davidNprogress

Imagine you are standing at the end of a washed-out bridge with people blindly driving your way all unaware of the fate that will behold them if they do not change their direction right away. You would, to the best of your ability, do all you could to get them to stop and go another way. As a 50+-year-old genX-debt free-cancer survivor, I feel this way about many topics. Marriage, parenting, health, career, finances are all areas that by this point in life I have learned many lessons. Some through my own great mistakes and many through educated hard work successes. My strongest obsession now for several years is a desire to retire without want. The journey began early in my working life when I first read The Millionaire Next Door. I was at the time single and making less than $25,000. It was amazing to learn at my young age that there is a path to wealth even for the average person.  That seed of hope was small and at the time did not take full root other than to get me ...

I still remember the day I realized that my daily diet coke habit was stealing my retirement dreams. At the time, Coke was running a promotion using a code from a bottle cap to get prizes. You would save your cap, enter the number on a website and points would add up for something fabulous. I kept these caps in a desk drawer and it did not take long for these to really pile up since I had a long time frequent habit of visiting the machine at work several times a day. There was the before work Coke, mid-morning Coke, lunch Coke, mid-afternoon Coke and usually something towards the end of the day. One afternoon I looked at the pile of caps wondered how much in cost that represented. Next, I began to think about cost over time and if I continued this pattern what it would mean in the long term. The final kicker was when I plugged in my average monthly diet coke spending into a savings calculator and considered how much $5 a day applied to retirement could mean if saved for the ne...