How to Calculate How Much You Need to Retire
It doesn’t matter how old you are; you need to know how much you need to retire. The sooner you understand this, the better equipped you’ll be to plan your financial roadmap. If you plan to retire at age 35, you’d need a hyper-aggressive investment plan. If you plan to retire at 70 and are already 65, you may need to start considering a conservative investment portfolio. Regardless, you need to learn to calculate your retirement number so you can start working towards that goal. Surprisingly, you can calculate this in just a few simple steps. Read on to learn how!
Pros and Cons of Retiring With Debt
When planning for retirement, one of the biggest hurdles you’ll face is deciding whether to retire with or without debt. Debt can be a strong wealth-building tool, but it carries risks you may not want to have in retirement. However, determining its importance will ultimately come down to your risk tolerance and retirement goals. Today, we’ll explore the pros and cons of debt to help you decide if debt is suitable for your retirement.
Year in Review of My 2023 Investments
About 3.5 years ago, I set a goal to reach $10 million by age 40. However, I set this goal when I lived in an expensive city in Silicon Valley, where median home prices exceeded $1 million. In the specific neighborhood I lived in within that city, homes were easily above the $2 million mark! Now that I live in a town with a lower cost of living in the Dallas metro, it would be tempting to lower that goal. However, I still believe reaching $10 million by 40 is attainable. To help accomplish this goal, I compare my investment performance to the S&P 500’s and Nasdaq’s at the end of every year. In this post, I will share my comparisons and see how my investments fared in 2023.
Financial Resolutions with Little Effort but Big Rewards
Happy New Year! I hope your finances had as great a comeback in 2023 as mine did! Now that it’s the start of a new year, you’re probably setting some resolutions for yourself. So be sure to include some financial ones, too. Here are some practical ones that require little effort but reward you handsomely in the long run.
Negotiation Tactics When Buying a Home
In today’s real estate market, you really need to know what you’re doing. Interest rates haven’t been this high in decades, pushing most home buyers to the sidelines. It’s also sidelined sellers since they know fewer people can afford homes with such high interest rates. Often, sellers plan to immediately become buyers once they’ve sold their home since they need a new place to live. In doing so, they’d have to give up their (likely) low interest rate loan when they sell and take on today’s high interest rates when repurchasing. Again, since this is not a desirable outcome for sellers, even fewer people are putting their homes on the market.
That’s all to say that inventory and demand are low, bringing the market to a grinding halt. However, if you’ve been keeping a close eye on your local market this year, the few brave sellers willing to sell their homes have been dropping their list prices quite a lot. So perhaps, if you’re careful, you may actually be in a good position to buy a home now despite today’s high interest rate environment. Read on to find out how!
How To Evaluate Investments
Whenever I talk shop with another investor, I’m often asked how I determine if an investment is a good one. While the answer is very subjective and personal, I evaluate 5 specific things every time I decide to pour money into a new investment. Today, I share what those are with some basic examples.
How My Investments Are Faring in 2023
Near the end of 2022, about 9 months ago, I shared that my net worth had plummeted a whopping $1.7 million! The losses were primarily attributed to a terrible year for stocks, with the Nasdaq down roughly 33% and the S&P down 20%. Going into 2023, I kept my expectations low due to the Fed’s aggressive rate hike plan and stubbornly high inflation. However, this year has proved to be one heck of a turnaround! In this post, I’ll share how much my net worth has recovered and what I’m doing with both stocks and real estate.
Launching a New House Flipping Business In 2023
As a follow up to my post on investing with other people’s money, one way I’ve invested with other people’s money this year is by partnering with another investor. Specifically, at the beginning of this year, I created an entirely new house flipping business with my new business partner. In this post, I will describe how we structured the business, why we decided to structure it that way, and some of the flips we’ve already undertaken!
Life Update As An Early Retiree
2022 was a crazy busy, expensive, and transitional year for my family and me. We moved and settled in twice last year, closed on our brand new home, bought big ticket items, and juggled multiple home improvement projects, all on top of the biggest one of all: adjusting to life as a Texan after living in California all our lives. In this blog post, I’ll touch on all those various aspects of our lives and share how each of them are going for us.
4 Ways To Invest With Other People's Money
Generally, you need to have money to make money. But wouldn’t it be great if you could simply borrow other people’s money to invest? Well, most of the time, you can’t just borrow money out of thin air. Someone who is willing to lend you money wants to have some assurances that you’re going to make good on your promise of paying them back entirely down the road, either in the form of monthly payments, collateral against your assets that they gain ownership of in the event you default on your loan, or both. But as soon as you start accumulating assets, you can start investing with other people’s money!
In this article, I will share 4 ways you can invest with other people’s money! If you don’t have assets to borrow against yet, learn these strategies anyways so you can learn which assets you’ll need to accumulate that are required for the borrowing strategies that are attractive to you.
5 Things That Helped Me Retire Early
When I tell people that I’m retired, they usually assume that I came from money, struck gold from a tech IPO, or that I got lucky throwing my life savings into Tesla or Bitcoin. But none of those are true. To achieve financial independence sooner than most, I think that I simply developed certain habits early in life that put me ahead of the curve.
