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

  Downtown Annapolis, Maryland  The last time my wife and I visited Annapolis was roughly 8 years ago.  Back then, we still had our fur baby, our Pomeranian, Toby.  We were living in Pennsylvania at the time, and we took a day trip out to Annapolis to check out the sights. We walked around the downtown area, explored a state park nearby, and had ourselves some delicious lobster rolls for lunch, then stopped by again at the same restaurant to take them home for dinner.  We had a great time together as we even got to sneak in a rejuvenating afternoon nap in our car, all three of us, at the aforementioned state park. Listening to sounds of birds while taking an afternoon nap is one of life’s simple pleasures, and afterwards we really did get our second wind back.  We stayed roughly 6 hours at the city exploring the place.  By the time we got back home, it was around 10 o’clock.  Nice day trip indeed! It would end up being 8 years for us to get back ...

  Warren Buffett:  “Successful investing takes time, discipline, and patience.” The year 2025 has been a strange year so far.  Stock market, which had been chugging along in early 2025, met some interesting turbulence right around the end of February, thanks to Trump tariffs placed on countries at that time. Starting from that time, the S&P 500 index , the most watched stock market index in the world, dropped almost 20% the next few weeks.  It wasn’t until June that the index recovered from this precipitous decline, scaring one too many investors in the process. I also watched my investments drop close to 20% those couple of months.  It’s never fun to see your hard earned money go down the drain.  But it is in these exact moments when everything in your being screams “ Do something! ”, that we must do something that is really, really difficult.   That is, to do absolutely nothing … I have lived through something like 5 different shocks to the stoc...

  Sunrise at Ocean City, Maryland  For those of you who have been following this blog for awhile, Ocean City Maryland , was the first location we stayed in using Airbnb, following our early retirement in 2020.  Back then, we were trying to adapt as best we can to our new chapter in our lives. We didn’t really know what early retirement would be like, nor did we know how we would spend our time.  One thing we did know for certain was the idea of traveling throughout this great country called the United States of America. We had visited Ocean City previously and found it a cool place with a beautiful beach, ocean, and plenty of things to do.  Of course, back when we did our month long AirBnB there, we still had our Pomeranian Toby with us. It was a month of us trying to make sense of early retirement, of how we were going to live day by day, and how we can live more fulfilling and stress less lives.  As tough as first days were adjusting to our new lives, by ...