Retirement Planning Topics
The Biggest Financial Surprise in Retirement that I did not Expect before Retirement
One reader recently asked a question, “What was the biggest financial surprise in retirement?” You might guess that my answer might be the high costs of health care. But I had done a lot of research concerning health insurance before I retired, so I knew all the options and costs associated with this expense.
Answers to Some Early Retirement Questions, Part II
A couple other questions I received about early retirement were: How much does one need to save each year to retire early? How did my wife and I know we could live on what we had saved?
Answers to Some Early Retirement Questions
I know this will cause much misery (I say with sarcasm), but I am going to start winding down this blog. After all, if retirement planning is truly simple, then there is no need to keep writing a blog about it until the end of time. However, for those of you who are interested or […]
Retiring Early – Our Story
This post is about how my wife and I managed to retire about ten years earlier than the typical retirement age of 65. Some of the things we did will seem inconceivable to some readers, but the choices people make early in their working lives ultimately determine when they will be able to retire. Perhaps […]
Should I Retire Early?
I have not addressed the subject of early retirement in this blog as I feel it is important for people to first and foremost understand and implement the basics of retirement planning. But over the course of writing this blog I have had more than a few people subtlety enquire as to how it is […]
The Low-Risk Anomaly
I ran across an interesting article this week that was published in early 2011 in the Financial Analysts Journal (FAJ). The article is an academic study on the long term returns of investing in high-risk versus low-risk stocks. The study was conducted by three professors of finance/economics who are also asset managers. If you have […]
Recency Bias
Recency bias is not a term you often hear in the investment world, but I have read about it and seen other people experience this thought process when it comes to investing in the markets. I believe recency bias is one of the causes of why so many people sabotage their investments by “buying high […]
A Tool to Help Monitor Your Investments
If you are like me, after years of working and saving money, you have several retirement related accounts spread around different financial institutions. In this post I will introduce you to a free online software tool that can help make monitoring your investments much easier.
Why Did We sell Our home? (Part 2)
This post is a follow-up to my last post on why we sold our home. In that post I discussed the opportunity to sell our home at a premium price and, despite the fact we loved our home, we concluded that selling our home would better enable my wife and me to change our lifestyle […]
Why Did We Sell Our Home?
In my last post I mentioned that my wife and I recently sold our primary residence. This action would appear to be in direct conflict to the statement I made in my last post concerning real estate. I stated that real estate is at the best value it has been in over a decade and […]
