Sharing all the details of our finances on our journey to financial independence and early retirement that you crave each month.
After taking a fresh look at our future retirement budget, we’re lowering our Financial Independence (“FI” or “FIRE”) Number to $1,000,000! When we initially determined our FIRE Number last year, we estimated that our annual spending in retirement would be around $50,000 per year. This gave us a FIRE Number of $1,250,000 using a 4%…
Spring is here! The weather has been incredible in AZ (and air quality as well, which is rare), so we’ve been spending a lot of time outdoors. This month marked the end of my first year of early retirement and being happily unemployed. Mr. RFL and I were also able to get our first dose…
Is it already March?! February certainly flew by. I can’t say that we accomplished too much since January, other than spending way too much on groceries. “A year’s worth of groceries” may be a stretch… but we’ve got enough to eat for several months. Mr. RFL’s approval to work remotely finally ended, so he had…
Well, that wasn’t the start to the new year that I had expected. January flew by with little accomplished as I’ve been dealing with some unexpected medical bills and undiagnosed health issues. I had such high hopes for this year that it’s hard not to feel disappointed, but we’ll try to make February a better…
We review our investment portfolio allocation and investment strategy annually, as a part of our year-end financial and tax checkup. In this post, we’re sharing our current portfolio allocation and investment strategy for the first time. Disclaimer: This post contains our personal opinions and portfolio and does not represent investment advice. Why you need a…
The most unpredictable year ever is finally over… Happy New Year! Although 2020 was strange and mostly unpleasant, I hope that you and your loved ones remained healthy and were able to find some silver linings. If you stayed invested in the stock market throughout the year, you likely at least have a fatter portfolio…
Happy holidays! I hope you and your loved ones had a happy and healthy November. Our November was filled with gratitude and the shock of an unexpectedly optimistic stock market. We also managed to squeeze in a mortgage refinance and some pandemic stockpiling this month. What happened this month… The US stock market had a…
Is it bad when wine represents 19% of your monthly budget? Oh, it is? Thought so. As you can tell from the caption of this post, our spending this month included A LOT of wine (and a few other October expenses). The good news is that we don’t spend this much on alcohol every month…
We loosened the purse strings a little bit after our frugal & healthy month challenge in August, and indulged in a couple date nights out as well as a 4 day/3 night road trip to Moab, UT to celebrate our 5th anniversary. It wasn’t the big vacation to Maui we had been planning pre-pandemic, but…
This month we embarked on a frugal & healthy month challenge to to establish better spending, eating and exercise habits. Is it a good idea to just dive into a complete life overhaul like this? Probably not. But I’m a recovering overachiever, and my husband is always up for a challenge, so we went for…