Last month, The Minimalists did a podcast on debt. That podcast led to a profusion of tweets about the drawbacks of credit scores. In fact, the underlying message–ripped out of Dave Ramsey’s playbook–was that no one should want a credit score. The Minimalists by way of Ramsey tweeted out that a credit score is nothing … [Read more…]
Is your budget really as smart as you think it is? One of the first things many people do when they are trying to get their financial fitness on is to create a budget. Undeniably, there is a requisite amount of trial and error involved in the first few passes. A budget should meet everyone’s … [Read more…]
In our budget, we currently set aside between 42%-48% of our after-tax income. It is also worth pointing out that 10% of both our salaries is taken out pre-tax and put into our pension funds. So on the surface, it looks like were are living on a fairly small portion of our income. But just … [Read more…]
I thought I had goals. But it turns out, I have mostly hopes and dreams when it comes to personal finance. Paying off our mortgage in the next 10 years isn’t a good goal. Staying out of debt isn’t a good goal. Increasing my net worth isn’t a good goal. They’re undoubtedly important aspirations, but … [Read more…]
Could you save an extra $5500 a year? When Maggie from Northern Expenditure first announced the Roth IRA Challenge, I wasn’t sure that I could side hustle that hard. However, after reviewing our finances from last year, it turns out that Mr. P and I BOTH managed to side hustle our way to an extra $12,000. … [Read more…]
At the start of the year, I wrote two different posts about debt repayment. First, I talked about how we paid $18,000 towards our mortgage. Then, I copped to the fact that we actually paid $24k towards debt, because Mr. P still had a car loan until one final click paid it off in full. … [Read more…]
I hate our mortgage. And I probably always will. The fact that we own so little of our home yet foot all the repair bills was maddeningly frustrating last week when our furnace started acting up to the tune of $600. But after clicking through Tim Urban’s “The Tail End”, I realize that maybe I’ve … [Read more…]
It’s not good to keep secrets in the blogging world. I know that. And it’s not so much a secret, so much as it isn’t really my story to tell. But we have more debt than I’ve previously mentioned. Well, had. More precisely, Mr. P had more debt. I wrote a post about how we … [Read more…]
For the past few years, I’ve been tutoring as one of my side hustles. It can be quite lucrative. It can be very fulfilling. It can also be a colossal pain in the patootie. Whenever I think I’ve tightened all the loopholes in terms of cancellations and payments and covered all my bases in terms … [Read more…]
It’s official. By the year’s end, we will have paid off $18,000 worth of debt. Instead of ordering ourselves a bunch of pink plastic flamingos for the yard or sending ourselves a delicious Edible Arrangement, though, we aren’t celebrating this milestone. The reason? We paid off a lot of debt. But we had no other … [Read more…]