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
Being Able To Pay For Something Isn’t The Same As Being Able To Afford It
A few days ago, I got an email from a reader named Kate who shared how her attitude towards money has changed over the years. She mentioned that in the past, she would have spent a lot more money than she does now, simply because she would have considered so many more things to be… Continue Reading
The Evolution Of My Relationship With Money
Four years ago, the focus of my blog was money. I wrote about our efforts to earn it, save it, and pay down debt. I identified with the personal finance blogosphere, and was quite wrapped up in things like calculating our net worth, and making sure it was always higher than it had been the… 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
More Estate Planning
Last month, I wrote about how my husband and I are starting the process of estate planning. There were some great comments on that post – thanks for all your thoughts! Although I must say, I was surprised at how unanimous the opinions were in terms of hiring a lawyer instead of using software to… 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
Early Retirement Inspiration
I’ve just spent the last hour on a website I just discovered, and am so inspired I wanted to share it with you. Early Retirement Extreme is my kind of site. The guy who writes it (Jacob) is in his early 30s and financially free… without ever earning a six figure income or coming into… Continue Reading
Are You Spending To Impress Other People?
Lately my husband has been spending huge amounts of time researching investment strategies. While we’ve both been committed to long-term savings goals for years, he’s really been getting into the nuances of it lately, and it’s made our retirement portfolios much more interesting to look at (of course they haven’t been much fun to look… 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