Marco Sison in the News

The Retirement-Focused Lifetime Saving Strategy

Marco Sison, a financial coach with Nomadic FIRE, believes that savings strategies at every age should be calculated with the same goal in mind: retirement.

“The average cost of retirement is roughly $750,000,” Sison said. “More than the combined cost of university education, raising a child and buying a home. The best way to ensure you are saving enough for retirement is to use a spreadsheet and calculate the present value of your goal at specific ages.”

One Dreamer Achieved Early Retirement Through a Nomadic Lifestyle

Marco Sison is a financial coach and the founder of Nomadic FIRE, where he advises his followers on retiring early while traveling abroad. His philosophy is based on the concept of geoarbitrage, a strategy that involves taking advantage of the cost-of-living differences between different geographic locations. Sison calls it “the most powerful, but underutilized strategy to retire early.”

Start Saving Early

Putting aside funds well before retirement can provide the chance to build wealth through compound interest. "When money is saved and invested, then your money makes more money; then that money makes even more money," says Marco Sison, who retired in 2015 at age 41 after working in business development for Erickson helicopters. 

Securing A Visa

Most people anticipate the big costs of moving overseas such as packers, movers and shipping, said Marco Sison, a retirement coach for the site Nomadic FIRE who has moved internationally more than a dozen times. However, many people forget to budget for the most critical step in the process: getting a visa.

AMBITION Magazine article - Association of MBAs

Remote workers and digital nomads can financially benefit by relocating from a high-cost area to a low-cost area. This generation can change cities, switch states, or move to different parts of the world, maximising their financial advantage, says Marco Sison.

Tying Your Budget to Your Current Place of Residence

“People need to stop basing their monthly budgets on the city they work and live in,” said Marco Sison, a financial coach at Nomadic FIRE. “As most companies have already announced remote work as part of their 2022 business strategy, workers need to leverage this unique opportunity to slash their monthly budgets and improve their financial situation through geographic arbitrage.”

Move to a Cheaper Place. Reduce costs and stretch savings to make it through a stock market slump during retirement.

Relocating to a place with a lower cost of living could help your fixed income stretch further. “An underused, but extremely effective way to reduce your cost is to move to a cheaper country,” says Marco Sison, who has been living abroad since 2015. Sison spent some time in the Philippines, where his monthly expenses were about $1,500 a month. 

Retiring Abroad

 
The pandemic has made retiring abroad complex at best, and impossible at worst. Marco Sison, who writes about international retirement at Nomadic FIRE, retired five years ago. Earlier this year, he attempted to establish a home in Spain, only to see his dream dashed when Spain locked down and halted visa applications because of COVID-19. 

Creating a financial solution for your relationship

"A critical conversation and decision point is deciding how to split expenses," said Marco Sison, a financial coach for Nomadic FIRE.

"Especially when there is a discrepancy in income between the two partners, how bills are divided can be a minefield of assumptions and misunderstandings." 

Traveling for Family 

Other travelers are planning trips to see family. Consider Marco Sison's situation. He and his girlfriend are currently in the Philippines, but they want to travel to Austria for a family baptism. Europe is also a great place to spend a few weeks during the summer. His girlfriend is Austrian, and Sison has dual U.S. and Philippine citizenship.

"To navigate the travel ban, we are looking to travel from the Philippines to Turkey," says Sison, who writes a retirement blog. "Turkey is currently letting in U.S. citizens with no quarantine."

Live Abroad

This may seem like a drastic option, but living abroad can be a way to severely reduce living expenses. A remote worker could save thousands by moving abroad, especially if they can maintain the same salary. It isn’t even all that hard to do.

“You can cut your monthly expenses by up to 70 percent just by jumping on an airplane,” says Nomadic FIRE finance coach Marco Sison.

Expert on Navigating Financial Challenges, Marco Sison, Retirement Coach at Nomadic FIRE

What financial advice and resources can you share with Asian Americans who are facing financial challenges?

There is no easy answer. Like any self-perpetuating cycle, significant effort needs to occur to break the dependencies. The first thing that needs to occur is clear lines of communication. People do not like to talk about money, but there must be honest conversations about uncomfortable topics to make progress.

Do you need to live near work?

Going one step further, moving to a cheaper country can reduce your housing expenses even more significantly, says Marco Sison, a financial coach with Nomadic FIRE  "Jumping on an airplane to another country may seem like an extreme way to cut your budget, but the savings can be financially life-changing."

Establish More Than One Stream of Income

Depending on how you define the data, anywhere from 20 million to 30 million people were unemployed or had their income affected by the pandemic, says Marco Sison, financial coach for Nomadic FIRE. To help protect yourself against the impacts of unemployment or reduced income, it’s a good idea to establish multiple streams of income.

Joining Financial Forces at this Milestone is the Best Bet For Your Relationship

Each couple likely feels differently about when the appropriate time is to tie themselves financially to each other, but according to financial experts, there is a key moment when you and your partner should to start to view "your money" as "our money." "The best time to discuss joint finances in a relationship is before moving in together," says financial coach Marco Sison. "This juncture is when joint expenses get real." 

Here’s why

As Marco Sison, a financial coach for Nomadic FIRE, told TMS, it is easy to view, in figures, two extremely different experiences of the recovery, which illustrate how “the COVID recovery has disproportionately helped the investors over the workers.”

Although the S&P 500 – the market index of the 500 largest US publicly traded companies – hit a COVID-19 low point of 2,237 on March 23, it has not only recovered, but has exceeded past where it was in February, closing at 3,647 points on December 14. 

Using Remote Work to Live Cheaper

This trend has been consistent over the past several months, which can be attributed to the fact that the pandemic showed people that remote work is viable, according to financial coach Marco Sison of Nomadic Fire. There’s nothing to keep people from working remotely in places where rent isn’t necessarily so high.

Let’s say you were living in San Francisco before the pandemic. If your job transitioned to remote work because of COVID, you are no longer required to be or live nearby. Now, if you wanted to move somewhere with a lower cost of living like Nashville, Tennessee, you would be cutting your monthly expenses by almost 50 percent, says Sison.

25 Finance Experts Share Their Advice

My number one piece of advice for people new to personal finance and investing is - START NOW! I mean right now, as in today. I cannot stress enough how powerful time affects wealth. The money invested today starts earning money; that money then produces even more money. The more time money is invested, the higher the exponential growth. 

This financial magic is called compound interest. Albert Einstein called compound interest "mankind's greatest invention," and that "he who understands it, earns it."

40 Financial Experts Reveal If Investing In Real Estate Is Worth It

In our current post-pandemic environment, inflation, volatility, and uncertainty are wreaking havoc with nearly every investment class. Is real estate safe?

I argue that there are 3 reasons your real estate investments are currently safe, even with inflation soaring.