We moved to Atlanta in 2005 after living in New Jersey for six years. Like most of our moves, it was a planned move. Though we had a nice circle of friends, family, good job opportunities, access to a great city like NYC but it was the time to move. Of course several reasons for the same, let me get into some of these:
Paris was the only disappointment, out of all European cities that we visited last year. I guess because the expectations were high. We had heard so much about Paris. The Maharajas (and other elites from India) are known for their love affair with the French designers for centuries. Even now, the city remains a magnet for the most.
As our train approached Paris, it reminded me of Delhi. The old and not so tall buildings, some of the avenues and streets are just like what we see in Connaught Place, New Delhi.
After doing all the research, we narrowed down to only a few landmarks: Luxembourg Gardens, Palace of Versailles, Arc de Triomphe, Notre Dame Cathedral and Eiffel Tower (of course). I will start with the most favorite first:
I hope you have read Greg Smith’s letter by now. It takes a great deal of courage to do something like this. I wrote about the very same issue in one of my earlier posts:
“Hiring wrong Financial Advisor: The Big Financial advisory firms such as Goldman, Merrill, Credit Suisse and other prestigious ones are the Worst. Even the firms like Fidelity and Schwab that are portrayed as Customer Friendly are bad. Your best bet is to work with a Fee based Independent Financial Advisor.”
Now you get to hear it straight from the horse’s mouth.
But if you have been in the corporate world long enough, this shouldn’t come to you as a surprise. I have found such ethical issues with all the Fortune 100 companies that I worked for and it is not limited to financial or brokerage industry either.
This is the question that we usually ask when we have amassed a decent balance in our savings or checking account. For some, it might be 10K and for others a million. The amount is irrelevant. We are willing to venture out and ready to take risk as long as the return is higher than the savings accounts or fixed deposits.
Should we invest in real estate, mutual funds, stocks, gold or insurance? We turn to our accountant for advise, watch or listen to stock channels and other investor friends. We start reading Money, Fortune, Kiplinger’s or other personal finance magazines. In addition to all this, the endless hours are spent surfing Morningstar, MSN money, Motley Fool and other financial websites, researching the best performing mutual funds, industries or stocks.
Most of us have wondered about this by now i.e. how much is really enough to retire comfortably. In case you haven’t, I am sure you will at some point in near future.
Actually “Retiring” is not the right word, I should use “Financially Free”. Many of us want to start a business, pursue our interests and hobbies, travel, spend more time with the family. There can be many reasons to leave the corporate world. But before we take the plunge, we need to be absolutely sure of our investment plan that will allow us to live comfortably without having to work again.
I have wondered about this number and studied extensively on the subject for the last 4-5 years. I also spoke to many friends and relatives to find out their monthly expenses. The idea is to keep it simple to begin with. We will make an assumption that we have already paid for our house, cars and have separate buckets/savings for kids college education and for any other major medical expense. It is easy to come up with these numbers or any other one time(like settling costs) expenses.
What I’m going to focus on right now is the corpus we need for our recurring monthly maintenance expenses like food, utilities, clothing, transportation, kids school education etc. I will use two separate examples: one for living in the US (similar to other developed economies) and second: Living in India (similar to other developing countries).
Regardless where we live, our investment plan or the Freedom Portfolio (like the term?) 🙂 will have to ensure following three things:
