Most of us have one or two subscriptions in our lives. It might be Netflix or Amazon Prime, but we all have one or two somewhere.  For a time now, I’ve had this nagging feeling that we’re spending to much on subscriptions services so today, Cat and I took a look at our combined subscription spending.  And here it is: *Disney+ is part of our phone plan from Verizon As you can see, we spend $2415 a year on Subscriptions!  This is way too much and so we need to cost reduce somehow.  So we started to look in detail in terms of what were using and how.  One of…

Today we hit our end of year target of $1M.  Yes, I thought I would lead with that. No fancy intro, just that. I set this target back at the beginning of 2021, when I had hoped that the market would return and we could, with a lot of savings reach that $1M mark.  Well, the market and our savings seemed to have exceeded my expectations, and here we are with a net worth of $1M between us, already. Compound Interest I want to thank the power of compound interest.  While Cat and I have been saving as much as we can, compound interest has also made a considerable contribution…

Hey I remembered to do the next quarterly report.  This one is going to be a little shorter than the last one. So first, lets take a look at the important bit; the numbers: As we can see there has been some decent growth in the portfolio. Excellent news!  I continue to put money into the HSA and the investment account, with some small percentage going into the 401k.  I will continue to do the same over the next two quarters and then reconsider my plans for 2022. Our Joint Figure Adding my savings to Cat’s savings brings us to about $950k or there abouts.  With some luck, and decent…

I was reading a Blog post by Millennial-revolution:  https://www.millennial-revolution.com/freedom/our-2020-finances/ Right at the start of the post was this line: Buying our time back has been the best money we have ever spent, and in no other year has that been more apparent than this one. Over the past year, I can honestly say that I have felt a strong pull towards being the master of my own time. I have often mentioned to Cat how I am so looking forward to being done with work, and just doing what we want to do.  I still like what I do, don’t get me wrong, but given a choice I would rather…

I made a post some time ago about making incremental changes.  In essence, your chances of making successful changes increase if you make the change in small increments as opposed to making large sweeping changes.  I have found this to be true many times over. Most recently I discovered tiny habits by BJ Fogg.  He breaks down the reasons for why incremental change works; and the crux of the matter is effort. Smaller changes generally require less effort, and that makes us more likely to make the effort. If the effort gets too great, it becomes too much and we fail to perform. I have applied this to a number of aspects…

I like to review where we are with some services, especially where I have a choice.  Often we can overlook some of these regular monthly bills and not realize we are overpaying.  In my quest for cheaper internet, I looked at 4G alternatives to Comcast, but alas, 4G is limited in data and given that we both work from home, we need all the data we can get.  I monitored data usage over a couple of months and we use maybe 150GB of data per month.  Sometimes more and sometimes less, but more than most, if not all 4G data plan will provide. So lets look at Comcast itself and…

I haven’t seen the movie yet but I understand the premise of the movie; a lot of folks living a cheaply as possible, usually out of cars and vans, their struggles and their lives.  What I have seen are some of the quotes from folks like Bob Wells, the sort of unofficial spokesperson for van life. A couple of the quotes I have seen attributed to Bob Wells are powerful, and make so much sense. THE AMERICAN DREAM IS BROKEN: “From a young age, people in the Western world are taught that living a “quality life” means getting a job, raising a family, buying successively bigger houses, and working most…

Let me start by saying that I am really bad about remembering to do a quarterly report.  This is something that I want to do but for some reason I fail at.  However, here I am, I finally remembered.  I like the idea of a quarterly report as it shows progress and that is an important motivator for me, So lets get to it.  First thing is what do the numbers look like? At the beginning of the year I was talking about getting to the quarter million by the end of the year.  Then I found the Zurich account had grown so much more than I expected, and here…

I recently read a post from the Go Curry Cracker blog. The post was: https://www.gocurrycracker.com/scared-to-death-of-early-retirement-no-more/ The post followed a couple who asked similar questions that we have been asking ourselves: What would we do with all of the extra time? Would we end up needing to get part time jobs later after giving up two good jobs? To a lesser extent, what would our family and friends say? Do we have enough saved? To some of these I have answers, others, well not quite so much. What would we do with all of the extra time? This is actually a really important question. I forget which blog it was but I…