Personal blog on early retirement and analytics projects. I write about what I learn as I am learning it.
Costa Rica keeps coming up in conversations about digital nomad visas, and it’s not hard to see why. The country launched its remote work program in a clean, accessible package — a defined income threshold, a single-entry point for applications, and a one-year permit that’s renewable. It’s not the cheapest option in Latin America, and it’s certainly not Europe, but it occupies an interesting middle ground that a lot of remote workers find genuinely appealing.
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.
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.
Early retirement extreme is the name of both a book and a philosophy — Jacob Lund Fisker’s take on FIRE, built around a savings rate so aggressive it makes the rest of the FIRE community look relaxed by comparison. The core pitch: cut spending down to something close to a student budget, save the rest, and you can be done working in roughly five to seven years instead of the standard four decades. I retired early myself, on a much less extreme version of this math, and I’ve got genuinely mixed feelings about ERE — some of it I think is the most useful idea in the whole FIRE space, and some of it I think oversells how many people can actually live it.
Continue reading “Early Retirement Extreme: What I Actually Think”
Let’s face it, we live in a culture that glorifies busyness. The business of busyness. It’s as if being busy is a badge of honor that we wear with pride. We fill our schedules to the brim with meetings, appointments, and endless to-do lists. But why? Are we really accomplishing anything or are we just spinning our wheels?
