Early Retirement Extreme

Financial independence, frugality, self-sufficiency, ecology, capitalism, and voluntary simplicity

Lately I have been buying stocks like crazy…

Published in July 21st, 2008

Posted by Jacob in financial independence, investments

If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!…in fact, looking over my credit card statement, where I put all my “frivolous” expenses, I can see that except for food, etc. it’s been more than two months since I bought anything but stocks. The reason is that [...]

The cult of index investing

Published in July 10th, 2008

Posted by Jacob in investments

7 Comments

Index investing is being touted as a kind of silver bullet. You can’t go wrong with indices, they say. Indices have historically produced superior results. ETFs beget a new era of investing. Here’s how to turn $1000 into $1,000,000 through the magic of compound interest. It works because it can be imagined. You guys are [...]

Can I retire with 2 million dollars?

Published in June 27th, 2008

Posted by Jacob in expenses, financial independence, investments

7 Comments

This, and various perturbations, is one of the most frequent google search term that hits this site. I think my very general answer would be, that if you have to ask that question then the answer is “PROBABLY NOT!”
If you’re asking if you can retire with 10 millions dollars, the answer is still no.
The problem [...]

Big sacrifices now make all the small differences later

Published in June 20th, 2008

Posted by Jacob in compound interest, financial independence, investments

2 Comments

Yeah, hey what wait, isn’t it the other way around? As regular readers will know I have a manical obsession with turning things on their head and making fun of them (just ask our dog), but there is some truth to this.
Consider the regular idea of making small sacrifices now to get big differences [...]

Early Retirement Portfolios

Published in May 22nd, 2008

Posted by Jacob in inflation, investments, planning

16 Comments

As I have mentioned before extreme early retirement (<35) does not happen due to a prudent investment plan. It happens either by following an extreme savings plan or by being lucky (rich uncle, lottery, penny stocks, real estate, …). These reason is that the time it takes to reach financial independence, around 5 years, is [...]

The major risks of buy and hold index investing

Published in April 11th, 2008

Posted by Jacob in compound interest, investments

13 Comments

I see stock markets falling in three, possibly more, stages. The first stage is the golden age of capitalism, where owners run and have a stake in their own company. In the second stage operations and stakeholdership is taken over by professionals, that is, CEOs, who own less than 1% of the company, and (institutional) fund [...]

Prosper taxes for debt sales and bankruptices

Published in March 14th, 2008

Posted by Jacob in investments, peer-to-peer lending, taxes

7 Comments

I just did my tax returns for my prosper loans and here’s how I did it. It has been very difficult, nay, impossible to find complete instructions online other than the in principle complete but to me useless suggestion to “consult a tax professional”(*). It does not make a lot of sense to me [...]

TurboTax proved too difficult for me

Published in March 11th, 2008

Posted by Jacob in investments, money

3 Comments

This year I figured I wanted to save the 30+ hours I spent last year doing my taxes. I have heard a lot of good things about various tax preparation programs that can fill out taxes and thus obviate the need for an accountant. After all if individuals need to hire experts merely to comply [...]

When Good People Give Bad Financial Advice

Published in February 29th, 2008

Posted by Jacob in investments, money, personal finance

8 Comments

In this guest post Hunter Nuttall talks about the challenges of giving financial advice. Although well intended, some advice can be ill suited for the person or just plain wrong. It is something we should all be aware of whether we are giving advice or taking it. If you like this post and want to [...]

The efficient market hypothesis

Published in February 19th, 2008

Posted by Jacob in investments

8 Comments

The efficient market hypothesis underlies much of modern portfolio theory (such as index investing). One particular nasty consequence is that this assumption makes a lot of investment theory mathematically tractable. The problem is that many people believe that a theory is credible once it is presented in the precise language of mathematics. Read about the [...]

« Older Entries