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…
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…
Apparently these days we either have a really great month or a not so good month where our savings rate is concerned because in between hasn't happened for some time now. And since August was by far the best month of the year for our finances, September had to be one of the pricer ones,…
We hit our best savings rate yet in the month of August, which felt so good to follow up July, which was our most expensive month of the year so far. I probably could have shuffled some of our expenses forward to August to balance out the months a little bit, but I didn't want…
To cut to the chase, July was our most expensive month to date. There were a lot of reasons for this, both voluntary and non voluntary, but the fact of the matter is we spent considerably more this past month than we have any other month this year, including May which saw us on a…
June was another month that absolutely flew by. We returned from our East Coast road trip on the first of the month, and that first weekend was mostly spent unpacking and relaxing before heading back to work the following Monday. In the subsequent weekends we went camping twice and spent another weekend afternoon exploring locally…
May was a very different month for us financially because we spent the second half of it on vacation on the East Coast. Thanks to some travel hacking, we didn't have to pay for the plane flights as well as a couple of hotel nights, but we were gone for a full two weeks, which…
April was a crazy busy month. Mostly in a good way, but still extremely busy. I started my public service board commission for our city, sent some good friends off on a move to Hawaii, wrapped up a work project and began a new one, and we went out of town three separate weekends because I…