In my last post, I detailed how to compute your monthly expenses, and then categorize them into a) required monthly expenses, b) required yearly expenses, and c) discretionary monthly expenses.
Now that we have those numbers, let’s determine what you REALLY need to compute your withdrawal rate (which in turn you need for determining if you’re Financially Independent).
Computing Long-Term Inflation-Adjusted Expense Averages Read More »
Alrighty, now that I have described our process for validating our expenses (to catch any fraud/mistakes), it’s high time to lay out exactly how we track our expenses.
Long time readers know that I’m always rattling on about how important it is to track your expenses to achieve FI. But I know that it can be really overwhelming to actually DO THAT when you first start.
If you’re just getting started, hopefully our process will give you a solid template to build on for tracking your expenses.
How We Track Our Expenses Read More »
Last fall I met Dr. Emily Roberts of Personal Finance for PhDs at the personal finance conference FinCon in New Orleans. I was thrilled to meet a fellow PhD at FinCon, we are a rare breed in that community.
Podcast Interview: Personal Finance for PhDs Read More »
My next post was going to cover how we track our expenses, since I’ve been wanting to do that for a while, and my last post detailing our 2023 expenses gave me extra motivation.
But as I was writing that post I realized I had quite a bit of content regarding how to validate our expenses – i.e. ensuring there are no mistakes or fraud on our credit card statements.
How to Catch Mistaken and Fraudulent Expenses Read More »
It’s that time of year again – summarizing our annual expenses! Woohoo! I know that’s everyone else’s favorite activity as well.
Last year I thought I might try to do quarterly expense updates, but that definitely was too ambitious. There are way too many other things to do, including lots of analysis and other posts I want to write.
So from now on, I’ll be doing just annual expense updates.
As mentioned in my previous post, Mrs. EYFI’s company ended health insurance for half-time employees starting Jan 1 of this year. So in addition to finding health insurance for her and our kids, we also needed to get dental insurance.
So, you know me: a big analysis with lots of plots ensued!
Choosing Your Dental Insurance Plan – With Math! Read More »
A few years back I created a post titled “Choosing Your Health Insurance Plan – With Math!”. Back then we were deciding between a high deductible and a standard plan at Mrs. EYFI’s employer (back when she was still full time).
This year we faced another tough health insurance decision: picking an Obamacare plan. Otherwise known as Affordable Care Act (ACA) Health Insurance. I’ll mostly use “ACA” below because it’s shorter/easier.
Choosing Your Obamacare Plan – With Math! Read More »
Last month Mrs. EYFI and I went to our third FinCon conference, and we had a great time.
This year it was located in New Orleans, which was my seventh visit to the city and Mrs. EYFI’s second.
FinCon 2023 Review Read More »
Last week at FinCon (review post coming soon!) I had the privilege to meet Emily Roberts, who hosts the Personal Finance for PhDs podcast and has helped many PhD students with personal finance since she graduated with her PhD in biomedical engineering in 2014.
As far as I know, she is the first fellow PhD in engineering I’ve ever met at FinCon, which was really nice – there aren’t too many of us interested enough in personal finance to go to a conference about it!
One question we discussed was whether grad students should invest any savings they can scrape together in a Traditional IRA (which is fully deductible, equivalent to 401(k) “pre-tax” dollars) or a Roth IRA (which you contribute to after paying taxes, but grows tax-free after that).
Roth vs Traditional IRA Contributions in Grad School Read More »
Recently I “sat down” (i.e., called over the internet on the opposite sides of the planet) with Pete at CaptainFI.com to do an episode for his podcast, and I think we were both amazed at how much we had in common.
Interview With Captain FI Read More »
