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 »
Ever since I started diving into social security income analysis, I’ve had one question that kept popping into my head: how will retiring early via FIRE affect your social security (SocSec) income?
This is a site about hitting Financial Independence ASAP after all!
Will you still get SocSec? If so, how much lower will it be? Can you offset that lost income by saving a bit more? How much longer would you need to work to get that needed savings?
Now that I have the tools to compute future SocSec for any scenario, I can finally get some answers!
Impact of FIRE on Social Security Income Read More »
The last expenses post I did was for our first quarter 2023 expenses, and that seemed to work pretty well, so now it’s time to review our second quarter 2023 expenses.
Our Second Quarter 2023 Expenses Read More »
Have you ever wondered if you could save much money by stocking up in your last month of a warehouse club membership (e.g., Costco, Sam’s Club, BJ’s) and then waiting to rejoin some number of months later?
And is it worth the hassle of doing so?
Is It Worth Letting Your Warehouse Club Membership Expire? Read More »