After reflecting on what I did to retire at age 31, I came up with a list of 5 things that helped me accomplish my goal. Surprisingly, not everything on my list has to do with money, so read on to find out more!
Actions I’m Taking During These Uncertain Times
I can’t believe 6 months have flown by since my last blog post! Life has been absolutely crazy for my family and me, having just retired at the end of last year, moving from California to Texas, selling our California home, moving again from an apartment to our new home, and finally settling in and acclimating to the new area. It was exhausting for me to type out those life events just now! Suffice it to say, I’ve been busy as usual. Blogging takes a surprising amount of time to plan and write out content, and I didn’t want to post something just for the sake of posting.
Anyway, the dust has settled for the most part in my personal life for the time being. However, the world economy has really hit the breaks this year, taking most of us by surprise. With out-of-control inflation coupled with the Fed raising interest rates at break-neck speed, investors like myself have really taken a huge financial hit all of a sudden, scaring me into taking action. Read on to see if you could benefit from doing the same!
How I’ll Spend $2 Million Dollars
After selling my primary residence in California for almost $1 million over asking price, I received over $2 million in cash from the sale. I can’t let that amount of cash just sit around idly; it’s always best to put money to work so it continues to earn more on your behalf. In this blog post, I will share what my plans are for the $2 million. And no. I’m not going to gamble it all away in crypto!
What's A Better Investment: Primary Residence or Stocks?
Normally, a primary residence should not be considered an investment unless you house hack and rent out part of the home while you live in it or you end up selling the home. In the house hacking scenario, your primary residence acts like an investment because renting out a portion of your home could certainly reduce your housing costs. Better yet, if done right, it could even net you a profit!
If you end up selling your primary residence, the home acts like an investment because you will hopefully yield some capital gains after building equity for many years. Plus, selling your primary residence has a nice tax perk where you can exclude up to $250K (single) or $500K (married) of the capital gains from taxes! The latter scenario is what my partner and I recently did when we sold our home in California for nearly $1 million over asking. So how does our primary residence as an investment compare with, say, the stock market? Let’s dive into the numbers today and find out!
Selling My Silicon Valley Home For Nearly $1 Million Over Asking
In 2015, my partner and I bought our first home together in Silicon Valley, California. Our home was zoned for some of the best schools in the country, so the plan was to live in the house at least until our (future) child would finish high school. Never in our dreams did we even think of selling our home just 7 years later and relocating to another state. But plans change and my partner and I are the type of people who know how to pivot when it makes sense. So today, I will share how we sold our home for nearly $1 million over the asking price!
What It's Like Living in Texas as a California Native
Moving from California to Texas was not an easy decision. After all, my entire family is California-native. Nevertheless, after much research and planning, we firmly believe we made the right decision to relocate to Dallas at the end of last year. After living in Dallas for about 2 months now, I wanted to share some of my observations about the area and how it contrasts with California. Many of them were expected, but not everything!
5 Things I’ve Learned From My 1st Month of Retirement
I officially retired in early November of 2021. However, since we moved from Silicon Valley, California to Dallas, Texas in December, most of my time in November and December was spent packing, coordinating with movers for our vehicles and belongings, and actually doing the move right before Christmas. We then unpacked, cleaned, and settled in just 3 days. On Christmas Eve, we finally had time to put up our Christmas tree in our apartment. The rest of the winter break was spent with family at home and doing a little exploring in the new area.
Although I technically retired 3 months ago, I didn’t experience true retirement until the 2nd week of January. In this post, I’ll share my thoughts on how my life has changed, both personally and financially, as an (early) retiree!
2022 Business and Personal Goals
Happy New Year! To kick off every new year, I like to set goals for all aspects of my life, both personal and professional. By publicizing my goals, it helps me stay accountable for the things I set out to accomplish for the year. I also hope that some of my goals inspire you to set some for yourselves, too! Let’s get started.
My 2021 Year-End Review
At the start of 2021, I set out to accomplish some business and personal finance goals for the year. By the middle of the year, I published a review of how those goals were progressing, as well as some of my personal goals (not money-related). Now that we’re at the end of 2021 (crazy how fast it went), I will do one final review of both my money & non-money goals and share how I did!
I Just FIRE’d Myself At 31
When I was studying computer science in college just over 10 years ago, I told my partner that I was going to retire early. They didn’t understand what this meant at the time, nor was I taken seriously. We hadn’t even started working yet, so how could we think about retirement already? Well, fast forward to today, and I have 2 major life updates to share with you all!
First, I have officially quit my corporate career at the age of 31, having worked for just a decade. Second, I’m relocating from Silicon Valley, California to Dallas, Texas, accelerating my FI/RE timeline by nearly a decade! These were some of the hardest decisions I’ve made in my life, but they are ultimately right for me and my family. I’m positive that at least 80% of you have thought of relocating (however fleeting) and are also wondering why I am quitting my corporate career at such a young age, so I will share my thought process and reasoning in this blog post.