Having a Good Discussion is Like Having Riches

Having a Good Discussion, is like Having Riches; so goes an African proverb attributed to Kenya. Thanks for the richness of discussion around my post titled A4 Portfolio on the FB page ASAN IDEAS for WEALTH. The fastest way to learn is to engage with other practitioners of the subject matter. I looked through the multitude of notes and comments and decided to respond in a Q & A format. This allows me to capture all the thoughts in one place, and also provides some continuum to the different perspectives shared by readers.

My 50+ Year Retirement Map : Do I Even Stand a Chance?

The single biggest challenge of an early financial independence and retirement journey can be quite a revelation.  Most people would think that the toughest part would be, how to collect and grow your corpus at a rapid pace to meet the requirements of early retirement.  

Though partially true, the real challenge (once you have of course reached your required corpus size) is to figure out how to structure your hard earned savings in a manner that will last through the entire period while you cool your heels and chill out!

The twist thrown in by the EARLY retirement, is that you have to spend a much longer period retired, which creates all kinds of crazy challenges and surprises for you to deal with.  I need to figure out a way to carefully nurture my hard earned corpus, which I would have built through the accumulation phase of my financial career, and make it last through all the turbulence I expect to encounter during the distribution phase in my golden retirement years.

My A4 Portfolio: High Risk and (Hopefully) High Reward

Asset Allocation forms the bedrock of any investment strategy.  You will find reams of pages spent describing different asset allocation strategies, for different phases in your career.

I have put in a fair amount of thought into what would make a good asset composition for my situation.  There is one critical factor I need to keep in my mind.  Since I am driving towards EARLY FINANCIAL INDEPENDENCE, I need a strategy that is tailored to achieving this goal.  

In this post, I describe my thought process, and share the actual asset allocation that I currently have in my portfolio.  I am looking for suggestions if there is further improvement to incorporate into my plan.  Read on and let me know what you think

Confessions of a salaried worker

I have a confession to make. It is not pretty, and it may not be something I like (or dislike for that matter) very much, but it is the brutal truth. Facts are facts, and must be stated as such. 

You might wonder what do confessions have to do with a personal finance, early retirement blog?

Well this confession has to do with my professional earning career. It is not earth shattering, but it is probably true for a lot of us, so please bear with me, and read on.

Multiply Networth 6X in 6 Years

First of all I apologize for the rather obvious eyeball grabbing title of this post.  But hey I do have the data to back it up so maybe it is not too bad after all!  

Well this is a follow-on post to the one I had done about a month ago about growing networth.  That post basically talked about some data points pulled out over the last 6 years detailing the growth of my networth.  As I clarified in my post earlier, this was not meant to be any indicator of portfolio performance, but merely my attempt to track one of the key indicators in my journey to financial independence and early retirement.  The key reason I track my networth is to be able to understand the dynamics of personal portfolio management, and how to improve the management over time.  In some sense you are the fund manager of your own personal networth (which is your own personal AUM), and you are constantly looking for ways to manage it better and nurture it to reduce volatility, and improve growth rates, consistently year over year.