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

  Winston Churchill:  “Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.” As we wrap up the previous year (2025) and look forward to a new year (2026), I‘d like to take this time to reflect on the past year and to plan ahead for the upcoming year.  It’s hard to believe but my wife and I have been retired (early) for over 5 years now.   We are ever so grateful that we’re living the way we wanted to live without conforming to what the society expects us to do.  We said goodbye to participating in the rat race, to pay ever increasing real estate/school/property/county taxes to live in our own home, and we also said goodbye to the constant bombardment by media to make us consume.   By choosing the “ red pill ”, like Neo , the main character from the popular movie “ The Matrix ”, we finally saw the true meaning of finding happiness.  It’s not through living the way society tells you to, but rather by figuring out ways to...

  As the month of July was marching on, my wife and I were quietly preparing to get back on the road to our next destination.  For our next destination, we had initially reserved another Airbnb rental to follow our month long Airbnb stay near Cape Cod .  It was to be a recently renovated small condo in a town called Lewisburg near Harrisburg , PA.   Our goal was to revisit some of our favorite neighborhoods near Harrisburg as it had already been some time since our last visit to the area.  Well, our plans changed. The more I thought about the cost of the 2 week long Airbnb rental (at near $1400), the less I was convinced it was such a good idea.  One of the major reasons for that was because about a year and a half prior, we had signed up for the Hilton hotel chain’s rewards program, called Hilton Honors .  The thought of trying to achieve Diamond status (highest status) definitely loomed over me. On top of that, we had suffered without a good worki...

  Mark Twain:  “Newport, Rhode Island, that breeding place-that stud farm, so to speak-of aristocracy; aristocracy of the American type.” Back in the good old 1980’s when there was no internet, the only way we could learn about a faraway place was usually through popular media, like television, print media (magazines, newspapers), or word of mouth.  We couldn’t simply turn on our smartphones or tablets to get information in an instant, like we’re doing these days. Although the internet age has brought about the best & the easiest way to access information like never before, I, a Generation X child of the 80’s, sometimes get nostalgic for the past (just sometimes) where faraway places really did feel exotic.  As a child growing up in New York City, just about anywhere outside the city felt so far and exotic.   Encountering new places on a magazine, a newspaper  advertisements, or television ads made my mind imagine and wonder what they are really like. ...