A working dad, starting a long journey to reach FIRE, contentment, or both.
Last year, I said New Year’s resolutions had the tendency to be depressing. They set absolute standards, which lead to disappointment when the standard is missed. I said I didn’t want to make resolutions anymore. So is the new year time to reflect and make changes, or not?
Of course it is. Only now I set goals. It gives me a chance to improve through the year by setting smaller goals as part of a the larger one.
So, let’s talk about this new year and my goals as we begin 2019…
When 2018 was about to start, I set a few goals for the year. I didn’t make any resolutions, because I don’t do that anymore; they seemed to absolute, and once broken, resolutions are easy to forget entirely. Goals allow me to work toward something. So…how’d I do? Let’s review 2018.
Continue reading “Did I meet my goals this year? A review of 2018”
In a response to my comment on someone else’s post, a reference was made to whether I was a follower of Dave Ramsey or Robert Kiyosaki. Obviously, most of us in the Desperately-Seeking-FIRE genre know: 1) who Dave Ramsey and Robert Kiyosaki are; and 2) that they have very different financial philosophies. For a long time, I could have answered in a split-second which of them I preferred. But is the answer quite so simple as that? It may not be anymore, at least for me.
Having recently gotten back from a Thanksgiving vacation (road trip across four states!), I had had to think about how to maintain my coffee habit/caffeine addiction while away from my trusty kettle and Trader Joe’s instant coffee.  Though I cut down from two cups a day to one a couple of months ago (thus saving quite a bit of money right there), doing so took long enough, with many caffeine withdrawal headaches to boot, that I don’t I’m quite ready to try to cut down much further.  And so, driving almost a thousand miles across the country, I had to have my coffee, at least once, every day.
Today, I have a guest post from Patricia Sanders, writing about how to achieve FIRE, which occasionally seems far away for this working dad. It probably doesn’t help that I’m batting about .400 with this list of suggestions. (And yes, the caption on the picture is mine.)
How can you achieve FIRE? Here’s how to do it…
Who doesn’t want to achieve FIRE (Financial Independence/Retire Early)?
Working becomes fun when you do it because you enjoy it, and not just for
money.
In my last post, I wrote about being content with my station in life. Â I didn’t win the Mega Millions jackpot; my job situation hasn’t changed; and, at the moment, I certainly am not pulling in the readers the way other bloggers have done. Â Contentment is more of an exercise for me than a character trait. I ask myself: what do those other bloggers have that I don’t? (Well, other than popularity.)Â The first answer that comes to me is that all of them have, or had (for those who reached FIRE*), a plan.
In the last few months*, I’ve been doing a lot of reading and thinking about what I want from this page. Â There are somewhere on the order of a bazillion blogs about money, so what could I offer here that hasn’t already been done? Â That was the start of refocusing this page, ever so slowly, into sharing my journey. No one else has shared that, because no one else has had my unique set of experiences. Â And I have realized that my journey, above all else, needs to be toward contentment.
A lot of people I know go to one of the warehouse clubs (Sam’s, Costco, BJ’s) for great deals buying in bulk. It’s always a good feeling to get four servings of something for the price you’d pay for about two in even your most economical supermarket.* Of course, you have to take the good with the bad when you shop those warehouse clubs, and the bad, in this case, is that you usually end up shopping with about 2500 of your closest friends. This is most evident when you are ready to check out and end up fifth in a line of stuffed-to-the-gills shopping carts.
I have found a better way.
Ah, April. Everyone’s favorite time of year, am I right? I mean, what American doesn’t want to pull out bunches of records and statements and devote several hours to filing taxes. Thankfully, the sting of having to file has been lessened thanks to the advent of tax preparation software (we, for example, have been using the same one for 18 years), but it’s still a lot of work.
Add to that this thought: you may have a bad strategy (or worse, no strategy) for your taxes. For us, our old strategy seemed to work out fairly well for many years; we’d get our large refund, and all would be right with the world. But is that the best way to handle your tax situation? Was it the best way for us? I would say no, and furthermore, I would say that getting those big refunds we used to get was a big mistake for us.
As we have continued to try to cut our budget and somehow bring it into balance, we have looked into trying to reduce our cell phone bills.
For many, many years, we had two very different cell phone accounts. Mine was unlimited everything, while hers, owing to the locked-in price, was 200 minutes per month, no texting, and no data. Her plan wasn’t even offered by the major carrier anymore, and it hadn’t been for years.
I was more than a little surprised to find that there were carriers that would, for pretty much the same price per month, offer phone, data, and texting, but there apparently are several options that could very well do that. The one that attracted us the most was Republic Wireless, with its offer of unlimited talk and text plus 1 GB of data for $20 per month.
Continue reading “Review: Is Republic Wireless a good carrier?”