Hello, thank you for visiting.
As I was setting up this blog, I told my wife I had gotten the domain ‘andhereigo.com’, to which her response was, go where. I suppose I should explain that.
I am currently working towards FIRE (Financially Independent Retire Early). I began by following other blogs and decided that the pressures of work were no longer worth it. Hence, I made the decision that I would retire well before my 65, or whatever the appropriate retirement age is now.
This is something I had wanted to do since my 20’s, where as I would work until I was in my mid 40’s build up a significant nest egg for me to live off the cap gains, and spend the rest of my life on a beach or far off country somewhere, or something like that. Then, life got in the way. I’m 46 now and probably only about half way to where I would like to be in terms of early retirement.
I don’t regret the decisions that put me here now. Back in my 20’s I believed if I simply had 300k in savings that would be sufficient to live off the gains. Some of the other FIRE participants have in fact done that with amounts around that using location based arbitrage. This was also assuming gains at 10%, so I would be making 30k per year, roughly what I was actually making at that time. However, though that may have worked with my lifestyle in my mid 20’s, it would not be sufficient now. There have also been a couple of market crashes since the late 90’s, so the 10% rule was never really realistic.
Additionally, pre COVID, I loved travel, and saw myself spending a large chunk of my time doing that in my post retirement life. That being said, 30k a year does not buy you a large travel budget. If I were to use the 4% rule , that would leave me with 12k per year to play with. Besides having to relocate to an ultra low cost location, I would likely be stuck there since I wouldn’t be able to afford to travel anywhere else.
Since then I have switched jobs several times, got married, divorced, changed cities, and got remarried. It seemed for a while that switching jobs and moving from Chicago to Seattle would in fact keep me content to working until my 65th birthday, doing away with an early retirement entirely. However, perhaps as a result of getting older, or a result of hitting what I at one point would be my mid forties retirement, I am again wanting the early retirement that I wanted in my 20’s, perhaps now being a bit more realistic about it.
The 300k number that I had in my twenties is now $1.5MM. Using the 4% rule that would give me 60k per year to work with post retirement. This would be sufficient for me to retire in the US, even accounting for its health care system, yet alone use location based arbitrage and retire in Portugal, my current goal, with a significantly lower cost of living.
This is a long term goal, by the time I am emotionally ready to pull the trigger on retirement, I will likely be in my mid 50’s. My hope of getting to $1.5MM may be too optimistic, I guess I will find out. Good thing is if things don’t pan out, it’s not the end of the world, I guess I would then be working for another 10 years.
Here I am going to document my journey to get there over the next 9 or so years, as well as other random brain dumps I have.
And here I go..... 