href=”http://www.physicianonfire.com/category/sunday-best/”>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

 

Mr. 1500 has been FIREd for two years already? My, how the time flies. A reflection from 1500 Days to Freedom, approximately 730 days post-freedom: Two Years Of FIRE: Sometimes, You Just Have To Leap.

 

I believe he retired at a stock market peak. A Wealth of Common Sense questions whether or not that’s a good idea. What if You Retire at a Stock Market Peak?

 

Mr. SIS stopped ironing his shirts at another market peak just recently and he kept us updated as the development unfolded. From Stop Ironing Shirts, I Gave My Early Retirement Notice….and Live Tweeted It.

 

Parenthood is often a driving force behind the desire for financial independence; it is for me. It is for the rich & Regular, as well. Fathers on Financial Independence.

 

For people like Steveark who have been quite successful in their chosen careers, choosing to leave can be difficult, regardless of how much money one has accumulated. For some, Money is the Easy Part.

 

Spending money is the easy part when you head down under, as Big Family Small World can attest to. Their round-the-world trip has brought them back there recently. Australia: Back to the Land of Luxury.

 

In another life, they might not be making their Debt Ascent from a $500,000 hole. In another life, their debt might be $50,000 for a truck and a boat. But they chose this life. In Another Life…

 

I actually know a number of physicians who hit maximum burnout and thrived after recovering. Crispy Doc is skeptical. Is Burnout Good For You? (Or Has Vagabond MD Gone Flipping Mad?)

 

People make lots of mistakes with insurance, including misunderstanding the purpose it’s supposed to serve. Jonathan Clements of Humble Dollar shares his honest opinions and has nothing to sell. Cover Me.

 

Asset protection is even more poorly understood. A man with plenty of assets shares his insight. From The White Coat Investor comes the Top 16 Asset Protection Moves For Doctors (and pretty much anyone).

 

 

As I hooked up chains to tractors, trucks and boat lifts last weekend, I envisioned A Life Without Chains. It looked idyllic.

 

If you expect Medicare to fully cover your healthcare needs, think again. Healthcare Costs in Retirement – Don’t Make this Big Mistake.

 

Don’t make the big mistake of lifestyle explosion. The Physician Philosopher taught us The 10 Percent Rule: Limiting Lifestyle Creep.

 

The Berkshire Hathaway Shareholders Meeting

 

Warren-palooza took place this weekend, and for at least the third year in a row since becoming a shareholder, I missed The Big Show.

The first year I was on call, and the last two I’ve been in (or en route) to Central America. I’m going to need to stop running out of excuses, though, before Charlie Munger (age 95) and Warren Buffett (age 88) run out of time! I haven’t made it out to Valley Forge, PA for the Bogleheads meeting, and I missed my chance to shake John Bogle’s hand.

Not that I expect to get that close to Warren and Charlie, but I think it would be worth a trip to Omaha to see them in person. It helps that a number of friends of mine from the blogosphere make the pilgrimage regularly.

The 1500s and the Waffles on Wednesday duo were there this year, so I can pretty much guarantee I missed a good time based on the Twitter hijinx and hijackings.

It’s on my calendar for next year, and I hope to make it happen!

Traveling & Blogging

 

A 16-hour overnight layover in Orlando made our trip to Costa Rica this weekend a two-day adventure. We’re now settled in our condo that we’ll call home for the week, but I’m not going to lie; making sure this Sunday Best got out to you this weekend wasn’t easy.

In fact, I write this not from the condo but from the plane over the Gulf of Mexico. By the time you read this, I will have landed, picked up a rental car, driven a couple of hours, gotten checked in, sorted out who’s sleeping where, done some grocery shopping and grabbed dinner, figured out the wifi, copied and pasted this piece, and prepared the post for publication.

At least, that’s how I foresee it happening. [Post-flight note: all went according to plan, and the wifi here is excellent! We also stopped at the crocodile bridge to snap a few pics of these hungry guys.]

 

 

Keeping up with a consistent publishing schedule can be a challenge for frequent travelers, and it doesn’t help that I’ve spent much of the last week or two packing and moving our stuff in preparation for “the big move” shortly after we get home from this trip.

One of my goals this week is to get four or five posts lined up for 5/11 to 5/23, as I don’t anticipate having reliable internet or much free time at all when we return to Honduras with One World Surgery next week.

For now, I plan to continue posting four times a week, but if the schedule proves incompatible with the freedom I seek as we travel more extensively, I may choose to slow down. The beauty of being self-employed is that the boss can’t tell me “no.”

 

The Big Move?

 

I may have mentioned that I thought we had found our “retirement home,” but the home had some pretty serious structural issues, and we’re back to Plan A, which might be Plan C, depending on how we look at it.

Since we plan to spend most of the year traveling starting this fall, we don’t have to have a big footprint in one place, we’re back to the idea of seriously downsizing. Our cabin has been a sufficient place to spend the bulk of our summers in the past, and it is looking more and more like it will be our home base for the foreseeable future.

It’s never been our only place before, but it’s about to be. We’ll see how it goes, taking things one year and one adventure at a time.

For a few years, we talked about having just our summer place to touch down, keeping our expenses and maintenance needs quite low. Then we got the idea to build, opted instead to buy, and now we’re back to the original plan.

FI gives you options. Choosing from them can be tough when you don’t know exactly what you want.

 

Happy Cinco de Mayo!

 

I think it’s a bigger holiday in the U.S. than it is in Mexico, and we’re in Costa Rica, so I don’t think we’ll party very hardy. Also, it’s a Sunday so most people probably tipped back more cervezas in the cantina on Star Wars Day (May the 4th be with you!) than they will today on the 5th of May.

There’s also the fact that my wife and I have chosen to take one week completely off from drinking each month since we tried out a Sober October. On May 1st (Happy May Day!), we realized there was no “good” week not to drink this month, so we decided to get it out of the way the first seven days of the month.

Is it Wednesday yet?

 

 

Have an outstanding week!

-Physician on FIRE