Dear Kristy, I just wanted to say that you have truly changed my life… Messages like this make my ears perk up. Despite having last heard from this particular reader about a decade ago, I remembered them. Back then, they had just discovered FIRE, and peppered us with questions about savings, investing, taxation, etc. Chief among her concerns was that she earned $60,000 a year and lived in an expensive city in the USA. Was any of this possible for her? And now? Thank you for the time taken t...| Millennial Revolution
Ever since President Trump trotted out that giant poster board on Liberation Day, there have been two competing narratives over how this would turn out. Economists have warned that the tariffs, which ranged from 15% to 50%, would ultimately be paid by consumers. The White House, on the other hand, has insisted that tariffs are basically free money for the government and that they would lower prices by bringing foreign investment back into the US. Serious investors never believed that overly r...| Millennial Revolution
A fellow FIRE blogger, MrNomadNumbers, came to visit us in Valencia recently and showed me some AI capabilities that blew my mind. Before he retired, he was a software developer, like us, so he knows his way around code. Within just 3 hours, he was able to not only write a song from scratch but also generate a video (using zero stock footage because everything was generated by AI), and add karaoke-style lyrics to it to boot. It looked so professional, it looked like it was developed by a prod...| Millennial Revolution
This FIRE experiment has been quite a ride. Through the ups and downs, I’ve documented our investing journey on this blog so that anyone can see how a portfolio like the one we taught in the Investment Workshop actually works in retirement. Transparency has helped people gain confidence that this approach actually works, which is great. But transparency has also helped us out as well. By forcing us to explain our investment decisions, it forces us to be better investors. Right now, our port...| Millennial Revolution
Travelling always involves an element of unpredictability, but when you travel with a child, that unpredictability goes into a whole new level. This happened to us recently, but not in the way you’re probably thinking. Let me tell you about our flight from Toronto to Zurich that we just did earlier this month. The route we were taking was an Air Canada flight from Toronto to Montreal. We had a layover of about 3 hours, at which point we would be boarding an Air Suisse flight from Montreal t...| Millennial Revolution
Traveling as a family is a challenge. Not only do you need to manage a tiny energizer bunny, while lugging around mountains of his gear, you’re doing it while jet-lagged and surviving on 2 hours of sleep. But for those who love travelling, all the obstacles are worth it. You get to spend quality family time together in new places, trying new foods, and soaking up the different languages and cultures that will, hopefully, make your kid a global citizen. But when you return to places as a fam...| Millennial Revolution
Hi everyone! We are still recovering from an exhausting travel week, which we will definitely share with you in future post, but now that we’re able to come up for air a bit, let’s do a reader case, shall we? Hi Firecracker: I love your reader cases and hope you will find my case interesting enough to respond. I am wondering when it makes sense to retire with a mortgage or line of credit or how many years I should be working before I can retire with manageable debt. My goals are: 1) to e...| Millennial Revolution
A concerned reader wrote to me today asking me if everything’s okay. Apparently, I hadn’t posted for nearly 2 weeks, and I’ve never missed a post, even days after giving birth. Don’t worry, we haven’t been kidnapped or taken hostage. We’ve just been travelling and running on fumes because jetlag is brutal when you’re a parent. Last year when we came to Europe with our infant, it was via a transatlantic cruise, so we managed to avoid the whole jet lag experience because the ship ...| Millennial Revolution
It’s been a while since we did a reader case and our inbox is piling up (a big thanks to everyone who writes in to tell us about your stories, we love reading them), so without further ado, here’s a reader case about geo-arbitrage! Hi Kristy and Bryce, We are a common-law couple, aged 52 and 53, from British Columbia. We recently bought Quit Like a Millionaire, and it completely reshaped how we see our future. We’ve both been grinders our whole lives — the people everyone counts on ...| Millennial Revolution
Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash The past 6 months have seen so many scary economic headlines that you just kind of get numb to it. Tariffs are going up! No wait, they’re paused! Now they’re back…| Millennial Revolution
Photo courtesy of PublicDomainPictures.com Last week, an article appeared on The Globe And Mail about an unfortunate case of an customer of Questrade who lost $70,000 after her trading accounts got…| Millennial Revolution
Photo courtesy royalty-free of HippoPX What time is it? It’s reader case time! Hi Kristy and Bryce Thank you for your awesome blog + investing course series! I’m also a big f…| Millennial Revolution
The Wanderer retired from his engineering job at a major Silicon Valley semiconductor company at the age of 33. He now travels the world, seeking out knowledge from other wealthy people, so that he…| Millennial Revolution
