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  • Why we bought a house

    Why We Bought A House (even if we travel a lot)

    To own or to rent: an eternal question that boggles us who have been in the workforce long enough to have saved a bit of money and want a place to live in. After the huge housing crisis circa 2008, we fast forward to 2015, when the prices of homes began to go higher, making it harder for most folks to own a house of their own. After a few years of renting, Peter and I buckled down and decided to buy a home. Here’s part one of our journey through home ownership — the hows, what & the why. Why We Bought A House: A Background Peter and I used…

  • Waiting for Alaska

    Two Weddings and an Alaska Honeymoon

    This is a story of how we decided to have two weddings and an Alaska honeymoon. Two weeks ago, we received some bad news. Ruby’s mom in the Philippines was denied a visa to attend Ruby’s wedding in the United States. The embassy officer didn’t even check her documents, which included confirmations from the priest and the church, just asked her 3 brief questions and denied her visa. We were all shocked and disappointed, because when Ruby’s aunt was denied a visa just a few days after that, it meant that Ruby wouldn’t have anybody from her family at her own wedding, boohoo. We discussed our options and thought about…

  • Financial Health Matters for Higher Education and Beyond

    When I was living in the Philippines, my mom had set up a college plan for me, which dismayed and annoyed my dad because he did not believe in financial planning. Sure enough, he did not live to see the day that I will enter university. Because of an illness, he passed away before I even made it to high school. If it was not for that prepaid college plan, and my mom helping out, I may not have been able to go to the university I liked. When Peter was going to university, he never got a full scholarship (only a partial one) to an in-state school in Florida.…

  • Allegiant Air

    An Allegiant Air Review

      While most people in the travel hacking community blog about business and first class redemptions, we try to keep it real and fly ultra low cost carriers on short domestic or international trips. This stems from my original roots of flying budget carriers in Asia and Europe as a means to explore, and it’s a cheap and fun way to discover the world one city at a time. For this post, we look back at our experience using Allegiant Air from Jacksonville to Memphis and back. Like our Dallas trip, our Memphis trip was another impulse buy. Allegiant had a super cheap sale; we didn’t know anything much about…

  • Vacation versus Travel

    The Difference between Vacation and Travel

    I recently read an excellent online article from The Atlantic about the dire financial straits that over 50% of all Americans find themselves in and something in the article struck me. The writer mentioned that because of the various financial choices he had made regarding his and his family’s finances, he and his family hadn’t been able to take a vacation in over 10 years.  They instead sacrificed their retirement money to send their two daughters to excellent universities (Standford and Emery). I’m not at all criticizing that particular decision, because wanting your kids to attend the best schools is a noble thought, but I was instead curious with how…