$51000 a Year is How Much an Hour? Good Salary to Live On?
51k salary is a solid hourly wage when you think about it. At least it was before 2022. When you get your…
Read More… $51000 a Year is How Much an Hour? Good Salary to Live On?
51k salary is a solid hourly wage when you think about it. At least it was before 2022. When you get your…
Read More… $51000 a Year is How Much an Hour? Good Salary to Live On?
Recently, I had a long discussion with an old friend on the subject of home ownership. Basically, his core idea is this: You should never own a home that you yourself live in. You might want to own a house as an investment and rent it out to others to earn income. You might even […]
The post Does it Make Sense To Never Own a Home? appeared first on The Simple Dollar.
Today, I’m pleased to present a guest article from one of my favorite money bloggers of all time: Jacob Lund Fisker. Fisker founded Early Retirement Extreme in 2007. It quickly became an influential voice for the nascent FIRE movement. In fact, I think it’s fair to say that FIRE wouldn’t be what it is today with his work.
Fisker retired from blogging in 2011. Since then, he and I have exchanged long emails on sometimes arcane subjects. Occasionally I ask him for advice. Recently, I asked him if he’d be willing to update people on where he’s been and what he’s been doing for the past decade. He agreed.
Here, then, is Fisker’s story of life after Early Retirement Extreme (and extreme early retirement). Be warned: His story is not short.
Starting in 2007 (and largely finishing by 2011), I formalized a philosophical alternative to consumerism in the form of a 1000+ post blog and 100,000+ word book [J.D.’s review], which I mistakenly called “Early Retirement Extreme” (or ERE in acronym form). These days, I stick to the acronym form. 😛
Central to my philosophy was the renaissance ideal of spending your life mastering a productive level of competence in a broad range of subjects. This arsenal of “renaissance skills” would then be combined into a mutually reinforcing web-of-goals, which made living more interesting and balanced — but also more cost- and resource-efficient and resilient in the face of the growing complexities and uncertainties of the 21st century.
Being a theoretical physicist by training (and remaining one in spirit) compelled me to present all of this as a theory of everything, rather than the more typical format of a light non-fiction autobiography or overview. As I didn’t really figure on a general audience — it was fairly non-existent back in 2008 — that also meant using graphs and equations when applicable.
The benefit of that format was that others could use the ERE design principles to construct their own particular plan according to their own individual circumstances and goals instead of retracing the footsteps of one particular individual.
Eventually, I considered the problem of “How to escape the earn-buy cycle in order to live a more interesting life” solved and sufficiently “communicated”. In 2011, I stopped blogging. I continued to follow the ERE principles in the spirit of the renaissance ideal with the goal of solving other big problems. Being financially independent (FI), I no longer require any compensation even if I still appreciate it — if nothing else than just to keep score or divert the lucre towards more useful purposes (e.g. supporting people on Kiva or Patreon).
Career workers who don’t know me typically ask me what I do for a living, expecting an answer in the form of a job title. (That tends to get awkward and I still don’t have a clever response.)
Similarly, people in the FIRE community (and the media that now covers it since they discovered it a couple of years ago) expect a curriculum vitae in the form of instagram-friendly bucket-list of accomplishments. However, following the systems-based web-of-goals approach, it’s really hard to answer that in a way that satisfies linear formats.
I follow many different leads and do many different things — often concurrently — and sometimes in ways where they combine and result in new, unexpected opportunities (the serendipity effect). It’s therefore difficult to summarize the last ten years of my life in chronological order, so let me instead attempt it as a “skill” or activity-based resume in no particular order.
This format makes more sense since the ERE strategy is to learn something and add value to the process and its environment, a side-effect of which is that I usually don’t have to pay to solve problems and that I sometimes get paid. As a consequence, my spending also remains ridiculously low. (I’ll get to that near the end of this article.)
I apologize that this is long and boring, but ten years is a long time and one can get a lot done in ten years — not all of which might be as interesting to the reader as it is or was to me. So, for the sake of completeness and in no particular order, and perhaps with the hope that I don’t have to write another autobiography for the next ten years, here’s a first-hand answer to the question: “Whatever happened to Jacob Lund Fisker?”
Avoid these blunders if you want to have a comfortable retirement.
In this episode, Sean Pyles and Liz Weston talk about what would-be home buyers and sellers should think about this year.
You’ve probably heard the saying that you shouldn’t buy the best house on the block. But everyone’s always looking for a deal, and in a fast-moving housing market, buyers especially are looking for a ‘diamond in the rough’: a good home in a not-so-good neighbourhood that they can buy for a steal and then sit […]
The post How to Spot an Up-and-Coming Neighbourhood appeared first on Zoocasa Blog.
Today’s mortgage and refinance rates Average mortgage rates fell significantly last Friday. That was fantastic news because it brought those rates for a conventional, 30-year, fixed-rate mortgage closer to 6% […]
It might only be nearing the end of November, but if you look around you, you won’t be surprised to see that the tradition of Christmas decorating is in full swing for a lot of people. Of course, shopping centers and public places are always the first, but more and more people are decorating their […]
The post Be the Envy of Your Friends this Holiday Season with These Top Christmas Decorating Tips appeared first on Fancy Pants Homes.