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Hacking Your Honeymoon
I think travel is one of the number one things that people miss out on because there is a misconstrued idea that traveling is expensive. Check out our article to see how we hacked our honeymoon and saved money on travel.
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Retire In The Mediterranean
Leaving our jobs to move abroad has to be one of the worst kept secrets in the world. We’ve all but sent out emails to our respective employers about the change we are about to make. Adventure and travel are much higher rungs on our ladder than climbing our way up the corporate ranks. Geoarbitrage is a natural step up in this thought progression. (How many ladder metaphors do you think I can fit in one paragraph?). Anyway, we are going to break down our costs to retire in the Mediterranean. Geoarbitrage Geoarbitrage is a fancy word for taking advantage of lower cost of living areas. It is also a…
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27 Life Lessons, Mistakes, and Realizations
Last week was my 27th birthday. So, I racked my brain to come up with a list of 27 things I have learned, try to live by, or have come to realize throughout my 27 years on planet Earth.
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How to Put Lipstick on a Pig
What in the hell is ‘putting lipstick on a pig’? In the real estate world, this is an endearing term of dressing up a relatively shitty rental, or even personal home. Our ‘pigs’ usually have good bones, and are in good locations, but aren’t very easy on the eyes. This perfectly describes one of our duplexes. We will dive in and discuss the background of the property, first. Then, the ‘lipstick’ that we put on this pig. Finally, we will breakdown the financial result of our efforts. Background A few weeks ago, Emily and I listed one side of a duplex that had recently become vacant. To give you an…
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4 Ways To Get Started In Real Estate
As you all know, we are a little obsessed with real estate. In our opinion, it is one of the ‘easiest’ ways to reach financial independence in the shortest amount of time. Since we are still fairly young, we obviously don’t want to spend what are potentially the best years of our lives working on or for something we aren’t 100% passionate about. We are using our able bodies and minds to save and invest in real estate now so we can use that as our means of living in the future while our minds and bodies can work on other enjoyable tasks. If you would have asked me 4…
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The Four Cardinal Sins of Finance
What’s the worst financial decision you’ve made? The Financial Independence journey is a spectrum and everyone falls somewhere on that spectrum, even if they don’t know about financial independence, or aren’t actively pursuing it. With that in mind, there no choices or mistakes that can not be undone with time, focus, money, or some combination of the three. We’ve made some mistakes of our own, and even a couple that are listed below. However, if you want to achieve FI or give yourself as much of a buffer of passive income, emergency fund, or even a mortgage free house as you can, you will do well to avoid making any…
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Taxes: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
One of my worst traits is procrastination. Ever since high school, I have had a tendency to put important things off until the last-minute. I thought maybe I could grow out of it, but lo and behold, as an adult, I find myself doing the exact same thing. However, being an adult, some things that don’t get done by a certain deadline can have serious consequences…like taxes. As everyone knows, yesterday was tax day. April 15 is a date James and I knew about and used that as our deadline to get our taxes done. So, of course, we just put them off until the last…possible…minute. It seems like we…
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Fitness vs Financial Independence
There are always, and will always, be similarities between getting physically healthy and getting financially healthy. To be effective long term, both require discipline, delayed gratification, and sometimes a long slow journey to the goal. However, while they can be very similar, at times they can also seem at complete odds of one another. If fitness and FI are so closely related, then why aren’t many more people on this journey, or already at their goal. Let’s take a look at Mr. Money Mustache, arguably the biggest, most well-known name in the FI world, he has a whopping 111k likes on Facebook. Admittedly, all those people probably aren’t on the…
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How To Get Your Spouse On Board With FI
I was reluctant to the idea of FIRE because I was fairly content in my ways of shopping, spending money, and having a nice car and expensive home.
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From Janitor to Regional Manager: My 5 Year Career Path
College was never really my thing. Unfortunately, high school was incredibly easy for me and it did little to prepare me for higher education. My college experience could be summed up by a couple of years of taking bullshit classes. In less than two years, I had three different majors, and I still genuinely didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. I suppose that I was lucky that my family was incredibly poor because Pell grants covered my tuition at the local community college. Part-time retail jobs gave me some spending money through college, and I spent every dime that came in. Once I realized how much…
Real Estate Investing | Travel | Financial Freedom
