211: Darrow Kirkpatrick, Millionaire Next Door

We’re kicking off ‘Millionaire Next Door Week’ on So Money today.  We’ve been revving up for this spectacular week for some time, I’ve been enlisting your help to either nominate yourself or people you know and excited to say that we received many more entries than we could record for this first week…But perhaps we’ll do a second week later in the fall. So many nuggets of wisdom to share… Our first guest is Darrow Kirkpatrick, the author of Retiring Sooner: How to Accelerate your Financial Independence and who runs the blog Can I Retire Yet? And the answer for Darrow, at least is, YES. He, in fact retired when he was 50 years old with over a million in the bank. You wouldn’t really know…He has a modest home, rides his bike most places…And when I visited at his home a few years ago on a story for Yahoo News, I don't recall seeing a TV in his living room. Darrow graduated from the University of Virginia with a degree in Civil Engineering. He started and sold his own business…After 29 years of programming, designing and managing computer software, Darrow was able to retire at the ripe age of 50. How did he do it? Well we’ll discuss this in the show momentarily but he attributes a lot of his financial success to good ol’ hard work, frugality, serious saving and certain investing strategies. Patience helped along the way, too.