My husband and I have always been big fans of retirement accounts. We both opened 401(k) accounts when we started our first corporate jobs in our early 20s. When we left those jobs to become self-employed, we rolled the funds over to IRAs. But we had a period of about 18 months when we didn’t contribute… Continue Reading
Making Progress Towards Our Savings Goals
Happy November! I hope you all had a good Halloween and that your week is off to a great start :-) Last spring, we refinanced our mortgage. We’ve been loving our 2.44% interest rate, and we haven’t made any additional principal payments since we refinanced – it just doesn’t make sense with that rate of… Continue Reading
Simple Investing, Goodwill Finds, Workouts, Facebook – Lots Of Wanderings!
Good morning beautiful people! I have a few links I’ve found lately that I want to share with you. Today’s post has a bit of everything. First, I’ve recently discovered Jim Collins’ blog, and it’s quite inspiring. He’s just retired at age 61, but he’s been financially independent since 1989. That is pretty awesome. He… Continue Reading
How We Invest
A reader asked me yesterday about our investing strategy, as I had mentioned a couple years ago that I was buying a socially responsible ETF (a clean energy fund). Turns out, that purchase wasn’t my best choice ever. My timing could have been better… I bought it in September 2008, and we all know what… Continue Reading
A New Credit Card With Sweet Rewards
Ever since we got married, we’ve been using a Visa credit card that gives us 1% cash back on everything we spend. We always take the rewards in the form of a cash credit to our balance, and have always been happy with the card. But after seven years, we’re switching to a new card…. Continue Reading
Bogleheads
I wanted to share a good forum with you all. Some of you are probably already regular visitors to Bogleheads, but if you aren’t, I highly recommend it. The tagline of the forum says “investing advice inspired by the example of Jack Bogle” (Jack Bogle started Vanguard), although the topics discussed extend beyond just investing… Continue Reading
Our New Retirement Accounts
Back before we became self-employed, my husband and I each worked for a large company, and we both had 401k accounts. When we quit our jobs, we rolled those accounts over to IRAs, and that has been our retirement savings ever since. In the early days, we didn’t contribute anything at all, but gradually worked… Continue Reading
Keeping Track Of Our Spending
Recently I got an email from a long-time reader, asking me if we still keep track of our monthly expenses. I guess the answer is both yes and no. We do pay close attention to what we are spending, and I check our bank balances and credit card transactions on a daily basis. But we… Continue Reading
Diversify By Paying Down The Mortgage
As I mentioned yesterday, our stock-based retirement portfolio is looking a little rough around the edges these days (and I’m sure it’s even worse now than it was yesterday – but I’m not looking). Times like these are when I’m glad that we’re focusing on paying off our mortgage as quickly as possible, in addition… Continue Reading
A Painful Look At Our Retirement Accounts
Over the last few weeks, as the stock market kept dropping, I decided I just wasn’t going to look at our retirement account values for a while. After all, we’re in our early 30s and have many years to go before we’ll be using those funds. But tonight I decided to take a peek, after… Continue Reading