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Survey about sustainable and responsible investing
Old 02-13-2014, 03:24 AM   #21
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Survey about sustainable and responsible investing

Dear forum members,

As part of my dissertation about sustainable and responsible investing at the University of Regensburg in Germany, I am carrying out a study about motives, preferences and beliefs of socially responsible investors.

Since the success of a study depends on high participation, I would like to ask you for your support. I would be very grateful if you would have a few minutes to take part in this survey. It takes only about 10 minutes to complete the questionnaire: https://www.soscisurvey.de/nachhaltigkeit2013/?r=ert

Thank you very much in advance for your support!

Best regards,
Mai
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Old 04-23-2014, 07:23 PM   #22
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Consider having a countdown clock instead. Set it for your estimated early retirement date!
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Seeking to interview ERs for Men's Health magazine
Old 06-04-2015, 07:45 AM   #23
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Seeking to interview ERs for Men's Health magazine

Hi ERs,

I'm a Contributing Editor to Men's Health magazine. I'm writing a feature with tips on how to retire 10+ years early and seeking stories to back them up.

Please reach out to me if you are a male (this is Men's Health!), have retired earlier than 60, and can discuss any (or more than one) of the following and their specific impact on your finances:

1) Convincing your boss/company to let you retire gradually
2) Supplemental income from a casual/fun/interesting job (including where you get a lot of work online--my editor is interested in sites like eLance and Fiverr.)
3) Aggressive saving techniques that really moved the needle
4) Multiple streams of income, especially landlording
5) Downsizing--did you do it early? Financial impact?
6) Paying off your mortgage (esp after staying in the house for a long time)
7) Retiring somewhere much cheaper, especially international
8) Impact of staying healthy on lower self-paid insurance premiums, etc.
9) Did aggressive investing pay off for you?

Please give a few sentences of detail relevant to the above and even a few figures on financial impact. Please be available for a phone call (not just email) after I've gotten back to you. And just in case I get a lot of responses, I apologize in advance if I can't get back to everyone. I really appreciate your time!

You can reach out to me directly at rsine@outlook.com.
(And yes, my wife and I would love to retire early!)

Thanks very much for reading!

Best regards,

Richard Sine
rsine@outlook.com
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Old 06-07-2015, 09:59 PM   #24
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Richard Sine View Post
Hi ERs,

I'm a Contributing Editor to Men's Health magazine. I'm writing a feature with tips on how to retire 10+ years early and seeking stories to back them up.

Please reach out to me if you are a male (this is Men's Health!), have retired earlier than 60, and can discuss any (or more than one) of the following and their specific impact on your finances:

1) Convincing your boss/company to let you retire gradually
2) Supplemental income from a casual/fun/interesting job (including where you get a lot of work online--my editor is interested in sites like eLance and Fiverr.)
3) Aggressive saving techniques that really moved the needle
4) Multiple streams of income, especially landlording
5) Downsizing--did you do it early? Financial impact?
6) Paying off your mortgage (esp after staying in the house for a long time)
7) Retiring somewhere much cheaper, especially international
8) Impact of staying healthy on lower self-paid insurance premiums, etc.
9) Did aggressive investing pay off for you?

Please give a few sentences of detail relevant to the above and even a few figures on financial impact. Please be available for a phone call (not just email) after I've gotten back to you. And just in case I get a lot of responses, I apologize in advance if I can't get back to everyone. I really appreciate your time!

You can reach out to me directly at rsine@outlook.com.
(And yes, my wife and I would love to retire early!)

Thanks very much for reading!

Best regards,

Richard Sine
rsine@outlook.com
Richard, I just sent you an e-mail from NordsNords [at] Gmail with more information and my phone number.
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Old 06-08-2015, 02:06 PM   #25
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Richard Sine View Post
Hi ERs,

I'm a Contributing Editor to Men's Health magazine. I'm writing a feature with tips on how to retire 10+ years early and seeking stories to back them up.

