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View Larger Map Happy Summer Greetings  to my billions of Millionaire Educator readers out there!  Most of you are unaware that in mid-January of this year, I took a job teaching Spanish at a high school in a neighboring county.  Naturally, I had to weigh the pros and cons of the opportunity before I could commit 4.5 months of my life to the job.   The job had some deal-breaking aspects:  the school was a "bad" school located 55 minutes / 48 miles from my house, and to make matters worse the school day began at 7:15 for teachers.  In order to cut down on my commuting, I talked to my brother-in-law about crashing at his house once or twice a week, and he said "Sure."   While having a place to stay would greatly reduce my commuting time, it also meant that some nights I would not be home with my beautiful wife and awesome son.  Nevertheless, I bit the bullet and took the job knowing that I could make it worthwhile.      All the cons aside, the teaching assignment had...

  Before we accepted fabulous teaching jobs in Echols County , Georgia, we worked and lived in LaGrange, Georgia for seven years.  Like most people we blindly subscribed to cable television and internet from our local provider, Charter Communications.  Over the years we started feeling a general dissatisfaction with the service; there were frequent internet outages, increasing fees, endless TV commercials, and terrible customer service.  In 2009, our monthly cable and internet bill was $130 a month.  Sometime around 2005 we started using Vonage for our house phone for the seemingly low rate of $33 a month for unlimited U.S calling.  While we were satisfied with Vonage’s service, it further added to our bloated monthly expenses.  Here is a breakdown of what we used to pay:   Old Services Month Year Cable & Internet $130 $1,560 Vonage Phone $33 $396 Total $163 $1,956 For nearly two grand a year we expected to get a lot more satisfaction from our phone, cable and internet services...

I was updating my net worth info at NetWorth.Com  when I noticed that I had three questions.  Wow, I have a few readers out there in cyberspace...awesome!  Here are the questions followed by my answers: Cheers posted:   "I am curious if I am understanding your profile comments correctly. You max out all your retirement accounts, and because of this, you need to supplement your income with 72t SEPP distributions from your IRAs?  So basically, you are still funding your IRA's, but taking 72t distributions at the same time? Is there an advantage to this? It seems like it would make more sense to just cut back on your retirement contributions, so you don't lock yourself into the 5 (or more) years of required 72t distributions." EM :  Cheers, good question.  My wife and I started our SEPP plans to provide us with a stream on income that will give us more flexibility.  Currently, we have a stream of  $18,000 per year that we use to pay our mortgage and other living expe...

In May of 2009, my wife and I were exhausted and in need of a change of scenery.  Our teaching jobs in LaGrange had become more and more hectic and less and less enjoyable.  One morning as I perused my Teach Georgia account, I came across jobs for both of us in Echols County . On a whim, I decided to apply for the jobs just to see if we might get an employment nibble. Later that morning around ten o'clock, I saw that I already had an email and a phone message expressing an interest in interviewing us.  That night I spoke with the assistant principal and set up an interview for the following week.  In a span of twelve hours, our job prospects had dramatically changed for the better. Naturally, I started researching the area and found out that Echols County was very different from the rest of Georgia.  First, the county had less than 4,200 people in its 421 square miles.  Most of the economy consisted of agriculture and timber...not exactly big city living.  I had always heard th...