Wandering Money Pig - A journey of early retirement and FIRE (financial independence retire early)

  Toby in Charleston, SC (2022) Pablo Picasso:  “I’m always doing things I can’t do; that’s how I get to do them.” December 2022 marks the second year anniversary of this blog “ Wandering Money Pig ”.  It’s true what people say about time.  It really flies, especially when you’re having fun.  I have a hard time believing it’s been two years since I started this blog. The first year of this blog covered everything I personally felt and experienced about the FIRE (financial independence retire early) movement leading up to my early retirement, as well as my personal journey of early retirement.  If the first year was laying down the philosophy of my personal variation of the FIRE movement, including how and why I got into the movement, then the second year covered how my actual early retirement was going.   I traveled to so many places during the second year.  These places included Altoona (PA), Snowshoe (WV), Murrells Inlet (SC), Tupper Lake (NY), Stratton (ME), and Canaan (VT).  All o

  Get that job after doing a great interview! My introduction to the corporate world would begin relatively late, around my mid thirties.  Prior to that, I had worked in car dealerships and at a small start up company.  The corporate world is a whole new animal all together.   It has its own ecosystem comprising of upper management, who most worker bees consider godlike creatures, that everyone caters to.  It has mid level management, who has the unenviable and impossible task of placating the upper management and the worker bees.  And finally, there are the worker bees who are the ones in the trenches working, complaining, and trying to make the best out of the daily grind. Corporate world also has internal politics, as various departments may try jockeying for power, to get a more favorable office location, or bigger budgets! Despite all the chatter that corporations are heartless and only care about the bottom line, I found the company I had worked for, do care about people as well

  Yankee Stadium, the Bronx, New York My first recollection of seeing the  New York Yankees was in October of 1981, when my family emigrated to New York City, United States.  My dad was a fan of the team, so he turned us onto watching the playoffs and eventually the Fall Classic  ( World Series ) that year.  I didn’t know the team or any of the players at first, but I soon learned to embrace the team as my hometown baseball team. New York Yankees would face their familiar foe in Los Angeles Dodgers that World Series.  Two teams, as I would eventually find out, played in the World Series on several occasions, as recently as 1977-1978. The first two games were won by the Yankees, who would then go on to lose the next four games!  It was the highest of highs to see your home team win games, only to experience the lowest of lows to see your team lose the series just a week later.   I got to watch great players like Willie Randolph , Graig Nettle s, Dave Winfield , and Reggie Jackson , th

  Table Rock, New Hampshire  Mark Twain:  “If you don’t like the weather in New England now, just wait a few minutes.” Prior to our trip to the New England states during the summer of 2022, we had not yet understood the popularity of New England as a summer tourist destination.  Of course, we had heard of famous places like Acadia National Park , Bar Harbor , White Mountains , etc., but we had never visited these places to truly understand. During January of 2022, we were looking for a long term rental via AirBnB as usual, for the upcoming summer months.  We were searching for a place anywhere among the three states:  Maine, New Hampshire, and/or Vermont.  Luckily, we found two that fit the bill.   For June and July, we got a small mountain cabin in Stratton (Maine), and for August, we got a two bedroom apartment in Canaan (Vermont).  In Maine, we got to experience the quietest summer ever, living near the northwest corner of the state of Maine.  We barely saw vehicular traffic near ou

  Car buying is tough these days… My wife and I had been driving our 2020 Chevy Equinox since December 2019.  It was hard to fathom, but our 39 month lease on our car would already be up in several months (March 2023).  Thanks to our busy travel schedule, we had been putting on the miles since our early retirement in August 2020. During the first 9 months of our lease, we barely put miles on our car thanks to work remote culture.  Like most people, I worked from home with no commute, which equals miles not driven.  By August, full 9 months after we got our Chevy, we barely had 2500 miles on the car.   All that changed since August that year.  We drove everywhere on the east coast of the United States.  On August 24th, the day we kicked off our early retirement, we left for North Carolina from Pennsylvania.  The same year, we would travel to New York City, then to Maryland, back to NYC, followed by North Carolina again.  We really racked up the miles the following two years, driving to