Tag Archives: Financial Independence

(Disclosure: Some of the links below may be affiliate links) Recently, I realized that too much optimization of our finances was creating complexity that I did not want anymore. Optimization of finances is about balance. Until recently, we were optimizing for the best price. Now, we are trying to make our finances simpler in a few ways. In this article, I will discuss what we are planning to do. Optimization is all about balance Sometimes, it is essential to realize that optimization for...

(Disclosure: Some of the links below may be affiliate links) Retire Early The Simple Guide is now available as an ebook and hardcover! I wrote this book with Thomas Walke, another blogger in Switzerland. Our book is about guiding the reader to their financial independence and possibly to their early retirement. Retire Early The Simple Guide is a general book applicable to most countries, but we primarily think about European countries. This article discusses Retire Early: The Simple Guide in...

(Disclosure: Some of the links below may be affiliate links) You have probably heard a lot about Financial Independence. A lot of things on this blog are about my path to Financial Independence (FI). But why would you want to be financially independent? There are many reasons for wanting to reach financial independence. And as you will see, retiring may not be the most significant reason. In this article, I list the main reasons people want to be Financially Independent. Of course, the...

(Disclosure: Some of the links below may be affiliate links) Interactive Brokers is an excellent broker from the United States. It is known for its cheap fees and its unique range of offered investment products. It is being used by many personal finance bloggers, for instance. It is currently the best broker that allows access to U.S. ETFs. And U.S. ETFs are the most efficient ETFs for Swiss investors. In this guide, I go over the details of how to open an Interactive Brokers account. It...

(Disclosure: Some of the links below may be affiliate links) When you retire based on a safe withdrawal rate, you withdraw from your principal month after month. The main risk is that you run out of money before the end of your retirement. The main case when that would happen is if you retire just before a major stock market crash. A bad sequence of returns is a big risk for your retirement. One way to reduce the risk is to reduce the safe withdrawal rate you are using. But that means you...

(Disclosure: Some of the links below may be affiliate links) Many people want to know whether they should rebalance their portfolios. This is an excellent question, and it becomes essential once in retirement. Rebalancing is the fact of selling the shares that have overperformed and then buy the stocks that underperformed. The idea is to keep your portfolio allocation to the same level. People disagree on whether you should rebalance in retirement or not. People do not even agree on that...

(Disclosure: Some of the links below may be affiliate links) If you plan to retire early based on a withdrawal rate strategy, you base your FIRE plan on historical data. So, what would happen if the future is very different from the past? We obviously cannot predict the future. So, what can we do? We can improve our FIRE plan with some margin of safety! In this article, we will see several ways of adding some margin of safety into your FIRE planning. The need for some margin of safety If...

(Disclosure: Some of the links below may be affiliate links) Your Safe Withdrawal Rate (SWR) is an essential component of your retirement planning if you plan to retire based on your investment portfolio. We have already talked at length about this method of retirement, the essence of the Financial Independence and Retire Early (FIRE) movement. But we have not talked in-depth about how to choose a Safe Withdrawal Rate for your situation. No SWR would fit every situation. And while there...

You have probably heard of the 4% rule if you are interested in early retirement. This rule states that if you withdraw 4% of your portfolio every year, you can sustain your withdrawals for 30 years. But do you know where it comes from? If you have read a lot about it, you probably heard about the Trinity Study. This study is where it all started. But do you know what the Trinity Study is? Probably not. A lot of things people are saying about the Trinity Study are...

(Disclosure: Some of the links below may be affiliate links) You have probably heard of the 4% rule if you are interested in early retirement. This rule states that if you withdraw 4% of your portfolio every year, you can sustain your withdrawals for 30 years. But do you know where it comes from? If you have read a lot about it, you probably heard about the Trinity Study. This study is where it all started. But do you know what the Trinity Study is? Probably not. A lot of things people are...