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September Budget In The Red
I always get excited when budget time rolls around, and I was particularly interested in this month. September is the first full month we have spent in Japan, which is our most expensive location (not counting Guam). If I had been allowed to peek ahead to the result of any one month’s budget before the…
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August Gap Year Budget Review
We have concluded another budget month while slow traveling internationally on our family gap year. I’m excited to crunch the numbers and see how our projections are matching reality. It’s the chance to prove or disprove that this approach of slow travel is sustainable over the long haul. Either way it’s useful data. The month…
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July Gap Year Budget
July is our first full month of travel and is our first chance to see if the financial aspects of this trip are going according to plan. We projected expenses for the places we are traveling using numbeo, but the accuracy of that in practice is a complete unknown to us. Being in Costa Rica…
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Did We Just Achieve FIRE?
Market Runup The US and international stock markets have been on a great run following the lows seen following the tariff announcement. With new record highs I wanted to check in on our progress toward at-home FIRE. At the time we left on our international trip, we were at FIRE for international travel but not…
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The Best Things In Life Are Free
Travel Log: Day 12 (7/9), Costa Rica Today was the undisputed best day so far in Costa Rica, thanks to a completely free activity (aside from a $3 Uber ride). This is exactly the antidote to yesterday’s failures. The place we went to is called “El Salto” or “The Jump”. It’s a small waterfall with…
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Failures and Volleyball
Travel Log: Day 11 (7/8), Costa Rica Failures It was a day of failures and lessons learned. Lesson #1 – We aren’t professional cleaners This lesson kicked off first thing in the morning with an email from our property manager saying the new tenants thought the kitchen and bathrooms weren’t cleaned sufficiently. We put a…
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Travel Vaccination Magic 8 Ball
When you have a list of 27 places that you might travel to, the vaccination plan becomes a project of its own. Reading through CDC recommendations became complicated enough that I had to put together a tracking spreadsheet. It was either that or one of those serial killer tracking bulletin boards with strings and push…
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I’ll Show You Mine (Budget)
With tariffs bringing chaos to the market, this is an entertaining time to take a look at our budget for the upcoming premature FI experiment where we will travel internationally for a full year. I find the budgeting aspect of this interesting because we have different moving parts that we don’t normally deal with in…
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Pulling Out Early: A Premature FIRE Experiment
Are we there yet? We haven’t achieved FIRE as you could guess from the title; at least not where we currently live. If you’re unfamiliar with FIRE there are plenty of good sources of detailed information on that topic. I will only provide some very basic info to set the stage. To put it simply,…
Traveling Toward Fire
A Premature FI Experiment
