Latest Posts
Thoughts on reinvention, clarity, work, money, and the quiet decisions that shape a life. New essays each week as we explore what it means to build a life with intention.
Don't Leave It in the Field: An Open Enrollment Guide for an Earlier Exit
In 2016, our 11-year-old picked a plastic skull mask that earned him respect at every door and turned into a sauna on a warm night across 800 homes. It looked great on the porch, but it wasn’t built for the night he was having. Benefits enrollment works the same way, so here’s how to choose the options that fit the life you’re living, whether you’re 10 years out, landing the plane, or already retired.
The Noises in the Night: Five Retirement Worries That May Wake You at 3 A.M.
My phone rang at 3 a.m. in a Dallas hotel room. Our home security alarm was screaming 900 miles away, and the technician we paid to check every sensor missed the real problem. If you’ve done the planning and the questions still come at night, here are the five retirement worries worth naming, and one step you can take this week for each.
The Retirement Line Item Nobody Budgets For: Adult Kids
At seven, our son planned to build a nest in a Japanese maple so he could live there with his wife and ten kids and stay close to Mom and me. A decade later, the nest became an apartment in Tucson. Here are three conversations that can help you launch your adult kids before you leave full-time work.
7 Questions to Ask in Building Your Downshift or Retirement Budget
On a cave tubing trip in Belize, I heard our guide tell another guide in Spanish to watch for snakes. Nobody else caught it. That’s what good guides do. Here are seven questions I’m working through as I build my retirement budget, and the culebras I’ve found beneath the surface.
Five Financial Decisions That Made My Downshift Possible
I was fourteen, shivering in a borrowed tent on the Appalachian Trail in a waterlogged cotton sleeping bag, too proud to ask my dad, a retired Marine, for the gear that was sitting in our basement. Thirty years later, here are the five financial decisions that made my downshift possible, and the lesson it took me a cold night on a mountain to learn.
The Weekday World I Never Saw
In my twenties I sat at the same corner table every weekday morning, life rich and money poor, watching the Blue Ridge disappear into haze. I traded it for twenty-five years of building. This month I walked back into a coffee shop, a gym, and an empty trail to find out what the weekday world looks like before I move in for good.