The Sunday Best is a collection of articles I’ve curated from the furthest reaches of the internet for your reading pleasure.

Every week, I scan hundreds of headlines, read dozens of posts, and bring you the best of the best to save you time and mental energy.

Financial Independence (FI) is a primary focus, but it’s an awfully broad topic. I tend to approach FI and early retirement from a fatFIRE perspective and through the lens of a physician, so expect to see those biases in the selected articles.

Related topics that have become recurrent themes include early retirement, selective frugality, tax issues, travel, physician issues, and of course, investing.

For more great articles, take a peek at The Sunday Best Archives. Now let’s get to the best… The Sunday Best!

The Sunday Best

Are you tired of seeing my story in national news publications? I’m not! I did most of the writing for this one, with Ryan Derosseau asking the questions for Forbes. This Anesthesiologist Retired At 43 By Avoiding The Normal Traps That Trip-Up Doctors’ Savings.

This week, I celebrated 44 years of life and 15 wonderful years with my wife. The Physician Philosopher also reached a milestone this week, celebrating his second blogiversary. The Physician Philosopher: 2 Years Later.

A physician can become a blogger. A computer programmer can become a carpenter. An entrepreneur can author a screenplay. Our British friend Alan Donegan teams up with 1500 Days to explore the wonders of Living in a Land of Infinite Possibilities.

Do you know about the nearly infinite opportunities to learn for free from your library? Not just from physical books, ebooks, audiobooks, but also thousands of dollars worth of courses! Route to Retire shares The Biggest Secret the Library Offers to Enrich Your Life.

The Chase Sapphire Preferred Card

The Chase Sapphire Preferred is my top pick for your first rewards card. Welcome bonus of 80,000 points worth at least $1,000 when used to book travel (after a $4,000 spend in 3 mo) and other great perks you can learn abouthere.

The White Coat Investor looks to simplify his investing life by eliminating some asset classes and beefing up others. Which ones got the axe? The New WCI Asset Allocation.

I’ll tell you which class gets a larger percentage. It’s real estate. If you’d like to learn more about real estate investing without spending a dime, Crowdstreet offers a thorough ebook of about 150 pages for free. Learn to Invest like a Commercial Real Estate Professional.

Invest well and before long, you’ll realize this truly awesome inflection point. When Your Portfolio Makes More Money Than You.

The biggest difference between your portfolio making money and you earning money is that the latter is much more heavily taxed. Big ERN, Ph.D. from Early Retirement Now does the math to find out How much can we earn in retirement without paying federal income taxes? It’s more than most would think.

What would happen if all portfolio gains, whether realized or not, were taxed as ordinary income annually? It’s an idea floating around in Congress to target those nasty wealthy people living luxurious lives with their post-tax capital gains. One Frugal Girl knows the pain of being painted in that light. When Rich Feels Like a Dirty Word.

Dirty word or not, wealth for you and your heirs may be a goal, and The White Coat Investor has a number of tips to help you achieve it. Creating a Dynasty: Building Family Wealth Across Generations.

Even wealthy people can have a hard time spending money; frugality is often a primary reason they’ve acccumulated significant wealth. Chris Mamula at Can I Retire Yet digs into this challenging mindset shift. Retirement Mindset Shift: Saver to Spender.

How can one be frugal while still enjoying some of the finest things life has to offer? Be like the Tired Superheroine and Take the High Low Approach to Your Spending.

You may be able to speed up your time to FI by entering some “cheat codes.” What are up down up down left right left right B A Start” equivalents in real life? FI 180 explains The Cheat Codes of FI.

I May Be Cheap, but Scott is Cheaper

Like Chris Mamula, I haven’t quite figured out how to make that transition from saver to spender. That’s OK, though. Just because you have more doesn’t mean you have to spend more. I’m allowed to be Frugal Without a Cause.

This guy Scott happens to be cheaper than me, or at least I imagine him to be. Although he emails me several times a week, I haven’t actually met Scott. He’s the guy that lets me know about cheap flight deals.

We used his tips to book round trip flights to Ecuador for under $400 apiece. He alerted us to flights to Spain at a similar price point. We paid a slight premium to fly out of our little hometown airport, but it was still a great price. My parents are going to visit us while we’re in Spain, flying out of their small town airport for a little over $400 apiece round trip.

When he told me about flights to Paris for under $300 round trip, I forwarded that one to a friend who recently honeymooned there and loved it. Today’s email (as I write this on Friday) shared flights to Rome for under $400 round trip valid for winter, spring, and fall of next year.

If you’re not yet a friend of Scott’s you can sign up for his excellent free emails or subscribe to the premium service that lets you select your home airport(s) and gets you more frequent and timely email alerts. The latter is $49 a year. Signing up through this PoF referral link should get you 10% off.

My Other Friend Scott Made a Movie

I owe Scott Rieckens another beer care package after his Iowa Hawkeyes handed my Golden Gophers its first loss of the season last weekend. They played the better game that day.

Scott may have taken a minute to savor that victory, but he had much bigger things to celebrate last week: the public release of Playing With FIRE, a film he and director Travis Shakespeare have been working on for the last two to three years.

The documentary featuring many of our mutual friends in the personal finance blogosphere is now available online for rent or as a digital download!

Find it here on Amazon or look for it on iTunes or Vimeo.

Sailing the Seven Seas

If you’re more fish than bird and prefer to travel by sea, a man named Tynan has put together a slick and speedy search engine to help you find the best cruise deals. He will also email about once a week with some of the best offers available, and he doesn’t charge a dime.

We used CruiseSheet.com to book a 30-day cruise to Asia and a 15-day cruise back to the states months later. The total cost for 45 days of cruising as a family of four will be right around $10,000 (plus some gratuities (some are included/prepaid) and optional excursions).

The itineraries that make the sheet are typically in the range of $50 to $100 per day (assuming double occupancy) and adding kids to your stateroom costs less. The site is much more user-friendly than anything I’d encountered before.

Check out CruiseSheet — I have no referral code or affiliate link to offer a discount, but the cruises are already discounted plenty! I credit my friends Bob & Amy for turning me on to this site. They are among the many awesome people I’ve met at Camp FI events.

A Recommended Financial Advisor

For those of you who would rather not DIY, I maintain a list of recommended financial advisors. Among the good guys and gals who work frequently with physicians, only the lowest cost, fee-only fiduciary advisors were invited to be on this short list. Among them is the flat-fee firm Switchpoint Financial Planning.

SwitchPoint Financial Planning

SwitchPoint Financial Advisor Application

SwitchPoint Financial Planning, LLC was designed to be different than traditional advisory firms. By charging a flat fee, rather than commissions or AUM fees, founder James Sweeney CFA, CFP®, sits on the same side of the table as his clients and can focus on what really matters – like maintaining investment discipline, minimizing fees and taxes, and maximizing cash flow.

We offer comprehensive financial planning and investment management to physicians and other HNW individuals who are in or nearing retirement. We will help you gain confidence in your retirement plan, guide you through the transition and provide ongoing support through your retirement years. We are DFA approved.

Fees:

Wealth Management – $4,800/year

2901 W Bluegrass Blvd Suite 200-26
Lehi, UT 84043
(801) 753-8538
james@switchpointfinancial.com

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Have an outstanding week!

-Physician on FIRE