Please reach out to me if you are a male (this is Men's Health!), have retired earlier than 60, and can discuss any (or more than one) of the following and their specific impact on your finances:

1) Convincing your boss/company to let you retire gradually
2) Supplemental income from a casual/fun/interesting job (including where you get a lot of work online--my editor is interested in sites like eLance and Fiverr.)
3) Aggressive saving techniques that really moved the needle
4) Multiple streams of income, especially landlording
5) Downsizing--did you do it early? Financial impact?
6) Paying off your mortgage (esp after staying in the house for a long time)
7) Retiring somewhere much cheaper, especially international
8) Impact of staying healthy on lower self-paid insurance premiums, etc.
9) Did aggressive investing pay off for you?

Please give a few sentences of detail relevant to the above and even a few figures on financial impact. Please be available for a phone call (not just email) after I've gotten back to you. And just in case I get a lot of responses, I apologize in advance if I can't get back to everyone. I really appreciate your time!

You can reach out to me directly at rsine@outlook.com.
(And yes, my wife and I would love to retire early!)

Thanks very much for reading!

Best regards,

Richard Sine
rsine@outlook.com
Folks, I just finished a phone call with Richard Sine and it went very well. He does a professional interview and Men's Health is buying a real no-foolin' article on early retirement. I guess you could say that financial health is part of Men's Health.

The best part of the interview is where he mentioned that I'll be hearing from their fact-checker. It tells me that the magazine is spending the money to do it right. The SEO works so much better when your name is spelled correctly, too...

He's seeking more guys to interview, whether you're still pursuing FI or already FI or already FIRE'd. Fuego, JJac, I think you two would be particularly good interviews because of your age and kids and (JJac) expat lifestyle. ClifP, you'd be great from the perspectives of experience (including two recessions during ER), Hawaii, landlording, and angel investing. That's off the top of my head-- there are probably other posters here who I don't know very well but who are exactly the type of men he'd like to speak with.

If you're a personal-finance blogger who wants to raise his profile: this is one of the ways you do it.

I'm going to e-mail Richard a few names of other people who are either already FI or who are doing a great job of figuring it out. Feel free to contact him directly, and feel free to contact me if you have any questions about being interviewed.
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Old 06-08-2015, 03:13 PM   #26
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Thank you Nords. I can confirm the feature will be fact-checked.

And I understand Brewer12345 may just enjoy flaming people, but I should say that I am open to suggestions of strategies not on my list, especially if we can document in detail how they allowed you to retire years earlier. Thanks.
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Old 06-08-2015, 03:52 PM   #27
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Richard, if you wander around these boards you see a lot of diversity but a number of common themes around living below your means, regularly saving for retirement, taking full advantage of any employer match, investing in no-load, low-expense equity indexed mutual funds, etc. No particular magic and mostly what we all read about but many people ignore, but just slow and steady saving and investing discipline and avoiding wealth destroying traps like cashing out retirement savings when you change jobs to splurge on a vacation, avoiding get-rich-quick schemes, and things like that.
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Old 06-08-2015, 10:43 PM   #28
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Originally Posted by brewer12345 View Post
Help me out here, Nords: we are talking about a reporter who has clearly decided what the story will be, what works, etc. and is just looking for real world examples that happen to fit his pre-conceived notions about how things work. Isn't this a little, oh, misleading/slimy/garbage journalism?
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Originally Posted by brewer12345 View Post
Actually, no. I have just seen a lengthy conga line of reporters who come here looking for real world meat to feed into their preconceived story line and I have to wonder why the management here tolerates it and why upstanding, fine people like Nords play along (I understand everyone supplying the meat likes the media exposure). So please, sir, explain how the filling out of the story line is ethical journalism...
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Well, as they say down at Sing Sing, silence implies consent. I guess we can all draw our own conclusions on this one.
Yikes, Brewer, it's just been a few hours since your first of these three posts, and we have the time-zone difference too. Gimme a chance to respond before you carry out the execution.

