• You are more than your job

    You Are More Than Your Job

    Most people in the FI space have at least a current job that they are doing right now. Some people hate it, some people actually like it. For those who actually hate their job or are just going to work to get that paycheck every two weeks, I have a message for you: You Are More Than Your Job

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 2017 Budget Year in Review

    2017 Budget Year In Review

    It’s that time of year again.  No, I don’t mean Christmas. I mean dusting off the transaction history for this past year from Personal Capital (link) and sifting through…(checking total amount of transactions)…2,097 transactions! Boy, what fun it is to calculate net income…yeah. It has certainly been an interesting year.  The first half of the year was largely focused on travel, and mid-way through the year, Peter changed jobs and work locations.  Let’s take a look at the numbers and then we’ll provide a summary of the good, bad, and ugly.  Please note that we will publish only the percentages of our expenses compared to our after-tax income (or disposable…