Personal blog. I write about what I learn as I am learning it

How to Retire Early: The Math That Actually Matters

People ask me how to retire early like there’s a secret I’m withholding — some clever investment, a trick with real estate, a system nobody else knows about. There isn’t. I retired early, I still don’t have a boss more than a decade later, and the math behind it is boring enough to explain in two paragraphs. The hard part was never the math. Here’s the version I wish someone had handed me plainly, instead of making me piece it together from forum threads.

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Deputy Alternative: Free Staff Scheduling, No Per-User Fee

The search for a Deputy alternative almost always starts the same way: the roster grows, the per-user fee grows with it, and someone asks whether a scheduling tool should really cost as much as a part-time shift. After twenty-plus years building optimization models professionally, I built my own answer — my free staff scheduling optimizer — and made it free: no per-user fee, no account, and a real solver doing the actual scheduling work.

When I Work Alternative: A Free Scheduling Optimizer

Most people hunting for a When I Work alternative aren’t angry at the product — they’re doing per-user math. Multiply a monthly fee by every employee on the roster, add the time-tracking add-on, and a “cheap” tool quietly becomes a real line item. I’ve built scheduling optimization models for twenty-plus years, and my answer to that math is my free staff scheduling optimizer: it costs nothing, needs no account, and — unlike most scheduling apps — it actually builds the schedule instead of giving you a nicer grid to fill by hand.

Illustration of a person planning employee shifts on a color-coded scheduling calendar, representing staff scheduling software

How to Plan a Delivery Route (the Way a Solver Does It)

Ask ten small fleets how to plan a delivery route and nine will describe some version of the same ritual: a list of addresses, a map, and somebody’s gut feeling about which order “makes sense.” I’ve spent years building routing models for real operations, and the gap between a gut-feel route and an optimized one is rarely small — it’s usually measured in whole driver-hours per day. The good news: planning delivery routes properly is a repeatable process, and most of it isn’t even math. It’s preparation.

What Is VRP? The Vehicle Routing Problem, Explained

So what is VRP, exactly? It stands for the vehicle routing problem, and it’s the three-letter answer to a question every delivery operation asks itself before sunrise: which vehicle should visit which stops, and in what order? I’ve spent a good chunk of my career as an operations research analyst building routing models for real fleets, and I still think VRP is the most practical piece of math most people have never heard of. If a truck brought you anything this week, a VRP solver (or a dispatcher sweating over a map) decided how it got there.

Illustration of a hand selecting a destination on a car's GPS navigation screen, representing route planning and vehicle routing optimization