Money Boss

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Two Great Online Retirement Calculators

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By now you know that I’m picky when it comes to online retirement calculators. Most of them suck. When computing how much to save for retirement, they tend to focus on current income rather than current spending. Plus, many of them have other problems — like arbitrarily deciding that you shouldn’t save more than 40% of your monthly income.

CNN retirement calculator

Last summer, I shared five online retirement calculators that actually provide meaningful results: cFIREsim, FIRECalc 3.0, the early retirement calculator from NetWorthify, the retirement income calculator from T. Rowe Price, and Bankrate’s retirement income calculator.

Since August, I’ve discovered discovered two more tools that I’m happy to recommend. Today I want to share brief reviews of the Personal Capital retirement planner and the retirement planning tool from NewRetirement. Both of them are awesome. [Read more…]

The Joys of a Walkable Neighborhood

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Over the weekend, Kim and I began our hunt for a new home. We spent several hours combing local listings on Zillow and Redfin. We flagged the homes that looked interesting to us. Because I’m a total nerd, I compiled a spreadsheet of our absolute faves, listing important stats like price, home size, lot size, and — perhaps most important of all — walk score.

Househunting Spreadsheet

In the olden days, I picked my homes based on emotion. When my ex-wife and I bought our old farmhouse in 2004, that decision was rushed and irrational. I liked the idea of the place. I liked the large yard (two-thirds of an acre close in to Portland), the hundred-year-old house, and the cute hobbit-hole window in the living room. I didn’t consider the massive amount of lawnmowing and yardwork. And I didn’t pay attention to the fact that I’d have to drive almost anywhere I wanted to go.

A Driver’s Life

When Kris and I moved into that drafty old house, we did a lot of driving. At the time, I was still working for the family box factory. Every morning, I spent half an hour driving twenty miles to work. Every evening, I did the reverse commute. We drove to buy groceries. We drove to visit friends. We drove to go out to dinner. I did go for walks through the neighborhood, but those were leisurely strolls without any particular purpose.

After I chose to become a money boss, I paid closer attention to my transportation costs. I looked for ways to drive less and walk more. At the time, I found that 90% of my driving was to the following locations:

  • The gym, which was 8.5 miles (20 minutes) from home. It took 40 minutes to get there via a 2.5-mile pedestrian trail (which required illegally crossing a railroad bridge). I could bike the 8.5-mile route in 40 minutes.
  • The nearest town, which was three miles (ten minutes of driving) from the house. It took 48 minutes to make the walk and 18 minutes to bike.
  • The grocery store, which was one mile (five minutes driving) from home. Walking took me 15 minutes; biking took me six.
  • Downtown Portland, which was ten miles (20 minutes) from home. Walking took three hours (I timed it once!), but biking took just 45 minutes.

Based on these times and distances, I changed my habits. I still drove to Portland most of the time, and I often drove to the nearby town. But since it took no longer than driving, I started biking to the grocery store. And when I had time — which was almost always — I walked to the gym instead of biking or driving. (Every time I crossed that railroad bridge, I thought of Stand By Me!) [Read more…]

The Year of Opportunity

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Earlier this week, I wrote about the importance of tackling one thing at a time. When you have a long list of goals, it can be tempting to work on all of your objectives at once. This scattershot approach, however, tends be counterproductive. Over the past decade, I’ve learned that I can be much more productive — and happier! — when I exercise the power of focus, prioritizing one goal over all others.

One way this manifests itself in my life is through themed years or months. One month, I might make it a goal to get to the gym every day. Another, my aim might be to never eat alone, to have lunch with a friend or reader whenever possible. And sometimes, I stay focused on a particular goal for an entire year.

Starting next week, I’m going to take “theming” to a micro-level. Using the ideas of Mike Vardy (the Productivityist), I’m going to try using themed days to stay on task. Each week, I’ll have “administrative Monday”, “typing Tuesday”, “thoughtful Thursday”, and so on. I’m not certain getting this granular with theming will be useful for me, but I’m going to try it for a few months.

As a firm believer in being proactive, I’ve always chosen the themes for my years and months. That is, I decide what I’m going to do, and then I do it. I don’t let life decide what my weeks and months are about. At least, that’s been my approach until this year.

This year has been strange. This year, life has handed me opportunity after opportunity. I started January with a direction in mind, but I’ve had to make numerous course corrections as new circumstances arise. So far, 2017 has been the Year of Opportunity. It’s both exciting and scary.

Let me give you some examples. [Read more…]

The Power of Focus: Why You Should Tackle One Thing at a Time

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I used to be the sort of guy who loved to have a list of goals. At least once a year — usually around New Year — I’d sit down and make a list of all the things that were wrong with me, all of the things I wanted to change.

In 2007, for instance, I made a list of 101 things I wanted to accomplish in 1001 days. (It took me longer than three years to finish that list, by the way. In fact, I still haven’t done everything on it because my priorities have changed. But now, ten years later, I see that I have completed nearly all of the ones that still matter.)

