We’re kicking off ‘Millionaire Next Door Week’ on So Money podcast today. We’ve been revving up for this spectacular week for some time, I’ve been enlisting your help to either nominate yourself or people you know and excited to say that we received many more entries than we could record for this first week…But perhaps we’ll do a second week later in the fall. So many nuggets of wisdom to share…
Our first guest is Darrow Kirkpatrick, the author of Retiring Sooner: How to Accelerate your Financial Independence and who runs the blog Can I Retire Yet? And the answer for Darrow, at least is, YES. He, in fact retired when he was 50 years old with over a million in the bank. You wouldn’t really know…He has a modest home, rides his bike most places…And when I visited at his home a few years ago on a story for Yahoo News, I don’t recall seeing a TV in his living room.
Darrow graduated from the University of Virginia with a degree in Civil Engineering. He started and sold his own business…After 29 years of programming, designing and managing computer software, Darrow was able to retire at the ripe age of 50. How did he do it? Well we’ll discuss this in the show momentarily but he attributes a lot of his financial success to good ol’ hard work, frugality, serious saving and certain investing strategies. Patience helped along the way, too.
Some more takeaways from our interview today include:
- The very specific, calculated way that recurring costs like your cell phone bill, gym membership, can eat away at your retirement savings.
- Preparing to retire …. And then experiencing a market crash…what did he do? Oh and he had to send his son to college the next year. Gulp
- How Darrow invests…specifically where, how and the exact allocation
If you would like to learn more about Darrow Kirkpatrick, visit his websites darrowkirkpatrick.com and www.caniretireyet.com.
One of my favorite quotes from our interview: “Live below your means and invest the difference wisely” – Click to Tweet
