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 long-dormant Dr. Doom, arguably the best and most authentic writer in the FIRE community, unleashes a massive life update in his first blog post at Living A FI since 2016. A lost love, unsettling idleness, a new medical diagnosis, and more in The 2021 Early-Retirement Update.
Join me in saying Happy Birthday to Jesse Cramer from The Best Interest. He celebrates with a lesson he learned each year he’s been alive, going back to kindergarten and even infanthood. 31 Lessons from 31 Years.
Panic at the Disco says you’ve got to have high, high hopes. So does Wallet Hack‘s Jim Wang. The Power of HIGH Expectations and how to harness them.
Jim’s friend J.D. believes that happiness is found in the distance between expectations and reality. Behold The Power of Low Expectations at Get Rich Slowly.
Who wants to get rich slowly? Not this pharmacist featured by Fiology. How To Get Rich Quick in a College Town.
Developing frugal habits for a short spell could help build lifelong smart money habits and resilience, according to Five Year FIRE Escape. Living Stingy During a Hard Life Event.
Tax Day has been delayed a month to May 17th, but women pay this “tax” all year long. Casey Bond with Your Money Geek explains. What Is the Pink Tax? (And How to Avoid It).
The White Coat Investor, whose CFE 2021 with 17 CME credits is $100 off through the end of the month, created a great graphic and accompanying article to help you understand how different types of income are actually reported and taxed. Understanding Your Tax Return — Income Flows.
When you’ve got a handle on how income is taxed, you’ll better understand WCI’s 7 Ways the Rich Pay Less in Taxes (and You Can Too).
In some instances, the rich pay more in taxes. Retirees with more than $176,000 in taxable income this year, for example, will pay more than triple for Medicare services. The FI Physician sounds the warning. IRMAA 2021: High Income Retirees – Avoid the Cliff.
You might not need that much income to live the good life, anyway. Every high-income professional needs to understand this message. Spend Less. Live More.
Many physicians, including me, have turned to entrepreneurial pursuits to find a way to work less (at one job, anyway) and live more. Passive Income MD asks, Do Doctors Make Good Entrepreneurs?
- Bonus: Grab a FREE registration to the 2021 Leverage & Growth Summit, and learn how dozens of physician entrepreneurs have launched ventures of their own!
Do NFTs make good investments? The jury is still out, but these nifty non-fungible tokens, which can go for tens of millions, are all the rage. A few posts to help you get better acquainted:
- OpenSea: The Non-Fungible Token Bible: Everything you need to know about NFTs
- Seth Godin: NFTs are a dangerous trap
- Of Dollars and Data: In Defense of Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs)
Death of a Laptop
There I was, just typing away when the dreaded blue screen of death popped up. I’ve seen it before — not on this machine — but it usually just means a restart is needed and I’ll be good to go.
Not this time.
When I tried to reboot, the boot failed. No bootable media. I got into the BIOS settings and found that no hard drive was detected. Not good.
It could be a hard drive failure, which would require me finding and installing a replacement SSD and crossing my fingers that it actually works. Hopefully, it will be a more simple fix.
The Lenovo chassis has a couple of small cracks that make the base a bit more flexible than it ought to be, especially when picked up with one hand, which is something I won’t be doing anymore. With any luck, it’s just a loose connection that needs to be secured.
I’ll find out when I can get my hands on a tiny T5 torx screwdriver to take the thing apart. Not the easiest thing to find when traveling, but I’ll find a Home Depot before long.** In the meantime, my wife’s laptop is the only reason I was able to put this weekend’s Sunday Best together!

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I Lied. Sort of.
It’s not really a lie when what I said was either true at the time or a misunderstanding, but in the last week, I’ve given you two false deadlines.
First, Coach Chad Carson’s Real Estate Start School was going to close on Friday, but due to an issue with his emails not going out and many of his subscribers unaware of the soft deadline, it’s been extended by 48 hours.
You can still enroll in the best value you’ll find for a comprehensive real estate investing course. Here’s all that you get for your $999. It’s a lot!
Second, the White Coat Investor was advertising a pre-sale on his Continuing Financial Education 2021, the 50+ talks from the recent WCICON and up to 17 credits of CME or dental CE.
My assumption was that the $100 off “pre-sale” would end when the course went live last week on 3/15, but I was wrong. Turns out it’s a launch sale, too.
You can still get all those talks and continuing education credits for $100 less than it will be at the end of the month. Last call will be 3/30/2021 on this deal.
This One is FREE, and That’s the Truth.
Tomorrow is Day One of the 2021 Leverage & Growth Summit. For one week, Dr. Peter Kim will be releasing 5 or 6 videos per day, and they’ll be free to watch for about 48 hours once they’re made available.
You can catch my talk on Tuesday, 3/23. For the full schedule and details on how to register for the free summit featuring dozens of physician entrepreneurs, click here!
You’ll be able to see every talk at no cost if you catch it in that 48-hour timeframe. You will be given the option to purchase a VIP pass for lifetime access to the talks, but that’s completely optional.
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**I got my hands on a T5 torx, and I’m sad to report it’s not a loose connection. I’ve got a new SSD ordered, which will be picked up this evening, and I’m hoping that does the trick!
Have an outstanding week!
-Physician on FIRE
5 thoughts on “The Sunday Best (3/21/2021)”
OMG! This is ALL I read, maybe some posts twice 3 months before I retired and immediately after. I recommend it to everyone! Wow, thanks for finding this!
Sorry to hear about your ailing laptop. The same thing happened to me in 2020. Dead ssd.
Apparently these things fail surprisingly often. A lot of it has to do with excess heat, and laptops are not always the best at venting heat. Thankfully, ssd’s are pretty cheap these days.
I’ve been much more careful with my current SSD since the last one failed, by installing CrystalDiskInfo it now rings an alarm when the disk gets too hot.
Anyway… good luck on getting it fixed! Thanks for the Sunday Best!
Thanks for the tip! I did notice when I took the machine apart that the fans were pretty dusty. I cleaned them up a bit.
I’ll try that program.
Cheers!
-PoF
Thanks for the heads-up about the Dr Doom post- he’s the reason I write a blog and I would have missed it.
Someone posted in Twitter that he had written the update. I might have missed it, too, but I recall reading tons of his stuff back in the day before I had a blog of my own.
Cheers!
-PoF