Last week, an article appeared on The Globe And Mail about an unfortunate case of an customer of Questrade who lost $70,000 after her trading accounts got hacked. In early January, Megan Tong lost around $70,000 after hackers logged into one of her self-directed investment accounts, cashed in all her holdings and briefly bought and sold tens of thousands of dollars worth of two Chinese stocks. But Ms. Tong’s discount brokerage, Questrade Financial Group Inc., has declined to reimburse her f...| Millennial Revolution
Photo by bady abbas on Unsplash They say parenting lets you relive your childhood. Great, if you had an awesome one. Not so great if you didn’t. Mine nearly made me swear off having kids fore…| Millennial Revolution
Photo by Kaptan Ravi Thakkar @ Wikipedia “May you always life in interesting times.” –Ancient Chinese Proverb To which I reply: Shut the Hell up, Ancient China! Oh, we live in interesting tim…| Millennial Revolution
Photo by Chang Duong on Unsplash “How do I get my family and friends onboard the FIRE train? We’ve had little success. Some friends are excited in the beginning but lose steam over time. Others are…| Millennial Revolution
An article from the Atlantic caught my eye recently, entitled “‘Success Addicts’ Choose Being Special Over Being Happy”. As a recovering “Success Addict” who quit her competitive engineering corpor…| Millennial Revolution
Photo by Jorge Ramírez on Unsplash Hope you’re all having a good summer and not drowning in sweat like we are. When we’re not out at community pools or chasing our toddler around at playgrounds, we…| Millennial Revolution
Photo by JessicaRodriguezRivas @ Wikipedia It’s been another whirlwind week in the news, and I haven’t really been commenting on most of what the Trump administration has been doing because, quite …| Millennial Revolution
“Of all the bloggers and podcasts I’ve read and listened to, I never heard anything mentioned about CCB or Canadian Child Benefit. I would love it if you write a blog about this so that every…| Millennial Revolution
Photo is public domain, courtesy of RawPixel.com Today’s reader case comes from a reader contemplating a move abroad and is wondering how this might speed up their journey to FIRE. Let’s find out! …| Millennial Revolution
Now that Little Matchstick is more than a year old, other parents and our family members have started asking, “are you putting him in daycare?” When it comes to raising kids, everyone and their dis…| Millennial Revolution
“You’re only renting because you don’t have kids.” “Your lifestyle doesn’t work for families.” “You’ll change your tune when you have a baby.” We’ve been hearing variations of the…| Millennial Revolution
The US flag and Canadian flag. Original public domain image from Flickr A few weeks ago, we did an example of how our portfolio is taxed after retirement, and showed that by constructing a portfoli…| Millennial Revolution
The US Stock market has been so volatile lately, it’s like a toddler on Krispy Kreme’s. Screaming one minute, giggling the next, and nothing anyone says can get it to calm down. This is why we don’…| Millennial Revolution
What a start to the new year this has been, and it’s only fricking February! While the US news has been bombarded with so much crazy crap that I can’t even keep up with it anymore, the news in Canada has been dominated by one topic: The threat of a US-Canada trade war. Trump will impose 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico for no good reason. The Dumbest Trade War in History, WSJ.com While the imposition of tariffs have been put on pause until March, the looming threat of a trade war and the ...| Millennial Revolution
Photo by Zooey @ Flickr After a brief reprieve following the inauguration where it looked like President Trump may have been open to not starting a trade war, it looks like tariffs are back on the …| Millennial Revolution
Now that we have a kid, naturally the next step is to buy a house, right? I mean, that’s what people tell us, anyway. Of all our friends and family members, the number of parents we know who chose to rent are next to nil. This is because not only is owning viewed by North Americans as the ultimate status symbol, renting carries a stigma. I’ve heard the phrase “renting is throwing your money away” and “home ownership is the key to wealth” so many times I can no longer roll my eyes ...| Millennial Revolution
Life is weird sometimes. We spend the first half of our lives trying not to get pregnant, and the 2nd half trying to get pregnant. And that’s how I found myself injecting strange chemicals into my belly at 7am in the public bathroom of my fertility clinic, with seconds to spare before my one-hour window ran out. Why they had to schedule my doctor’s appointment within an hour of the exact time I needed to administer the meds was beyond me. After feeling the biting sting of the meds as I pu...| Millennial Revolution
Now that we have an infant son, we no longer have the time to spend hours on the phone with Airbnb support, live in dangerous “ghost hotels” disguised as homes, or risk getting cancelled on last minute. Unfortunately, relying on hotels for long term stays wouldn’t work for us since we need a kitchen and laundry more than ever. Luckily (or unluckily), since we’ve had to get a long-term rental to stay around and help take care of my father-in-law over the past few years, we discovered a...| Millennial Revolution
