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Some Early Thoughts on COVID-19

Just a few short months ago, I wrote an entire post contemplating concerns about the next recession, and if I was going to be mentally and emotionally prepared to handle it when it inevitably happened. Little did I know I would be tested just a matter of weeks later, as the market declined by about 33% from it’s peak. Don’t Panic Thus far, I’ve done exactly the same things I’ve been doing the past many years… investing as much money as possible into exactly the same portfolio.

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Thinking in Layers 🍰: Emergency Funds FTW

No matter how much we try to plan for the future, life is always guaranteed to throw some curveballs our way. Many of these curveballs can cause us to need to come up with money rapidly. This is why having cash available with little notice is so absolutely vital. I previously discussed reasons why an emergency fund is so important. This article is about how I think about funding any potential emergencies that come my way.

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💵 Cash is King 👑: Why I Like (and Potentially Hoard) Cash

At some level, I think everyone knows how important having cash on hand is. It helps pay the bills. Your mortgage. A bite out to eat. A new pair of pants. Obviously, you can use credit cards to pay for all of these expenses, but without the cash to pay your credit card bills off in full at statement close, you’ll end up trading in your burgers and jeans for debt (or to think of it another way, those fifty dollar jeans might end up costing a whole lot more than fifty bucks).

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The Best of Intentions: Why I Worry About The Realities of the Next Recession (For Myself) 😟

Flash back to 2009. Barack Obama had just become President of the United States, in part because he seemed like the best person to deal with a crushing recession that saw the loss of 8.7 million U.S. jobs. It was an incredibly scary time for many Americans: a loss of income, homes, and for some the dignity of working an honest day’s labor. For me, it was just a year after I graduated from college.

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🤔 What's FI? Defining Financial Independence

Since this blog is exploring my journey to financial independence, it seems reasonable to explore exactly what financial independence means, both in general terms, and also more specifically to me. At the most basic level, financial independence is having enough assets saved that they can sustain you for the remainder of your life. The assets can come in different flavors (stocks, bonds, real estate, cash, or really anything that has a significant value) and the ways in which those assets are tapped to pay for your independence are also varied (stock dividends, real estate rental income, actually selling things off).

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🏦 My Investment Portfolio: 2020 Edition

Overview of my investment portfolio in early 2020.

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📌 An Introduction

Moments before I started writing this, I finished another set of runs on FIREcalc, a web app that runs a series of simulations to estimate the likelihood that a particular amount of savings and spending will last for a set number of years in retirement. It’s one of about a billion different retirement calculators that can be found all over the internet. I’ve experimented with many of these, plugging in different saving and earning rates, watching graphs of theoretical funds blast off to the stratosphere or crash and burn like a plane that’s run out of fuel.