One of my personal goals for 2019 is to spend less time in front of a screen. This includes phones, laptops, and televisions. Reading books on my Kindle is still allowed.
I certainly spend way less time on a device now than I did while working, but I find that I have lost time doing mindless things that could be better spent playing guitar, exercising, cooking, reading, or spending quality time with the fam.
I view this solely as a matter of preference, choosing what to do with my waking hours. So far so good.
Over the past several years, I’ve made minor annual adjustments to our investment portfolio – harvesting capital gains, rebalancing, and adding fresh capital.
This is what our portfolio looks like as of early 2019.
2018 was our 6th full year of early retirement, world travel, and blogging. We’ve now been doing this longer than time spent in high school, college, or in my first real job.
Most of the content I’ve written comes from trying to figure things out for myself and our family, and then sharing the outcome. It’s helped create an exciting community of early retirees, tax geeks, expats, world travelers, nomadic families, and adventurers.
Although the blog became a profitable side business back in 2014, any financial benefit was mostly accidental. I typed some words, talked to some reporters, added some links, and (virtually) cashed some checks.
This year I put more hours into creating regular content, as I was trying to figure out a bunch of new things with taxes, travel hacking, and our life direction.
This seems to be a good approach – 2018 was the most profitable year yet.
Happy Holidays everyone! I hope 2018 found y’all becoming increasingly healthy, wealthy, and wise.
2018 was our 6th full year of early retirement and world travel. Do anything long enough and memories start to jumble together… Did we visit Paris this year or last year? Was Jr walking when we were in Chiang Mai? Thankfully our financial records and photos cleared it up in an instant. (Another good reason to track spending?)
This year we meandered through 11 different countries (Taiwan, UK, Spain, Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Finland, Sweden, Norway, and the United States.) If my math is right, this brings Jr’s country total to 35. Our Instagram shares some fun photos of each.
We’ve now started to ask ourselves, “What is next?”
In Spring of the last 3 years I have stepped off a plane in Europe, wearing stylish skinny jeans and a classic neckline T-shirt. 3 or 4 months later, I was sporting a budding double chin and elastic waistline “athletic” shorts.
Upon returning “home” I would slowly shed my substantial souvenir, slip back into my favorite jeans, and board another plane to carb heaven.