Eventually I realized that making a long lists of resolutions is a sure path to disappointment — at least for me. There’s a reason you see newspaper and TV stories every spring about how most people aren’t able to maintain the resolutions they set at the first of the year. It’s because most of us try to do too much. (And, I think, because we try to set goals that aren’t truly aligned with our primary purpose in life.)

Nowadays, I do something different, something that’s actually proven to be successful. Instead of trying to change many things at once, I’ve learned to change only one thing at a time.

One Thing at a Time

In 2010, for instance, I focused on fitness. In fact, I dubbed 2010 “The Year of Fitness”. My aim was to lose fifty pounds. Every decision I made was with that goal in mind. You know what? It worked. Though I didn’t lose fifty pounds that year, I did lose forty. (And I lost the final ten by the middle of 2011.)

[Weight Loss Progress]

I was able to do this because for the entire year, my only goal was to get in shape. I was focused. Nothing else mattered. I didn’t have any other big goals clouding my view or competing for my attention. I set one goal, and I worked hard to meet it.

In 2011, my one goal was to learn Spanish. And I did it. Three times a week, I paid a Spanish tutor for ninety minutes of personal instruction. In my spare time, I watched Spanish movies and listend to Spanish music. I read Spanish books. I consumed Spanish podcasts. Within a year, I’d achieved reasonable fluency in the language. I could carry on converstations in South America, and I could read Spanish-language novels. (Though not all Spanish-language novels.)

In 2012, I tried something a little different. Instead of one big goal for the year, I chose to work on one goal each month. Some examples:

  • In March, I had lunch or dinner with a different friend every day. This let me reconnect with people I’d been missing.
  • In April, I embarked upon my Extreme Dating Project. I’d just been divorced, and my goal was to meet as many women as possible. (April was a fun month! And it led to my current relationship with Kim.)
  • Next, my goal became to make it to the gym every day in May. I didn’t quite succeed — I only worked out 28 out of 31 days — but I came close.
  • My next goal was “no junk in June”. I focused on my diet, which helped me lose five pounds and two percent body fat.

Sometimes I spend a year on any given goal. Sometimes, I spend a month. And sometimes I spend even longer! After Kim and I decided we wanted to take a trip across the United States, for instance, I spent the next eighteen months devoted to that project.

During the first part of 2015, we shopped for and purchased a motorhome, then prepped it for life on the road. We left Portland on 25 March 2015 and spent the next six months exploring the U.S. We paused for six months in Savannah, Georgia, before beginning our homeward journey this time last year. On 29 June 2016, we made it back to Portland. We had a blast — because for those eighteen months, we were committed to one thing and one thing only.

You get the idea. At any given time, I’m concerned with only one major goal. [Read more…]

The Guilt of Wealth

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During my recent trip to Florida for Camp Mustache Southeast, I had an interesting conversation with some of the attendees about the guilt of wealth. About half of the folks at the weekend retreat had already achieved financial independence — they have enough money to support their current lifestyle indefinitely — while the other half were well on their way to that goal. But achieving wealth can have some surprising side effects. Guilt is one of them.

For instance, one woman received an inheritance when her mother died. This woman is young. And she’s smart. She knows she didn’t do anything to actually earn that money, so it weighs heavily on her. Being a good Mustachian (or money boss, if you prefer), she’s not wasting the inheritance. She’s slowly turning that money into more money through careful investing. But that doesn’t stop her from sometimes feeling unworthy.

This guilt doesn’t just affect those who experience windfalls. Even folks who work long and hard to build their nest eggs can suffer from the feeling they don’t deserve the money they have. This is especially true for people who travel. When you explore the world and realize how many advantages you have — not just financially, but in all things — the sadness and sorrow can cut deep.

Deserve's got nothing to do with it

The Guilt of Wealth

“You know, you once wrote about the guilt of wealth at Get Rich Slowly,” noted another Camp Mustache attendee.

“Did I?” I said. “I don’t remember. But it doesn’t surprise me. It’s something I think about all of the time.”

In that seven-year-old Get Rich Slowly article, I shared two examples of folks who built wealth without windfalls.

  • One of my friends was raised way below poverty level, for instance, but he’s worked hard to obtain an education, build a career, and he now owns a couple of businesses. It was never his aim, but he has become wealthy. He’s proud of his accomplishments — justifiably so — but he also feels guilty. He’s embarrassed by some of the stuff he has, and he worries that his kids will grow up to take for granted those things he views as blessings.
  • Or there’s my former neighbor, my real millionaire next door. He’s a retired junior-high shop teacher who lived frugally and invested wisely. He built an enormous nest egg. When my neighbor retired, one of the first things he did was buy a boat — something he’d always wanted. At first, however, he was embarrassed by the size of the boat; it was so much bigger than most of the others he saw. “I was worried what other people thought of me,” he said.

Both my friend and my neighbor are generous. They contribute time and money to their friends, family, and community. They’ve built wealth through hard work, and can afford the indulgences they allow themselves. Yet they both feel some degree of guilt over the things they have — as if they don’t deserve them. [Read more…]