Well, I think I had some unfounded hope at the last quarterly update back in April that things would be more back to normal by now, but they clearly aren't. COVID cases here in the United States are higher than ever, and I'm concerned what 4th of July gatherings are going to do to them…
After the age that was the month of March, life slowly picked up after April and May, and June has somehow sped by. Though, in the words of Scary Mommy, this new pandemic phase is more stressful than lockdown in many ways. It's finally summer, and the weather is beginning to look like it as…
While I clearly don't have a large family, I grew up in one (I'm the oldest of four children and my grandmother has lived with my parents since I was a baby). While my parents were frugal to a degree, ecofrugality wasn't a huge focus when I was a kid. We learned about nature and…
May has been speeding by. March felt like it was at least three years long, and April was only a bit faster. It must be that we've been in this weird stasis for long enough now, but the days seem to be going by in hyper speed now. Memorial Day weekend completely caught me off…
I first heard some of Tami's story before she was a blogger herself. A couple years ago, she recorded an episode on FIRE Drill Podcast. Disability and chronic illness is rarely discussed in the FIRE (financial independence, retire early) community - oftentimes it seems to be overlooked on purpose because it flies in the face…
A couple weeks ago, I began reaching out to friends to ask about the status of their food and supplies at home - if they had the minimum two weeks as recommended as a standard rule of thumb for emergency preparedness. For the most part, I got lightly brushed off and business continued as usual,…
Ever since That Frugal Pharmacist wrote a guest post here on the blog about her family's experience with what we then coined as PrepperFI, I had meant to write my own. PrepperFI, as we've defined it, is the crossover of financial independence/retire early (FIRE) and emergency preparedness. With the current situation of COVID-19 here in…
Last weekend was another weekend hanging near home. The weather was actually pretty decent - with sunshine and low fifties for part of the days - so we spent quite a bit of time outdoors. It might not be summer yet, or even spring, but it's obvious that the winter gloom is starting to loosen…
When I first started blogging back in summer 2017, I had absolutely no idea what I was doing and knew no one in the online community. Months before I had even figured out that Twitter was where I would find the majority of my personal finance friends, I'd somehow connected with a few other new…