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1. 

   carpe_diem
   

   Novice
   Joined: Nov '11
   Posts: 9

   hello people of the FIRE --

   I'm glad to have discovered this forum, and it has already reoriented my financial life through a little series of coincidences, which I'll explain in the next post. But first thing first: I'm a european FIRE-person, well on my way towards the FI goal. I have always been instinctively frugal, and to my surprise and delight, after graduating, people gave me jobs to continue doing what I love: reading books and having opinions. They even pay me good money for that, at various universities in Europe and in the US, and that mostly goes straight to my bank where it has just been sleeping. This would be an almost perfect ERE story, were it not for a somewhat chaotic private life, which led to divorce and child-custody nightmares, robbing me from years of peace of mind and financial sanity -- the price of bad relationship-decisions making me grow up the hard way, I guess. Now that I mostly stopped fighting that life-draining custody fight, I find myself in my early forties, with a good reserve of money and my old dreams of early retirement. Googling those dreams one day, I stumbled upon this community which make me feel right at home. Finding you guys also led me to be moving apartments next week, and I'm looking forward to the next steps :)

   Posted 1 year ago #
2. 

   Bingeworker
   

   Apprentice
   Joined: Nov '11
   Posts: 48

   Hi carpe_diem. Welcome- I'm pretty new here too. I've got a nest egg of $ too, working on figuring out how to invest it. Do you have a plan yet on how to make yours work for you?

   Posted 1 year ago #
3. 

   ExpatERE
   

   Journeyman
   Joined: Jul '11
   Posts: 219

   Welcome!!

   Posted 1 year ago #
4. 

   carpe_diem
   

   Novice
   Joined: Nov '11
   Posts: 9

   hi Bingeworker! I saw your thread "I have the $$$ - now what?" and followed it with great interest. My plan is to invest about half in rentable property (I just did that), which I initially use for myself, and for the other half: 'no'. Ie the plan for the other half is to learn about investment and get a 3-4% interest on it, which doesn't seem easy these days anymore, but reachable. At my leasurely pace of work and lots of free time, I have about 2-5 years left before FI, so I'll use those years to educate myself in investment. I'm very much looking forward to that period, a sort of "preliminary" phase of ER.

   Posted 1 year ago #
5. 

   carpe_diem
   

   Novice
   Joined: Nov '11
   Posts: 9

   thanks ExpatERE -- I see from your journal that we've have a somewhat similar "emotional blip+recovery-to-FI" in our recent past. I am impressed by your radical change, and look forward to following your development here.

   Posted 1 year ago #
6. 

   ExpatERE
   

   Journeyman
   Joined: Jul '11
   Posts: 219

   thanks Carpe... I certainly can relate to "emotional blips". Sounds like you had a fairly frugal mindset to begin with and then just took an unexpected detour. Me, I had the wrong damn map to begin with and the divorce was the cold, hard smack across the face to finally get me to wake up and unplug myself from the consumer matrix. Better late than never, eh?

   Best of luck on your continued journey...

   Posted 1 year ago #
7. 

   Bingeworker
   

   Apprentice
   Joined: Nov '11
   Posts: 48

   carpe_diem, I had rental property, my house was rented out for several years. I found I made money on it (both in equity, as the bubble was still on the rise, and in income, as the mortgage was paid off when I rented it), but I hate being a landlord. I moved back in for a while but I travel so much I sold it and bought a condo. I had also looked at the house and realized how much maintenance was probably coming due on it, and I just didn't want to do it. It wasn't the money, I just didn't want to be scheduling repairs etc. and hoping the tenant cooperated, too much hassle. But it was definitely a good thing financially that I did have it and rent it as long as I did, a big chunk of my nest egg comes from that.

   Posted 1 year ago #
8. 

   Felix
   

   Master
   Joined: Nov '10
   Posts: 396

   Just out of (strong) interest, how do you get paid for reading books and having opinions? I'm good at both. :-D

   Posted 1 year ago #
9. 

   carpe_diem
   

   Novice
   Joined: Nov '11
   Posts: 9

   @Bingeworker: I'm interested in hearing some more about that, since I was thinking on embarking into what you characterize as "too much hassle" and "I hate being a landlord", and we have a similar situation apparently, both financially and travel-wise. I'll PM you, if you don't mind.

   @Felix: that was a way of saying that I got lucky in academia (the right people like my opinions) and was surprised that people would actually give me money to do something I would have done for free anyway.

   Posted 1 year ago #

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