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.
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.