This Site

Welcome

I’m Darrow Kirkpatrick, the founder, and I’m glad you’re here. This site is focused on the personal finance needs of anyone who is thinking about retirement or early retirement. The initial audience is my own baby boom generation, but anyone who is interested in financial independence and financial freedom will find value here.

This site is different from other personal finance blogs, in being written by someone older, who actually has saved, invested, and retired early. The ideas covered here aren’t speculation, future plans, or wishful thinking. They are firsthand experience.

Goals

The purpose of this blog is three-fold:

  1. To serve as a trustworthy and independent resource for readers as they navigate one of modern life’s most complex and expensive transitions: retirement.
  2. To make the the world a bit better for us, our children, our grandchildren, and the planet, by encouraging prudence, thrift, and living within our means.
  3. To generate some modest income to pay for operating expenses, compensate for the many hours of work involved, and provide a little retirement “mad” money for myself and my dear wife.…

Content

Most of the posts on this blog fall into three primary categories: Saving, Investing, or Retiring. They are generally based on my own personal experience of saving, investing, and achieving financial independence over the course of a professional career.

Understand that I don’t dispense professional investing or retirement advice. This is an educational or entertainment channel. What you get here is my own experience of the early retirement process, integrated with my reading of new research from some of the true experts, simplified using my engineering sensibility, for my everyday application.

Some topics that I don’t focus on here include: active investing, business/marketing, credit cards, debt, estate planning, individual stock picks, market timing, options/futures/commodities, and tax strategies.

I don’t spend time on extreme viewpoints. This blog is for regular people, with busy lives, trying to manage their money and retire, without a lot of time for debating financial minutiae. I also steer away from discussing politics, pointing fingers, and speculating about the future. I’d rather stay focused on the present financial reality we are all living in, and leave changing the world to other venues.

The web is wonderful because there are forums for discussion of every imaginable topic, and everybody can have their own space as well. This blog is primarily a personal publishing platform for finance topics that interest me and that I believe are of value to others.

Comments

I love hearing from readers. You can use the contact page if you want a private line to my inbox. Be assured that answering you is a very high priority for me, though at times there may be more mail than I can handle, and individual responses won’t be possible.…

Note this site does not provide a discussion forum. Comments are disabled on older posts, an unfortunate measure we take to deal with the quantity of comment spam we receive. Readers don’t see it, but behind the scenes here we are dealing 2-3x the volume of comment spam (bad-faith actors trying to sell products or phish for credentials via our site). Keeping comments live for old posts would overwhelm our current resources.

Advertising

Running a blog like the one you see here entails some non-trivial costs for the software services that make it all hang together. And, though it’s a labor of love and interest, the hours involved are often not so different from a job commitment!

I look for ways to generate income from this site that avoid conflicts of interest and are not harmful or distracting to my readers. There are many choices, some of which fail the above tests, in my opinion. (I don’t accept paid links, write or accept paid reviews/posts, or use high-pressure hover forms, for example.)

You will see some advertisements on this site. I do my best to ensure they are clearly identified, and relevant to my readers. But note that I have only limited control over individual offers.

See also: Terms of Use.