The Wanderer retired from his engineering job at a major Silicon Valley semiconductor company at the age of 33. He now travels the world, seeking out knowledge from other wealthy people, so that he…| Millennial Revolution
We’ve all collectively been through a rough few years. After a brutal global pandemic and stock market crash, followed by years of inflation and the subsequent rise in interest rates, you can be forgiven for feeling kind of shitty about the state of your finances. The rising cost of living has affected everyone, and on top of that there’s now a housing crisis to deal with too! While Millennials were seen as whiny and entitled, Gen Z has been described as “financially hopeless,” and ha...| Millennial Revolution
You asked; we delivered. Welcome to the Millennial Revolution Investment Workshop, a step-by-step guide to teach you how to invest from the ground up! How does it work? Right here in this space, we will be running a year-long workshop, using REAL money, in the REAL stock market, to show you exactly how to build your own portfolio of low-cost index ETFs, just like ours. And we will be there, every step of the way, to help you out and answer your questions. And the cost for all this?….FREE!!...| Millennial Revolution
Hey, remember travelling? Yeah, I sure do. As the world continues to drop COVID-related restrictions for travellers, tourist operators have reported a surge in bookings. Clearly, the world misses international travel as much as we do, and while it may still take some time for the international tourism sector to recover, I’m more than happy to contribute to that recovery. Accessing Money Abroad Used To Suck When FIRECracker and I took our first trip together to the Caribbean waaaay back in 2...| Millennial Revolution
TV show guest: “Back in my day, we didn’t have video games. The only toys we had were chalk that we used to draw on a sidewalk” Eric (*incredulous*): “You had chalk?” Me (*even more incredulous*): “You had a SIDEWALK?” I never expected to find my country bumpkin doppelganger in Miami, but that’s exactly what happened when I met my Airbnb host several years ago. A flight attendant who grew up in southern Kentucky, Eric had a surprisingly similar childhood to mine, despite being...| Millennial Revolution
Hi! I’m FIRECracker, a computer engineer/children’s author, and I used to live in one of the most expensive cities in Canada. Like my fellow Millennials, I was desperate to make my parents proud…| Millennial Revolution
What time is it? It’s reader case time! This reader case caught my eye because this international family decided to say no to the conventional North American 9-5 lifestyle by starting their own business and moving away from the US and to an island in the Pacific! They are also at a major turning point in their FIRE journey (something we’ve had experience with). So, without further ado, let’s get to it! /*********************************************************************************/ H...| Millennial Revolution
Last week, stock markets looked like they were on the edge of teetering over the abyss, as stocks plunged in multiple stock exchanges around the world. The Japanese Nikkei 225 index tanked more than 12% on Monday, marking its worst performance since 1987. The S&P 500 sank more than 3% and shed $1.3 trillion in value, notching its worst day since the 2022 bear market. The Dow lost 1,000 points that same day, and the Nasdaq Composite ventured further into correction territory. All three major i...| Millennial Revolution
After being retired for 10 years and preaching about FIRE, I’ve learned somethings about why certain people are more resistant to FIRE than others, but overall, it’s still a mystery. In fact, even though we get daily e-mails from readers thanking us for helping them get to FI, most of our family and friends are surprisingly not interested at all. I thought this might have something to do with...| Millennial Revolution
We love doing reader cases on this blog, as that’s kind of our way of giving back to the FIRE community that has been so kind to us over the years. Most of the time, we don’t really have any idea whether our analysis has any actual impact. This isn’t one of those times. Hi Kristy and Bryce, It’s been a little more than 5 years since my husband wrote in with our story that you took on as a case study. I wanted to give you a happy update. I mean, who doesn’t like to hear “Hey, I...| Millennial Revolution
Hi FIRECracker and Wanderer (and Little Matchstick), I could also title this, “I think I’m mathing my shit wrong.” I’ve never been a Mathlete and always like to use the excuse that I was an art student and the reason we’re “starving artists” is because they don’t teach us how to do math. I know that’s just an excuse but I really flounder around in anything having to do with arithmetic. To be honest, I spent the first part of my working life oblivious to the FIRE possibility....| Millennial Revolution
Every time I think this decade can’t get any crazier, I keep getting proved wrong. 2024 was never going to be a walk in the park, but holy shit! By now you’ve all heard that former President Trump narrowly escaped an assassination attempt by some nutjob at a rally in Pennsylvania. The investigation is ongoing, with updates seemingly every few hours revealing new details about the shooter, but regardless of how that goes, we’ve all just witnessed a pivotal moment in American political hi...| Millennial Revolution