Another perception of the reporting would be that the writer already knows how FI works and simply wants to confirm the details from someone who's done it. Or he wants to hear what didn't work in those assumptions. Or he's just crafting a human-interest story with no scandals or hype-- full of boring advice like "LBYM" and "high savings rate". If only he could jazz it up with some action photos like Hawaii surfing... oh wait.

He could find plenty of examples of failure too, but he probably has all he needs from Early-Retirement-Fails.org. I'm not sure whether there's a market for those articles unless it's celebrity schadenfreude.

As for those preconceived notions: he knows now that #1 didn't work for me (and it probably wouldn't have worked for your employer). He already knows that Fiverr and eLance (#2) are probably only a living wage if you're spending that money in India or the Philippines. He knows that my spouse and I didn't do #5 (in fact we upsized) or #6 (although we refinanced multiple times). And he knows now that we didn't do #7 or #8, either.

But I referred him to more ERs who have done those things.

Interesting side issue: I shared what I've learned about freelancing over the last four years, and now he has a whole new bunch of people to interview. Maybe it's for Men's Health, or maybe it's just for swapping tips to boost his own freelance career. Either way we helped out each other.

What he's going to do with Men's Health is connect me with more military readers who can learn how to reach financial independence. I'm not sure how that would be seen as misleading/slimy/garbage journalism.

I've done interviews where the interrogator interviewer had preconceived notions about how we reach financial independence. Thankfully this was not one of those interviews. I suspect that the moderators are pretty proficient at screening out those guys, too.

I may be a little out of touch because I only drop by here once a week to search for keywords like "Nords" and "military", or whenever I get an alert to one of my subscribed threads. If you guys have links to that conga line of reporters then I'll track them down too.
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Old 06-09-2015, 12:19 AM   #29
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Smoke 'em if you've got 'em. As a relative newb here, it's been cool seeing Nords show up in various articles. Similar with the Go Curry Cracker couple. They help put faces on the lifestyle.
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Old 06-09-2015, 06:19 AM   #30
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Yikes, Brewer, it's just been a few hours since your first of these three posts, and we have the time-zone difference too. Gimme a chance to respond before you carry out the execution.
Nords, my last post was really directed to our roving reporter from the tower of journalistic integrity Men's Health. Mea culpa. I should have been more clear. I am glad that you got something out of the exchange with him.
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Old 06-10-2015, 07:54 AM   #31
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Nords, my last post was really directed to our roving reporter from the tower of journalistic integrity Men's Health. Mea culpa. I should have been more clear. I am glad that you got something out of the exchange with him.
No worries.

There are probably a lot of military readers at Men's Health... we'll know when it's published.
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Old 06-12-2015, 06:31 PM   #32
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Sigh. Suffice it to say that after more than two decades of writing and reporting, I am aware of the danger of basing articles on preconceived notions. My suggested strategies were based on previous conversations with, and reading the stories of, early retirees. But thank you, brewer, for prompting me to add that I was open to other strategies. After further conversations and more research over the past week, however, I can daresay that I covered a lot of the bases even with that first post.

The good news is a few readers of this forum have blown past all the flame to reach out to me. Some of the conversations I've had should appear in the feature, and your stories may inspire others to reach financial independence sooner.
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Old 06-12-2015, 06:57 PM   #33
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There was nothing in the first post that called my name. Like many of us here, we just plodded along. But of course that's not what readers want to read. It sounded like the same article that gets written every month, linked to by one of our own, discussed with the conclusion of 'entertaining, but nothing new'. Hopefully this one won't be described as click bait, but that depends usually on the title that the editor decides on.
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Job that helps you retire -- for Men's Health magazine
Old 06-18-2015, 04:29 AM   #34
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Job that helps you retire -- for Men's Health magazine

Well, at the risk of further, uh, commentary...again, this is for Men's Health magazine:

Are there any men out there who have continued working at a job they really enjoy--a job that also helps them pay the bills and helped to ensure that they could retire early? If so, I'd enjoy talking to you--but would need to do so by Saturday to hit my deadline. (Sorry, making $ by blogging about FIRE doesn't count--a good strategy, but a small niche!)

