolades were everything, and the more quantifiable, the better. But the farther I’ve separated myself from this life in space and time, the more clarity I’ve gained.
Grasping for metaphors, I was tempted to explain this budding awareness as a slowly growing flower. But for perhaps all the wrong reasons, I hesitated to describe my growth and awareness as floral, preferring to drop the metaphor. But I can’t quite shake it, because I have watched something slowly grow. It’s not me that has bloomed–again, all the wrong imagery–but it is the world I could not see then. I could not see the flawed logic buried in the cold and wet earth because I identified with it. It was my life, so I could not reject what protected me. And four years later I’ve watched something slowly take root.
Continue reading “Four Years of Financial Independence: The Slow Growth”
When we make important decisions, we are often not as rational or objective as we’d like to believe. The base rate fallacy is the tendency to misjudge the probability of a situation by not accounting for all relevant information. This cognitive bias affects everything from first impressions to voting preferences to broad market behavior.
Continue reading “The Psychology Behind Poor Investments and Other Important Decisions”I thought these visual-friendly brackets would help in your 2024 planning and 2023 taxes. Bookmark and enjoy!
We’re back to the digital mailbag to answer your questions!
For this week:
When I left my corporate career in early 2020, I didn’t fully understand the ways that I would, in later years, slowly become decoupled and desynchronized from a society that values hustle, status, and self-worth generated to a large degree around our career titles. You’ll read the same thing repeatedly on the internet: Ignore the haters, do your thing.
But when I actually sit down and talk with those who are living a similar nontraditional lifestyle, regardless of their financial position, I find that the tidy internet talking points leave many of us dissatisfied. After all, humans are one of the most social species on the planet. We shouldn’t be surprised by the difficulty in overriding instinct, to go against the grain of what the herd values most. My thinking has evolved dramatically on this subject in recent years, so let’s dig in.
Continue reading “Facing the Rest of the World with a Nontraditional Lifestyle”