The Sunday Best (7/29/2018)

The Sunday Best is a collection of articles I’ve curated for your reading pleasure.

Expect most of the writing to be from recent weeks and consistent with the themes presented on this website: investing & taxes, financial independence, early retirement, and physician issues.

 

Presenting, this week’s Sunday Best:

 

ESI Money‘s latest post forced me to calculate my opportunity cost of retiring at 43. It’s an 8-figure number! His is a bit lower, but still… How I Lost Millions by Retiring Early. I’d better up my game with this side hustle!

 

Erin Lowry, the Broke Millennial, isn’t keen on 7 and 8 figure opportunity costs, favoring the FI over the RE (much like E.T.F. did before embracing the RE concept). She prefers to keep hustling as explained in That Time I Almost Joined the FIRE Movement.

 

The other day we featured Bryan Miles’ medical school side hustles. Passive Income MD was a hustler, too, which should come as no surprise to anyone. What were his four side gigs? My Med School Side Hustles.

 

Those guys figured out how to make money in med school. Others can’t figure out how to set aside much of anything as attending phsyicians. The White Coat Investor dishes out some tough love in $320k and Unable to Save for Retirement. Really? Reaally?!?

 

This next post from Four Pillar Freedom shows us just how important it is to find a way to start saving as soon as possible. Saving Your First $300k Takes Roughly the Same Amount of Time as Saving the Next $700k. Similarly, saving the first $1 Million takes about as long as the next $2.33 Million. Get saving, my friends!

 

Some doctors haven’t had to save diligently to become millionaires. Increasingly, private equity firms have been purchasing physician practices with buyout offers that make the partners instant millionaires, even multimillionaires in some cases. From Nisha Mehta MD, Private Equity: A Primer for Physicians.

 

 

Find me on Twitter — I shout sometimes. I’m also on Instagram now! IT’S TRUE!

 

Ideally, you’ll learn to save before the next great stock buying opportunity. Could one be imminent? The Wall Street Physician ponders the question. Inverted Yield Curve: Predictor of Recession and Bear Market?

 

For the number crunchers who liked that one, let’s shift our focus to an important number in real estate investing. Coach Carson gives cap rates a thorough treatment in Cap Rate Explained (And Why It Matters With Rental Properties).

 

Joe Udo (did you catch his CGP?) from Retire by 40 explores real estate investing, too. It’s a question many of us have asked: Should I be a Landlord or a Passive Real Estate Investor?

 

The man behind Retire Before Dad is probably not interested in landlording. He’s more interested in Life Without The Constraints Of Time And Money. Who wouldn’t be?

 

I’m in the middle of about a four-week break from work and it truly feels like a life without those constraints. We’ve spent the last week at our little lake cabin in northern Michigan. At about 700 square feet, it’s basically the size of two tiny homes, but it’s all we really need and very easy to keep clean.

We’ve got acres of wide open space outdoors, a couple hundred feet of shared beach frontage, 27 square miles of lake water (and rivers connecting us to much, much more), and a boat to explore it all.

With two more weeks to go up here, we don’t feel pressed for time. As far as money goes, I imagine we’ll always exercise some constraint — that’s what got us to where we are today, but we can be confident that we can keep living this way, or even upgrade our lifestyle a good amount without fear of running out of money.

Yesterday, I took the boys on a day trip to Mackinac Island. We sampled fudge, hiked 9 miles around the circumference of the island and then some, and they were still able to muster the energy to mess around in the mirror maze. We ended the day with pizza and ice cream on the island, and a stop at the local brewery on the way home. It was a great Saturday, and I can’t wait until every day can be a Saturday.

 

 

 

I’m Speaking at FinCon18. Twice!

 

The full schedule for the personal finance creators’ conference has been released, and I was happy to see my moniker appear not once, but two times.

On Thursday, September 27th, I’m on the “Four Flavors of FIRE” panel with JD Roth of Get Rich Slowly moderating. Joining me on the panel are Jillian from Montana Money Adventures, Mr. Money Mustache, and Mr. 1500.

On Saturday, September 29th, I’ll be part of the “Withdrawal Strategies for Early Retirees” panel with our friends Brad and Jonathan from ChooseFI, Karsten from Early Retirement Now, and Jean Chatzky from the Today Show, Her Money, and more.

I just dropped a lot of names right there; I hope I didn’t get your toes! Clearly, I will be among great company, and I am humbled to be included and excited to be on stage with these wonderful people.

If you’re interested in knowing more about FinCon18, you can read my recap of last year’s event here, you can see the full schedule here and register here — the price increases $100 on August 1st, so there’s no time like the present to commit if you’re on the fence.

If you’re not familiar with FinCon, I wrote a detailed wrapup of my first experience at FinCon last year.

 

A Minnesota Meetup

 

Four weeks from now, we’ll be wrapping up Camp FI Midwest just north of the Twin Cities. That event takes place Friday through Sunday, and a few of us will be getting together beforehand on Thursday, August 23rd.

That day happens to be the opening day of the Great Minnesota Get-Together a.k.a. The Minnesota State Fair. I haven’t been there since college, and my wife and kids have never been, so we plan on making a day of it. I’m thinking we’ll have a happy hour meetup at the beer garden with the possibility of a second meetup later on that evening in Minneapolis.

Watch the Sunday Best for more details in a few weeks. I’d love to say hello to some of my friends in the North Star State!

 

 

Have a fun week!

-Physician on FIRE