Thanks!
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Old 06-18-2015, 10:39 PM   #35
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Richard,

Sent you a PM.

Since you have walked into the lions' den and want to know so much about us, tell us about yourself. It's only fair.

What are you doing? How are you planning for retirement/eventual permanent unemployment? Why are you still working? When and how do you expect to stop laboring in the fields of mammon? Do you own rentals? Inquiring minds want to know.

Ed
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Old 06-19-2015, 04:31 AM   #36
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Not to mention "avoiding divorce." Although there is precious little on the board about how people actually accomplish that, other than "pick the right spouse to begin with," so might not be so useful to Richard.

I enjoy reading Men's Health when it appears in the gym. I find men's magazines much more interesting than women's magazines, plus there are always beefcake photos disguised as "25 Ways to Get Ripped Abs in 2 Weeks".... Too bad Richard doesn't want female input...or maybe I could just say "Call me Joe" and say I'm a man!

Amethyst

Quote:
Originally Posted by pb4uski View Post
Richard, if you wander around these boards you see a lot of diversity but a number of common themes around living below your means, regularly saving for retirement, taking full advantage of any employer match, investing in no-load, low-expense equity indexed mutual funds, etc. .
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Old 06-19-2015, 05:56 AM   #37
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Hi Ed, if you must know...

I am 44 and have 3 small children, so I'm nowhere near financial independence. I'm a writer so if/when I'm able to scale back to semi-retire it shouldn't be so hard. But my wife is a corporate executive type with a larger income than mine. If we save a good deal then she should be able to retire in her late 50s, which will be my mid-60s. Think that's the best we can pull off!
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Old 06-19-2015, 09:02 AM   #38
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Hi again, Richard,
Between the two of you, what percentage of your gross income are you saving in retirement accounts? If you aren't saving at least 10%, you are spending too much elsewhere. I tell my kids, save 20% and fund your Roth first.

I am as serious as a heart attack. I learned this myself too late. It is not really about early retirement, it is about long-term survival.

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Old 06-19-2015, 11:14 AM   #39
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Originally Posted by Amethyst View Post
Not to mention "avoiding divorce." Although there is precious little on the board about how people actually accomplish that, other than "pick the right spouse to begin with," so might not be so useful to Richard.

I enjoy reading Men's Health when it appears in the gym. I find men's magazines much more interesting than women's magazines, plus there are always beefcake photos disguised as "25 Ways to Get Ripped Abs in 2 Weeks".... Too bad Richard doesn't want female input...or maybe I could just say "Call me Joe" and say I'm a man!

Amethyst
People on this board are better at avoiding divorce than any group I have ever heard about.

But avoiding divorce seems to be a somewhat negative and uncertain goal.. Many people here have no intention of having children, Absent this desire on the part of a man, by far the easiest and most secure way of avoiding divorce is avoiding marriage. It is also the method that can never require you to make painful compromises (In marriage, compromise is a misnomer. It usually means surrender by the party most at risk)

For a guy, a breakup is usually pain enough. Add to that that she usually walks off with the house, a hard to forecast hunk of your money and stuff, and your kids if any, and it gets to be more than many who are not under some sort of delusional state would agree to risk.

Ha
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Old 06-19-2015, 12:32 PM   #40
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Richard, good luck with your article. You sound serious and earnest. As another female member of this board, I've noticed that financial issues for early retirement are identical between men and women on this board: LBYM, avoid divorce (if possible!), invest early and maximize your investing, don't have 10 kids, find work that pays well, etc. I suspect that is more due to the interests of those who participate here than anything else. I think here there is also a mindset that develops that our self worth does not depend on our occupation, our job title, or our paycheck, but from finding our various ways of enjoying life. Most of my former co-workers, both male and female, have a different view of their work life than I did from the very beginning, and would be lost in this online community. Wanting freedom from work is a mindset that is not gender based.
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