The divorce rate in the US has statistically been high in over the past few decades. For a while it was believed to be around a rate of about 50% although new data (thankfully) shows this number has actually declined. Now there are many reasons for divorce but a couple of the consistently top reasons are money and communication. For the SFF household though, this is certainly not the case. Continue reading “How Our Journey to FIRE Has Strengthened Our Marriage”
I posted last weekend about some of the issues we had when traveling down to Florida for a funeral but I wanted to summarize the whole trip now. My grandfather passed away so my sister and I planned a trip down there for the funeral. Being so frugal (you might even say cheap) I was not willing to pay the asking price for last minute plane tickets. As a result, we had a ton of added stress to our travel plans.
Originally I was thinking I would just do one post about my recent last minute trip to go to a funeral but I figured I would do a mid-trip update. My grandfather passed away this past week so my sister and I planned a trip down to Florida for the funeral and did our best to be as frugal as possible. So far, this has failed and makes me wonder how much easier my life might be if I was just willing to shell out money every once and a while.
Continue reading “When Traveling Fugally Backfires – Part I”
Are you the type of person that absolutely loves this time of year? I mean, the whole processing of the tax return can be a pain but many people get money back so it can be pretty great. Or do you dread the April 15th (or 18th this year) deadline as you know this means you have to write a big check to the good old US of A? For us I don’t look forward to tax time but I also don’t really dread it. Continue reading “Tax Time is Here”
Um, wow! This past month we made incredible progress towards reducing our food costs. Woot, woot!
Part of the reason that our expenses were a little lower this month is I did some stocking up last month at Costco buying enough nuts to last a couple of months as well as some meat that we are still using. So I guess it kinda evens out in the end, but still I love seeing a lower number even if it is skewed a little. Continue reading “Monthly Food Costs – Update #3”
Last fall I stopped doing monthly savings updates as I found it was common to have one month completely thrown off by a car repair or some larger expense and then followed by a good month. Over the course of three months though things seem to even out pretty well.
The first quarter this year was a very good example of this as I started the year out with a car repair. It is amazing how much a $250 repair will throw off all of my numbers. But following this up with a couple of good months and I was back on track. Continue reading “First Quarter Savings Update”
When you own an investment property you know in the back of your head that nothing is guaranteed and that something will come up. Well it turns out that for our new property, it only took a couple of months before we had our first hiccup.
As we sort of inherited the tenants when we closed on the property in January we actually know very little about them. We have their names, email addresses and phone numbers and that is basically all we know. We are kind of stuck with them until their leases are up this summer. Continue reading “Our First Investment Property Hiccup”