Retiring early is normally pretty simple: Just spend less money than you earn, invest the difference in index funds, and follow the 4% rule. The 4% rule says that once you have at least 25× your annual expenses invested, you can withdraw enough money to…
At age 29, we quit our jobs with a paid-off home, a reasonably well-stocked investment portfolio, and no plans to work full-time ever again. As financially independent early retirees, we’ve been praised for our prowess with money. But in truth, the decision to retire early…
When we tell people that we took six months off work for our honeymoon in Hawaii, or that we spent seven months on the road visiting every National Park in the US, or that we later retired early at age 29, we often receive an…
We’ve been blogging about saving and investing money for nearly three years now, and somehow we’ve never actually shared what’s inside our own portfolio. Oops! I guess the main reason is that it’s really nothing special. We don’t have any super secret investments that helped…
At the beginning of 2015, I was a public school teacher, Lauren was doing marketing for a small financial company near Orlando, and we were both getting a little bored with working 8+ hours a day for ~$40k/yr. Luckily, we had a plan to fix…
The US stock market grew 25.7% in 2021, causing a lot of personal finance influencers to show off their investment gains. They posted about passive six-figure growth over 6-month periods and preached about the power of investing. The same was true for us, actually…Investing is…
In his early twenties, Jeremy Schneider founded RentLinx, a website that helps landlords list their properties for rent on multiple platforms simultaneously. At age 34, he sold that business for millions of dollars, invested the proceeds into stock and bond market index funds, and retired…
“Pay yourself first” is popular wisdom in the world of personal finance. The idea is simple: Every time you make money, you must save (or invest) a fixed amount of that income before doing anything else. Then, you can spend the rest however you like,…
It’s time to come clean: We’ve done a lot of unnecessary spending in the past year. It started last August, when we moved out of our perfectly good, paid-off condo in Gainesville, Florida, and bought ourselves a fancy beach home for $204,000 instead. Sure, we…
Today marks the two-year anniversary of our first blog post here, and it’s been both a lot of fun and a lot of work. Our goal in starting this website was simple: to share the knowledge that changed our lives for the better — for…
Whenever we travel, we’re always meeting lots of cool new people we can learn from and make friends with. They all have unique perspectives and different things to share. But usually, the start of each conversation is the same: Them: Where are you two from?Us:…
I'm happy to share a nugget of success with you today: This little blog is now getting enough traffic that credit card companies have started to take an interest in us. We recently had a call with one, and the prospects of turning this site…
We kinda hate tracking our spending. I know it’s a sin among personal finance bloggers, but on the 8-year path to accumulating our savings, we never tracked our expenses much at all. Once we learned that money can buy freedom rather than material things, our…
By writing a series of blog posts about personal finance and stock market investing intended for his daughter, JL Collins (somewhat by accident) reached an international audience of millions. Now, in the world of financial independence and early retirement (FIRE), few authors are as well-respected…
“Early retirement?! In this economy? You must be insane! Interest rates are near 0%. The stock market has seen some of the quickest drops ever recently. Unemployment is through the roof. People are living longer than ever. Social Security is doomed. And you think your…
In January of 2016, we were headed back home from the high of a 6-month honeymoon in Hawaii. Ready to buckle down and get full-time jobs again, we figured it’d be a good idea to buy a house, so at ages 25 (me) and 26…
Life is ever-changing. We’ve always engineered our living expenses to be ultra-low, and when you combine super low expenses with full-time, middle-class jobs, an explosion of wealth is inevitable. But as we close in on the finish line of financial independence, spending large amounts of…
We’re a bit extreme about saving money around here. In fact, we recommend saving so much money that you never have to work a job again if you don’t want to, preferably as early in life as possible. This is usually achieved by optimizing your…
In the three years following graduation in 2012, Lauren and I extended what you might call our “college lifestyle” into young adulthood -- skipping cable TV, sharing one car, riding bicycles instead of driving, strategically living in one-bedroom apartments in mostly low-cost-of-living areas, getting our…
