Retire the Blog? not yet but...

IF I were to bail on the blog, and I'm not saying that I am, but IF I were, I would manage an orderly transition of that process by handing all three of you over into the capable hands of the people I trust the most (listed below for the four categories of my "links" posts).  I guess this is a back-door "best of" again but really I have to do it.

And where am I now, precisely, in my blogging? Doing ok, I think.  As an exercise in self learning and self expression it's been pretty cool so far. Technically speaking it has been a revelation.  I tell my kids I do more math, and certainly more (sorta) calculus, in a month than I did in my entire four years at college (though I'll put a big plug in here for Carleton College, one of the very best in the country.  USnews seems to like it, anyway. I did). Maybe that is just me trying to role-model.  And certainly I have achieved some of my original goals which can be articulated as "somehow seeing (dimly) into the nature of retirement processes and making sense of it to the benefit of me and my family."  But, really, how far can I take that. And anyway, there are others that do that kind of thing better and with more integrity and rigor.  For me this was always mostly play and self-learning.

If I were to be honest with myself about how to allocate my time now that: (a) my beloved kids are starting to age out of my care, and (b) I have run through a pretty large swath of the technical aspects of ret-fin that I personally wanted to learn, then -- since I have no commercial incentive to do otherwise (but if you have an offer, email me) -- I would say the following to myself: "Self, you should probably allocate more of self's time to what one is really supposed to be doing in early retirement, almost none of which has anything to with the mathematics of retirement finance, such as:"

- finding and then re-imagining purpose again and again over remaining lifetime
- exploring the elusiveness of "meaning" as time passes and age overwhelms
- re-forging one's ephemeral identity in a continuous process that really has no hard boundaries
- traveling and leaning and growing a personal universe, one tiny increment at a time
- throwing something, anything, back to community and world
- staying healthy (the new year's resolution joke was to start smoking and drink more)
- meeting new people whenever and wherever, ...and last but not least
- fostering the essential bonds of: brothers, sisters, children, significant others, and...friends

Now that is worthy of blog consideration.

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My "outsource" recommendations by way of my "Links" categories (and no I'm not going away yet but I do encourage you to visit these folks) is below.  I notice now that I have written this that the list is overwhelmingly male.  I'm thinking, given the world we live in, that that needs to change. Soon.


QUOTES OF THE DAY

Tadas Viskanta, abnormalreturns.com

RETIREMENT FINANCE AND PLANNING

Dirk Cotton TheRetirementCafe.com
Ken Steiner. http://howmuchcaniaffordtospendinretirement.blogspot.com/
Darrow Kirkpatrick, CanIRetireYet.com
EarlyRetirementNow
Michael Kitces 
Wade Pfau
Financial Samurai
and, for the odd ducks like me, SSRN

Alternatively, keep an eye out for anything new coming from:

- Moshe Milevsky
- Joe Tomlinson
- David Blanchett
- Michael Finke
- Javier Estrada
- Gordon Irlam
- others tbd...

MARKETS AND INVESTING

Tadas Viskanta, abnormalreturns.com 

Corey Hoffstein, Newfound Research

Wes Gray and Jack Vogel at Alpha Architect
Mike Piper at Oblivious Investor
Ben Carlson - A wealth of common sense
Cullen Roche - Pragmatic Capitalism
Michael Batnick - Irrelevant Investor
Any Fed site but Atlanta, St. Louis and Philly seem to be the best
Morgan Housel
Capital Spectator - not mass audience but the best at friendly and helpful
New: ofdollarsanddata  Twitter too.
Jake at econompicdata

there are tons of others. I'll add later... I'd maybe add others in the Ritholtz crew but that is more or less a mass audience thing and the only ret-fin links that never responded to emails. 

ALTERNATIVE RISK

Corey Hoffstein, Newfound Research
Mark Rzepczynski Disciplined Systematic Global Macro Views
systematic risk and systematic value
Adam Butler, GestaltU
AQR and Cliff

tons of others...tbd

SOCIETY AND CAPITAL

Tim Taylor - conversable economist
Tyler Cowen - marginal revolution
Visual Capitalist
John Cochrane, Grumpy Economist
Farnam Street
bazillions of others...

If you feel jilted, complain and thy complaints will be answered.  Better yet, write a guest post with something fun to say about ret-fin and if it's pretty good or even mildly good it'll probably be posted.

RH