Personal blog on early retirement, a little traveling, and analytics projects. I write about what I learn as I am learning it.
I have Italian roots, and for years I’ve had this persistent fantasy of working from a terrace somewhere in Tuscany or a flat in Bologna — laptop open, espresso at hand, pretending I live there instead of just visiting. So when I started seriously researching digital nomad visas, Italy was the first one I looked into. The short version: Italy was late to formalize this, but the situation has changed, and there are real options now.
“How many days in five months” is a very strange question to write a post about but I am learning about SEO (Search Engine Optimization). And using Ahrefs keyword research tool I found out the question is a very good keyword to target. At the end, I explain how to calculate it using Excel (or any spreadsheet).
This is what Google tells us:
The premise of “Die with Zero” sounds provocative: Bill Perkins argues you should plan to spend all your money before you die, optimizing for maximum life experiences rather than maximum wealth at death. Not “die debt-free” — that’s a different book. Perkins is talking about people who will almost certainly die with millions in unspent savings because they never gave themselves permission to spend it on things that actually mattered while they were healthy enough to enjoy them. The title is deliberately extreme. The actual argument is more nuanced than it sounds.
I picked it up because I’m interested in the other end of the FIRE question — not just how to achieve financial independence, but what to actually do with it.
Linear programming is a mathematical method for optimizing the allocation of resources — maximizing profit, minimizing cost, that kind of thing. I’ve built dozens of these models over 20+ years in operations research, and one concept I lean on constantly, and that clients almost never intuit on their own, is the shadow price: what a change in one constraint does to your optimal solution.
Fair warning: I wrote this post after a genuinely frustrating afternoon dealing with Vanguard. I’ve kept it up because the complaints are real and I still hear them constantly from other investors. Take the title at face value—it’s rant-y—but stay for the part where I acknowledge what they actually do well, because that part is also true.
Continue reading “Vanguard Sucks”