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 »
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.
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 »
After publishing our 2022 Expenses post, I thought it might be good to publish our expenses a bit more frequently than once a year.
Initially I thought perhaps I’d publish monthly, since that is how most people think of expenses: yearly and monthly. And that’s how we organize our expenses as well.
But that also seems like a lot of posts, and it could easily get really repetitive. And thus boring for me to write and for you to read!
Our First Quarter 2023 Expenses Read More »
Finally! I’ve been wanting to do an expenses summary post for quite some time now. I’ve been discussing it in “Future Work” sections since the beginning of the year, and probably before that.
I already do a bunch of (fun spreadsheet) work to track our expenses every month and year, so I’m excited to share all that info in a more public way. I’m hoping this will be a great way to hold my wife and I accountable in our finances and lifestyle.
I’m also excited to show others what’s possible: if you’re spending more than us and are looking for ideas to cut down your expenses, hopefully this post will help.
Ah, summer time. Time for swimming, long road trips, and watching the millions of blades of grass in your yard come to life.
Unfortunately many folks will reach for their phone and wallet to keep that grass and other things in their yard in check: 40% of Americans with a yard, actually.
That’s a lot of domestic outsourcing!
Why You Should Mow Your Own Lawn Read More »
A couple years ago my wife and I were procrastinating yet again on selecting a health care plan option. Specifically, which of two plans to select for her and our son that were offered by her company. My health insurance is super simple: I’m fully covered, no premiums (ignoring dental and vision). But hers was hard! There’s a huge amount of information to consider, from premiums to deductibles to co-pays to co-insurance rates to tax-savings to traditional vs high-deductible plans to how much to put in your FSA or HSA…. Insane.
I got fed up with trying to eyeball this decision. So, I broke out Python! I managed to script up and plot a wide variety of scenarios, and as a result the decision finally became clear. I love Python and plots – I’m definitely an engineer to the core.
Choosing Your Health Insurance Plan – With Math! Read More »
