A year and a half ago, I had no budget. And I don't mean an anti-budget, where I artificially restricted our access to funds by diverting them to our savings account and "paid ourselves first." I mean that we simply lived by the method of "spend less than you earn." Of course, that meant some…
I adore three paycheck months. While I realize that our overall income doesn't change whether we get paid twice a month or every other week, I do prefer it this way because it feels awesome to have a big "bonus" month two times a year, and it's a big mental boost to be sure. Money…
We are now just about a quarter of a way through the year, and I realized the other day that I only had a vague sense of the goals I had set for myself for the year. While I knew some were on track, I knew I needed to go through the list again to…
Somehow, as of March 1st, it has been a full two years since I began my clothes buying ban. Two years without purchasing a single item of clothing, shoes, jewelry, or accessories. When I first embarked on this journey early in 2017, I expected that I would coast into that first year of no purchase…
I have to say, I certainly started off 2018 on a better foot in terms of total savings rate. Then again, we also didn't take my grandmother to Hawaii at the start of 2018. The good news is, March is a three paycheck month and it should go a long way to balancing things out,…
Again, I think this is one of those months where I am way too hard on myself. After missing out on my 2018 savings goal by a few percentage points, I went into 2019 with a renewed focus to hit that full fifty percent savings rate this year. Of course, January was also the month…
Last year, I had my goals in place and written out by January 1st. This year has been different though, and I just haven't felt up to the task. The biggest reason for this has been the life changing cancer diagnosis a personal finance blogger and friend is going through with her son who is…
We doubled our savings rate this past year. Literally doubled it. When I first started tracking our finances closely, we'd been doing "reasonably well" for years when it came to our finances, but there was a lot of mindless spending that occurred each month and we didn't have a very big buffer left over each…
After the last couple of months of less than stellar savings rates, it feels good to write an update that comes closer to where we were at the first half of this year. Juuuuust shy of that 50% savings rate goal I set at the beginning of 2018, but it feels better than that because…
Well, for a month that started off with plans to be a "no spend" month, October was definitely NOT a no spend month. I guess I'll start off with the good part - we are still at a cumulative 47% rate for the year through October. The less good news is that in order to…