Retire by Degrees

  • Dan McDermott

    Best Ever Mid-Year Resolutions

    This summer I’m reading The Bridge of San Luis Rey, by Thornton Wilder. One endorsement touts the book as “…a towering achievement in American fiction and a novel read throughout the world!”  So, I figured I can self-label my blog post the “best ever.” If you’ve traditionally made resolutions and set goals on January 1st, then the midpoint of the year is…

  • Dan McDermott

    Phased Retirement: A Bad Time to Retire?

    With the recent steep market downturns I’ve been reading more articles about whether this is a bad time to retire?  If your nest egg has suffered, will you have enough to live on comfortably?  Will the markets go even lower?  Will inflation continue to diminish your purchasing power? Well, as they say, it sells papers. But if 2 or 3…

  • Dan McDermott

    Phased Retirement: Gap Year

    My past posts have focused on a typical approach to phased retirement.  It seems funny to even write “typical” since the phased approach is certainly less practiced than retirement-as-we-know-it. But a lunch conversation with a friend this week made me think about alternative approaches and how they have value and deserve to be considered as well. My concept of phased…

  • Dan McDermott

    Phased Retirement: The Hype Cycle

    There’s a lot of hype about retirement.  Some of the buildup is external via advertising, articles, well-intentioned friends and marketing spin about the wonderful opportunities that await us. But some of it comes from our own internal voices. We go back-and-forth between thinking about how wonderful it will be to ditch all those things about work that we don’t like…

  • Dan McDermott

    Phased Retirement: Tapering

    This week’s post was originally published on the HumbleDollar blog yesterday:

  • Dan McDermott

    Phased Retirement: Uncertain Times

    Today’s times are uncertain.  Pick up the paper, or glance at the news online on your laptop or phone. Inflation, war in Ukraine, falling stock market, and Covid cases rising again.  It’s mostly scary news with unknown outcomes. But here’s the thing. The times are always uncertain for the people living through them (that’s us). Think back to the 1960s…