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…

Back in 1991 when I was still living and working in the UK, a financial advisor persuaded me to open a private pension fund. For my US friends, this retirement account is essentially an IRA.  I opened a retirement fund with Zurich insurance (back then they were Allied Dunbar I think) and I contributed a bit to it, then moved on. Eventually I forgot about it. Just recently I remembered this pension fund and figured I would go ahead and call Zurich and get my info updated and see how much I have in the pension fund.  I was absolutely floored to find that I had almost $100k in there!…

I wrote a while back about COVID and the financial panic.  We have all heard stories of people pulling their money out of the markets, but we took JL Collins advice and held our course.  In fact, not only did we hold steady, we put money into the market (indexed funds only kids!) and we find ourselves on the upper part of the K shaped recovery. Frankly we have done well so far over the past 12 months: We seem to be missing some growth, but it is interesting that the recovery time post the COVID announcements is maybe 3 months. It doesn’t come back to where it was but…

Today (this was originally drafted on 2/6) was an interesting milestone day.  The funny thing is, the milestone was passed sometime last month.  We have just passed the $750k mark in retirement savings.  Wow! We have talked about this today and we are both sort of amazed that we have come to this point.  It does not seem that long ago that we were laboring under a completely different set of circumstances.  And now we have $750k in assets and no debt. Logically, we knew this would happen but emotionally, this feels amazing.  When I say it out loud I have a sense of unrealness and at the same time, elation.…