It's never too late

OG2: There are some aspects that are universal or indisputable. Such as 2+2=4, the sun rises in the East or one of the kids will get on my nerves today. From the outside looking in, or at a high level, FI appears to be universally generic. ‘Live well beneath your means’, ‘Save 50% of your income’, ‘Get off the hamster wheel’, ‘Minimalism to the maximum’ or ‘Bustle with a Side Hustle’ (alright I made that last one up).. Even though many posts or podcasts advocate that as an individual, you need to pick and choose certain concepts or methodologies that work for you, within the larger FI community this doesn’t always hold true. It could be just a matter that people are much more comfortable extolling platitudes from a keyboard, or maybe they truly believe they’ve lived all lives and have concluded their way is the only way. Even in…

As referenced in our first post, the Why of the FI Old Guys, we came upon the concept of FI in July, 2018. This blog was launched in January of this year. We thought it would be useful or interesting to understand what we’ve done in those first six months in pursuit of our FI paths. Many of the items below will be detailed in much greater depth in future content. OG2: From my perspective, it’s as simple as ‘retain all of your income’. That means stop spending money and earn all you can. This clearly is an oversimplification, but gets at the root of every successive step. Eliminating the outflow of cash is the simplest and easy step. Now, I didn’t say it was emotionally easy, just that terminating non-essentials from a technical perspective isn’t difficult. The second step is assessing your income and debt (if you have any).…

There are a lot of blog posts out there with all the detail you would ever need to understand the concepts and the math of Financial Independence (FI). This post is designed to provide a quick, easy read to summarize the concepts in play. Again, this is our interpretation and not meant as the end-all-be-all on FI-xpertisness.   First of all, if you don’t know what CliffsNotes are, you’re definitely a lot younger than the OGs. Definition of FI 1)         Figure out what your income/annual spend will be in retirement. A lot of the minimalists or frugal types already early retired are generally in the $30-$40k/year range. OG2 is using $100k annually. Right now this is just a nice round number for me. It will become more clear as I research actual costs of where OG2’s family is going move after retirement. Additionally, we are doing some cost logging this…

Old Guy 2: It’s the first of the year and as with many things, we also fall into the trap of kicking things off on this arbitrary date. We’re (nearly) old and ready to lay down tracks to retirement, sip drinks with umbrellas and enjoy all the possibilities that time and money provide. What could possibly go wrong? This initial post covers the inevitable question of WHY do this blog. Old Guy #1 and #2 (going forward referred to as OG1 & OG2) have been friends and colleagues for a decade. We’ve worked on the same projects at our job from time to time, share a couple of out of work hobbies and have learned that our lives have a lot of similarities with wives and kids. Many of these commonalities will lead to future blog posts as a shared passion, humor or frustrations in life. In 2017, OG1 and…