Investing tips & strategies to make your money work for you.
Today, I’m sharing the results of our 2022 mid-year financial review. Here in the Rich Frugal Life household, we like to perform a deep dive into our finances twice a year. During this review, we compare our year-to-date spending to the budget, analyze our investment portfolio allocation and targets, and assess how we’re tracking towards…
It seems like everyone in the personal finance space is talking about I-bonds lately… and for good reason. Inflation is soaring and I-bonds are currently paying interest at an APR of 7.12%! Plus, that interest rate is projected to increase to 9.6%+ in May 2022! I-bonds are a type of government savings bond that pays…
If you read our January financial update (and as you’ll read in our February financial update), we recently received a big cash lump sum from Mr. RFL’s annual bonus and vesting of stock compensation. This money propelled us past our financial independence goal, yay! Now we now need to decide what to do with it….
If you’re lucky enough to have it, stock compensation is an awesome benefit! As pension plans fall away, more employees are finding themselves eligible to receive some form of company equity as part of their overall compensation package. Generally this equity comes in the form of company stock or stock options, which are subject to…
I love a good debate. Not many get people as riled up as they do for the debate on whether you should invest extra cash, or use it to pay down your mortgage early. In fact, I wrote about this debate and the change in our strategy earlier this year. However, with experts now projecting…
When the market dropped and interest rates went down, we went searching for yields… primarily in junk bonds. Our investment strategy for early retirement includes dedicating a portion of our portfolio to income-producing investments. These assets will provide a passive income stream that we’ll use to offset expenses in early retirement. We’re hoping this strategy…
Do you want to start investing in real estate? I’m a little bit obsessed with it, myself. I spend way too much time searching for homes in cities that I don’t yet and may never live in (just planning for our future retirement). I was house-hacking before I knew that was a thing, have watched…
I decided to write this post after seeing how many people across the personal finance community and social media are using an estimated market return of 10% in their illustrations and forecasts. If you’re one of those people; I promise that I’m not trying to pass judgment. However, I do want to make sure that…
Say you’ve got an extra $30,000 lying around that you want to invest. What do you do? Would you invest it all at once (lump sum investing) or spread that investment out over a period of time (dollar cost averaging)? This is the decision we found ourselves facing about six-months ago. After making a major…
So, you’ve paid down all your “bad debt” … high interest loans, credit cards, etc. Congrats! Now that you have fewer payments to make each month, you may be debating if you should use that extra cash to pay down the mortgage or invest? You’re not alone. This question is one of the most frequently…
