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.
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.
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.
The Sequence That Determines Whether Your Retirement Lasts (And How to Sleep Through the Chaos)
I graduated from graduate business school in May 2007 into a city buzzing with possibility. By 2008, I was watching people carry file boxes out of high-rise towers. What I learned about markets in that season, no classroom ever taught me. This post is about the one retirement math concept most people skip entirely, and the three protections that let you sleep at night when markets do what markets inevitably do.
A Special Welcome
If you just came from ESI Money, welcome. Desert FI exists for people at every stage of the FI journey, with a particular focus on what comes after the number. Not retirement as an escape, as a beginning.
The Seven Signs You're Ready for a Next Endeavor
After years of following the same personal finance philosophy, I was getting bored. Then a Saturday morning podcast introduced me to a then-foreign language: tax credits, Roth conversions, higher savings rates, and something called FIRE. A whole new world was opening to me. But the concept I couldn't find anywhere was the one I actually needed: how do you retire earlier, at a comfortable spending level, but continue to serve others and do work that genuinely matters? This post is about that question, and the seven signs that tell you whether you're ready to answer it.