In my post, What They Don’t Tell You About About Retiring Overseas, I wrote about how my wife and I are avid travelers. With one of our kids now seemingly living in Europe on a semi-permanent basis it makes a great deal of sense for us to consider buying a home somewhere in Europe to…
Endless PF Debates, Wrong Context
As I mentioned in my post, Do You Have The Right Personal Finance Community, I wrote about how I spend a great deal of time surrounding myself with like minded investment class people and while that has helped me learn and grow it doesn’t come without some aggravations. Those aggravations are in the form of…
Which Investment Broker(s) Do I Use?
Over the course of my career, I’ve collected a cornucopia of brokerage accounts. During that time frame, many of these brokers began buying each other out. For example E-Trade got swallowed up by Morgan Stanley, TD Ameritrade is now Charles Schwab. Fidelity is probably one broker that hasn’t been swallowed up or changed names over…
Why Are You People Buying Bank CDs?
I really don’t get why people buy bank certificate of deposits where there are many different options out there. The Wall Street Journal had an article entitled, “How High-Yield CDs Turn Into 0.05% When You’re Not Looking” and it boils my blood to see how people get cheated but cheating the customer isn’t something new…
The Best Two Debit Cards for International Travel
I just got back from a week long trip to see my son living in Europe and I wrote about my expenditures here but I didn’t go into detail about a significant challenge I had while traveling from city to city there and how I overcame some of my issues. Payment With Credit & Debit…
I Owe Uncle Sam $15,000
With April upon us the tax deadline is looming and I decided to sit down this past weekend to work on our taxes. My go to tool is TurboTax and I have a love/hate relationship with this software but that’s a story for another day. After going through dozens of documents and forms the software…
$1.5 Million To Retire Comfortably?
The Wall Street Journal has an article (paywalled) out stating that the new number to retire comfortably in the United States is $1.46 million. The article didn’t state if that is per individual or couple but do you think that is correct? It Depends Many of these articles are often fairly useless because there are…
Zepbound: My Health Journey – End of March Edition
War! That’s the only way I can describe what happened to me after I finally got my second month of Zepbound. I rotated from taking the shot on Thursdays to Saturdays because of the fiasco that ensued in February. Note: I had intended on posting this at the end of March but I went on…
The Whopping Costs of Vacationing In Europe!
I just got back from spending Easter in Europe and I am shocked at how much inflation has grown there and the whopping costs of living there. Airfare I was lucky enough to find “cheap” airfare to Europe for $760 but it was only because I have an alert on flash sales setup on my…
Inflation At Home 2024
Inflation is like a boa constrictor that slowly squeezes every nickel and dime out of you but lately it feels like a Titanoboa and we must battle it everyday. I got a bit of a shock early this year with the cost of utilities. Both electricity and water went up far beyond what I was…