Browse Month: February 2018

What the Media and Academics Don’t Understand About FIRE

FIRELast month, Stanford University Professor John B. Shoven, and three former Stanford students, Gila Bronshtein, Jason Scott, and Sita N. Slavov, published a paper entitled “The Power Of Working Longer” through the National Bureau Of Economic Research.

One of their key findings was “that working 3 to 6 extra months has an equivalent impact on the affordable sustainable standard of living as saving one percentage point more for 30 years.”

Their “primary conclusion is that working longer is relatively powerful compared to saving more for most people.”

The media jumped upon their research, with Bloomberg View columnist Justin Fox gushing that a 49 year old “could take the drastic step of upping your retirement savings by 10 percent of your salary. Or you could achieve the same result by retiring two years and five months later than you had been planning to.”

Which left me shaking my head.

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Our Solar Energy Bank Goes Bust

Early Retirement
Any guess which panels are producing lots of energy and which panels aren’t producing much at all?

Our solar energy bank finally went bust in January.

Since we didn’t have solar panels installed until last June, we knew our first winter with solar energy would likely be our most expensive. We missed out on several months of strong sunlight last spring that would have allowed us to build up more solar energy credits heading into the winter.

We tapped into the credits we built up last summer to keep our electric bills at minimal levels in November and December, but we finally drew our balance down to zero last month. Short and dark days, and lots of ice and snow, kept our panels from producing much electricity from late December through late January. Our solar energy production for the past month was less than 10% of what we produced in August. Continue Reading

An Unexpected Raise!

Financial IndependenceI’ve intentionally tried to keep Retiring On My Terms a politics-free zone.

There are some political issues I care deeply about and others that matter less to my family and I.

I’ve found when discussing U.S. politics, unless you surround yourself only with people who think exactly the same way you do, roughly half of the people will agree with you, and roughly half of the people will disagree with you – and in some cases, think you are ignorant, nuts, or evil!

So I do my best to avoid going down that path at all here.

That said, what happens in Washington D.C. impacts our family on a daily basis, and recent developments have been positive for the ROMT family’s finances!

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