Early Retirement Extreme Forums

My first wife were really chafing at the American 9 to 5 grind. Even though we were earning good money, we lived for the brief two weeks we could vacation in Germany each year. We both had lived almost our entire lives in the USA, however, we were both second generation Americans of German descent. ...

Sounds like you are in the driver's seat there. I assume you have already expressed your unhappiness to your current employer. I work in the English teaching business in Japan, and I know the attitude of some employers is that any native English speaker will do. However, maybe you have built up some...

Hello Lisa,

CuencaCultureShock.com is a great webpage. I went from one interesting article to the next. What do you do for health insurance in Ecuador?

You know, it seems these predictions of the apocalypse come...and then they go again. Remember all that talk about Peak Oil? Turns out we are swimming in oil. I'm no fan of fracking, but they say America is becoming an oil exporting nation. Yes, I also know that this is just delaying the inevitable ...

Hello SilverElefant! Welcome to the boards. Sounds like you have your life under control. Germany is a wonderful country. I lived there for six years from 1997 to 2003. You can read my story under Hello from Japan!in this Intro forum. I lived well on less than 800 euros a month, and that included a ...

I think "forever" stamps from the post office are an excellent hedge against inflation.

<t>Bromptons are the very best folding bikes in terms of folded size, weight and ridability. They are soooooo expensive though. I wouldn't try taking a Brompton on an airplane without a hard case, any folding bike is too delicate to survive unprotected a "determined" baggage handler. Then the proble...

<t>What's the big deal? My college textbook says we already consume about 500 grams of insect parts a year if we eat peanut butter, tomato sauce and chocolate. Doesn't seem to hurt us. I once volunteered at the local zoo in the bird area. They had what looked like a high chest of drawers and inside ...

<t>Thanks for your comments so far. $430 a month for health insurance would sure make most people think twice about early retirement. I assume if you are trying to insure a family, it's even more. When I read the first page of this blog, "...learn how you can live a middle class lifestyle like mine ...

<t>I plugged health insurance into the search box here, and didn't really come up with any topics devoted to health insurance. Surely, that must be the 500 pound gorilla in the early retirement scenario. Even with Obamacare, I suspect trying to get reasonable health insurance by yourself is difficul...

<t>RoERE,<br/> <br/> Glad to see you back commenting. I would be very reluctant to try to settle your Dilemma by asking others to advise you. No one here can really compare Romania, USAurban or USArural and "Europe." What Europe? there's expensive Europe and there's expensive USA. I live in a relati...

<t>I've heard of the freeters. They tend to work in low paying jobs when they can. Some live with their parents to save on costs. The newspapers are always complaining there are too many freeters. But the newspapers also have articles about regular workers who are literally worked to death. Maybe th...

<t>Vanguard has a nice compare tool on the online descriptions of their mutual funds. It only shows 10years, 5years, 3 years, and 1year total return comparisons. But for any of those annual return rates, the Index fund gets it's butt kicked by the stodgy old (actively managed) Wellington Balanced Fu...

<t>Welcome from one novice to another. Is your future wife on board with the frugal lifestyle? I have discovered women and men have very different ideas of what frugal is. Well, if she goes for the frugal wedding idea, she must be okay! Congratulations and may you live happily eve after!<br/> <br/> ...

<t>I have heard nice things about Bulgaria too. Beautiful countryside, great beaches, great wine. I kind of wondered which of the two countries Romania and Bulgaria would rise the fastest economically since they both joined the EU at the same time. At first I thought Romania was pulling away, but no...

<t>A fascinating read. Congratulations on your frugal ways. Does the car have to be flashy Korean job for $460 a month? Is there something more reasonable? I am completely unbiased and "disinterested," but why don't you buy an old Citroen 2CV. Tell your boss it's a classic from the days when the the...

<t>Thanks Spoonman and Blue in Sina for your kind comments. I've been to Heidelberg many times. It's beautiful! But it isn't a cheap place to retire. I lived in the former East German part of Germany in a town called Meiningen. A new studio apartment cost me about $285 a month. I lived with money to...

<t>Too bad this thread has stopped. I spent some time in the central part of Romania from 1998 to 2003. That was before it became a member of the EU. Everything was very cheap. Bucharest was different. Quite expensive. The Romanian language really wasn't that difficult if you had had some exposure t...

<t>I enjoy gardening too. Have you noticed that not all seeds in a package are equally fertile? I love to grow and eat kohlrabi which is hard to find here in Japan. I am always amazed at the difference in the sizes of my kohlrabis. I prepare the soil the same for all of them, I thin out the sprouts ...

<t>Well, I'm not half as interesting as Hello from China!, but would like to say howdy to everyone anyway. I desperately wanted to retire early because I seemed to fail at every job I tried! I guess I wasn't cut out for the dog-eat-dog business world in America. I didn't think accounting was like th...