Our son signed up for his company 401k plan as quickly as he could after starting work last month. The company has a good match, but he wants to make sure he is saving as much as he can to really put himself ahead in the future. He wondered how much more he needed to save – beyond the 401k to really be on track … Continue reading Playing The Percentages For Savings
Inflation is one of the assumptions that our FIRE financial model is the most sensitive to. Even a half percent change in inflation over a 40 year retirement plan is hugely significant. We use an assumption that our spending inflation will be between 2.5-3.0% a year, which is slightly higher than what the official US Consumer Price Index (CPI) has averaged. I’ve read articles in … Continue reading How Fast Are Prices Really Rising?
Our son is just out of college and about 4 weeks into his career in software & web design. He signed up for all of his work benefits right away, including his health insurance and retirement 401K plan. He’s very thoughtful with his financial approach, but I saw an online chat about ‘Financial Advice For People In Their Twenties’ from the fatFIRE Facebook Group that … Continue reading Financial Advice For Your Twenties
June is typically the month of weddings, but the CV-19 pandemic has largely eliminated the big, traditional wedding. We were planning on attending a couple weddings this summer, but they have both been converted to small, family-only affairs. Such is 2020. Perhaps it is all for the best when it comes to the cost of hosting a big wedding. The analysis I did a few … Continue reading Small Wedding Sensibility?
Insurance is one of the things I certainly hate paying for. Health insurance, disability insurance, life insurance, and car insurance are all necessary to a degree, but it’s hard to pay for something you only use in a catastrophe. We’ve gradually dialed back our insurance coverage for things we can ‘self-insure’ the risk of. We have the highest health insurance deductible we’ve ever had and … Continue reading Up, Up And Insured
We are very proud of our son who graduated from college this past weekend with his degree in computer science. He finished ‘on-time’ – completing his studies 4 years after first walking through these arches as a Freshman. He’s all set to start working a week from today as a software/web developer at a local software company. He interned there last summer and got a … Continue reading Post-College ‘Raise’?
My brother and I were talking about some estate work that we each had done recently and the subject came up of safe-keeping documents. We’ve steadily upgraded our approach over the years from using a file cabinet, to putting our wills in the freezer drawer, to buying a fire-box, to investing in a full-on home safe. We now keep our important papers in a large … Continue reading Safety First For Documents
With global governments printing trillions of dollars, Euros, Yuan, and Yen to keep economies from going illiquid, I thought now would be a good time to check on Bitcoin. Longtime readers will recall I took a ‘hobby stake’ in Bitcoin back in early 2017 to test my thesis that cryptocurrencies have a role as a more reliable ’store of value’ than government-managed currencies. I have … Continue reading Bitcoin Amid CV19
I started looking at the topic of America’s growing debt before the coronavirus pandemic spread. Across all age groups, debt has been accelerating rapidly for the last two decades, and I’m sure it has gotten much worse now. This chart, from a CNBC article, shows the magnitude of the debt problem, with perhaps the greatest growth happening among older Americans … As the chart shows, … Continue reading Debt Has Spread Like A Virus
It was good advice. I had it written in a cell at the bottom of the first budget spreadsheet I put together thirty years ago: “Keep 3-6 months spending in an emergency fund. More if you smell layoffs coming.” We had just gotten married, we were watching every penny, and we viewed it as an important first step. We took the emergency fund principle from … Continue reading Locked Up
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