I just realized that my passive income from investments (assuming an average 7% market return) has now surpassed what a minimum wage employee would make working 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year. WOWZA! At the beginning of 2018 I had $237,000, which would generate $16,590 at 7% while a minimum wage employee would receive $15,080. That’s wild!
I have an invisible minimum wage employee working hella hard while I sleep, away from my day job, which I think is a very cool idea. I’ve touched on this phenomenon in a previous post, but she was just a teenager working part time after school then. Now she’s a full-timer. This just got serious!
Now we should probably working on raising that minimum wage (Washington did recently) so the average isn’t so low!
I need to rant for a minute. Originally when I entered the work world I thought I was simply missing something, but after 7 years I can confidently say this: People like to cash in on buzzwords. Buzzwords they use incorrectly, buzzwords they don’t understand. The people they’re selling to also don’t seem to know what they’re talking about and don’t seem to care. Continue reading “Cashing In On Buzzwords” 
I’ve been working for almost 7 years and I have always had a hard time pinpointing exactly why I dislike traditional work so much. After help from my partner I’ve figured out one of the reasons. The 9-to-5 work schedule was originally created in the Industrial Revolution with physical laborers in mind. 8 hours being a cog in a factory gives you another 8 hours with your family (theoretically) and another 8 hours to sleep. Perfect! 
I’ve espoused before about how “Rainy Seattle” is a myth used to keep people from moving here in droves. Given how it’s the fastest growing city in the country it obviously didn’t work!
One of the things I want to learn in retirement is watercolor. I was feeling down a few weeks ago and started wondering – wait, why am I waiting until retirement? I’m still in this city for another 2.5 years. That’s plenty of time to learn a skill and get rid of any utensils I’ve collected for the hobby. 
I started this blog over 3 years ago to catalog my journey to early retirement. Originally I just wanted to start writing and getting my thoughts down on ‘paper’. As a result I didn’t take basically any time to decide on my platform. I typed in “free blog” into Google and (of course) Blogger, their subsidiary, was the first hit. 
Something shocking happened at work. I was hosting an event to share recent vacation pictures with the group. Our other presenter had recently spent a month in Mexico. He even wrote a blog post for our company about how to successfully work from anywhere. He used 2 weeks of PTO to basically work half time and extend his time there. Their main goal for the trip was to look into buying a house near Puerto Vallarta. 
The end of Q1 2018 has me at about 0% market gains for the year (while the S&P 500 is down -1.22%). This inspired me to do a thought experiment. What if the highly improbable happened and the market remains stagnant at a 0% gain until I retire? How long would that add to my working career? My initial thought was several years since the average of 7% would add $17,850 to my current portfolio so my savings for the year would be made of approximately 20% gains and 80% savings.