I really enjoy blogging about our progress towards early retirement, and we’ve said before that interacting with people who read our stuff is the highlight.

But there is one area that irks me when it comes to responding to some people.

It’s not when people question why we do things in a certain way. Those are valid questions for them to understand our actions. They’re even questions that are worth it for us to think about as a truth test of our plans. Why don’t you do X instead of Y? Etc, etc.

Rather, what gets me is when people…

When it comes to writing for the blog, we have some quick-reaction posts that get written and posted within a few days. But we also have a list of blog ideas in the pipeline that we work through and add too.

They can sometimes take months to see the light.

A while ago I looked at our portfolio and had a story idea, and wanted to add it to the list. I wrote down a really basic note to illustrate what I wanted to convey and build an article around. It just said:

“When investments take on a life of…

One day I opened up my internet browser and was met with this incredible scene:

Ellie and I have done something either incredibly stupid, insanely brilliant — but more likely something in between.

We’ve previously banged-on about how we paid off our home loan, and have mentioned in passing that we kept the home loan active in the background as a line of credit, just in case.

Well, we’ve just pushed the red button on that home loan, and we’ve tried our hands at debt recycling. Essentially we’re now $80,000 in debt to buy shares.

Yikes. Not sure if I ever thought I’d see myself writing that, but that’s the world we’re living in.

So…

In a lot of ways I feel rather disengaged at work, and it’s been building up over time. I don’t think any one thing is really to blame. Rather, I think it’s a plethora of factors all culminating.

My work can be challenging at times, but for the most part it isn’t too difficult. Sadly, the challenges are less about pushing myself intellectually or creatively, and more about difficult people wanting silly things. I suppose you could say that it’s just fundamentally uninteresting.

If I sound like a privileged prat, I get that. I am grateful that I have a…

Unless you’re earning money absolutely hand over fist, the rest of us have to go without something(s) to achieve financial goals. Whether it’s wanting to buy a new TV, afford a holiday, or investing for early retirement, you need to set aside money and save.

You prioritise one thing over another.

Naturally, the bigger the goal, the more money you need to save and the longer it takes.

Even with our recently revised early retirement date, which cut three years until the time we retire, my working career will have lasted some 20 years.

During all of that time I…

Hi everyone, we hope you’re going well! Hopefully the currently see-sawing markets aren’t making you dizzy.

Something that went great last time was our call out for reader questions for 2021. You submitted some great questions — too great, even. It resulted in some follow-up articles dedicated to a couple of other questions you wrote in.

As a result we thought we’d do it again later in the year, and once again you obliged us with some awesome questions.

So thanks once again to those of you who got in touch and submitted questions to us — it’s greatly appreciated!

…

Before we knew it, we were a quarter of the way through 2021. Now here we are with half the year gone.

At the beginning of the year, you may remember that we set ourselves a combination of ambitious and fairly conservative goals for 2021. With half the year already finished, today’s post talks about our progress and how we’re tracking against those goals.

All in all, we’re pretty happy about things — but not everything is going to plan.

The markets are going pretty okay, care of the Covid-19 vaccine rollout occurring worldwide. In Australia, we’ve had an increasing…