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.
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.
Landing the Plane, Part 2: Timing Your Exit and Maximizing Your Final Working Year
You've done the math. You know your number. Now comes the part nobody talks about: actually leaving.
Landing the Plane, Part 1: Building Your Drawdown Framework
Eight years ago I drove through the Valley of the Sun for the first time and knew Arizona was exactly the change we needed. Learning to live there required an entirely new set of rules. The transition from accumulation to distribution is exactly like that.