Category: Mailbag

I Retired at 33 By Tracking Every Dollar I Spent

Financial Independence, Lifestyle, Mailbag, Personal Finance

“JM”, a new commenter on the blog, left a great comment asking about tracking spending and how that helps you get to Financial Independence.

“Do you track all your monthly spending, no matter how minute? Did this help get you to Financial Independence? And how?”  -JM

The quick answer is yes, I did track all spending down to the dollar while working towards FI. And looking back, tracking everything I spent was pivotal to accelerating my journey to FI.

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Should you retire early if you only have five years to live?

Case Studies, Lifestyle, Mailbag

Every week I receive a handful of questions from Root of Good readers and I try to answer them all, even if it’s a brief response. Last week was no different.  The inquiry I received from “Eric” caught my eye immediately as I scanned through my emails.  Subject: “Scared”.  One word, vague, non-specific.  Hmmm – might be spam?

As it turns out it wasn’t spam at all.  I clicked to open and read further and was intrigued by the brevity of the question with what appeared to be a clear-cut easy answer on the surface but has a lot of layers that need to be peeled back to flesh out a complete response.

Here’s what Eric wrote:

“You’ll probably think I’m crazy but I’m 48 and have incurable cancer and even though I qualify for long term benefits income protection of 6 figures a year I am scared of retiring. I’m scared I’d decline and get depressed with no purpose.”

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Don’t Fall Off The Affordable Care Act Subsidy Cliffs

Financial Independence, Mailbag, Personal Finance

This week I’m dipping into the mailbag to answer some questions from a reader named Don about the Affordable Care Act subsidies and the income limits to watch out for if you don’t want to lose your subsidy or face an unexpected increase in health care costs.

In the past, I talked about the ACA (or “Obamacare”) making early retirement a lot easier where I went over two case studies. One case study was for an older couple approaching traditional retirement age. The second case study was my own situation of a family of five including three children.

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