• How Much Spend on Travel

    How much should you spend on Travel?

    This is one of the most important questions that we ask ourselves every single chance we can: How much should you spend on Travel?   I was doing the December 2015 budget a few days ago, and I got the idea to look at not just how much we spend  per month on different things, but also how much we spend on travel as a percentage of income.  The answer was pretty illuminating, actually.  You get to see that the biggest expenses are essentially out of your hands, and that you don’t always need to sweat the small stuff.  I’ll be posting these every month this year after I do the…

  • Siesta Key, Sarasota, Florida

    What to Do in Sarasota Florida

    We discuss what to do and where to go in Sarasota in an effort to help our wedding guests & potential tourists to plan their travels within the area. Read on for more.

  • Blue Ridge Parkway

    2015 Travel on a Budget

    Dear Fellow Journeyers, 2015 is nearly over, so we wish to share all of our travels that we did for 2015, complete with detailed expenses per trip.  Our budget was $4,000 per person. We traveled to 15 destinations during the year: North America – 10 (Tampa, Orlando, New York, Atlanta, Las Vegas, Augusta, Emerald Coast, New York, Cocoa Beach & Mexico) Europe – 3 (Germany, Austria & Slovakia) Asia – 1 (Philippines) Caribbean – 1 (Turks & Caicos) The full cost of these travels was $8,791.94 per person for the whole year.  However, using travel hacking tools, exploiting mistake fares (while there were still mistake fares), and using big hotel…

  • What Artificial Intelligence means for Financial Independence

    “By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes.” – Shakespeare’s Macbeth   The machines are coming…or have they already arrived? In the year 2000, artificial intelligence still seemed like a distant dream.  The tech revolution had begun but soon deflated when people realized the early tech startups weren’t really producing much economic value.  It was a quasi shell game that the market eventually squashed, and tech as an industry retreated into the spotlight behind the usual titans like banking, oil, and pharma. And then Google, Apple, Amazon and Facebook entered the picture, and the true tech revolution began.  This has resulted in many changes to our way…

  • Why You Shouldn't Care About Other's Finances

    Why You Shouldn’t Care About Other’s Finances

    It’s Black Friday as I type this, and most of the USA is out shopping, including me. A few others are opting not to shop at all, and that’s fine, I totally respect that. However, I just got to thinking… in this personal finance world, have we become too voyeuristic? Why do People Care About Other’s Finances? As personal finance gets more mainstream and other people start retiring early, we become fascinated with certain people (bloggers, vloggers, or PF ‘celebrities’). Some publicly show how much they are earning online or through their various businesses, some posted how they managed to retire early and how they’re doing it. Have we become…