Back to getting my regular financial updates in, starting with income and expenses before updating my net worth. This update contains the past two months separately as I did not do an update in October for September. Overall I feel that the months went well and I am very happy with our overall spending while maintaining a great lifestyle.
Savings Rate
RANT WARNING – WTF – What the Fee!?
I have been looking to optimize the wife and my investment options, which is why I am in the processing of transferring her ROTH IRA to avoid the fees on her loaded fund. So when the option to join her work 401(k) opened after a year of employment I figured it can’t be worse than throwing more money into the ROTH at Edward Jones, right?
WRONG!
Blog Update
I will try to not do too many of these, as my focus is primarily on content, but I wanted to let all of my readers know about the pages I have been adding recently as a quick reference to reoccurring articles.
Additionally I have signed up with twitter and facebook. Although, it is worth mentioning that I am not a big fan of facebook and I haven’t been updating that regularly… yet.. but I would probably be more motivated if I had some followers! That and I haven’t found a way to auto post my latest posts onto the page yet, but I have found a way to do so for twitter but honestly I was doing good on twitter before the auto post thing.
So here is a quick breakdown of the pages I have added or updated recently: Continue reading
Income and Expense for August 14
I did things in inverse order this month where I updated my Net Worth before my savings rates. To me the savings rates is the most important battle, I have even created a new page to track my progress over time. Every dollar I don’t spend can either be invested in the future, used to pay down debt, or help bolster one of the layers of my emergency fund. I may track my income and expenses different than other bloggers, mainly because I use this as a purpose of updating my Net Worth. So any action that will increase my Net Worth, such as paying down the principle on a loan, or savings into a HSA, is savings in my mind as those actions will increase my net worth.
August overall was a grand month with extra paychecks from the daily grind. I had expected to pay $2,500 more for my house due to storm damage in April, however that hasn’t happened as of yet. I guess I will need to double check my paperwork to see where I stand on this, but I am holding those funds aside for now as I plan on paying it at the present time. Continue reading
The Road to Financial Independence
I have had a vague idea of when I would become financially independent. Somewhere between age 46-50 was the general idea. I can’t say when it will happen for certain, circumstances change, inflation happens, or life events. But I can say if everything cost wise and lifestyle wise were to move in the same direction as where I am today, that I know when I can retire. The good news is I am a bit of an optimist and I hope I can create a larger spread in savings, paying off debt, and make a little more income than inflation. Who knows, if this blog starts to make a little money a couple years into the journey that is all money that will speed up this process.
After reading a detailed post from Big Guy Money on his journey to financial independence I thought maybe I should share my thoughts on the time frame for my journey here. So this post will kind of give you an idea of where I am going now and how I plan to get there. Kind of like a travel guide subject to changes due to unforeseen circumstances. Continue reading
Income and Expense for July 2014
It is time to update my income and expenses. As I previously noted when I first started tracking that I consider everything that contributes towards growing my net worth as savings. So this would include the principle portions of debt repayments, while not including the interest, or insurance and taxes on my home. With that said there was a point made that I do not depreciate my vehicles or amortize them in some fashion other than an adjustment to net worth. This is true… but I am also not including dividends inside my retirement accounts as income, maybe it is currently more skewed that depreciation is greater than that income, but I would hope in the future that this will change. Anyways, this is a system that works for me and you need to determine a system that works for yourself and helps keep you on track, that is the main goal in my opinion. Continue reading
Frankly Frugal Finance: Weekender Edition #4
Here we are with the first weekend of August and I am quickly approaching one month in the blogging world! Time just seems to fly by when either you are busy or having fun, or both. I like to think it is the both part. Anyways, if you have checked out my posts this week you can cheat and just click on the links below:
Life is Short – You Only Live Once
Choosing a Broker for the ROTH IRA
Earn Money Over 10 Times in a SINGLE Transaction
Now it is time to honor those other great bloggers out there! I try to keep this list short with just five, but I do tweet articles throughout the week as well. You can follow me on twitter @FranklyFrugalFI to see them as I find them. Also the blogroll is a great place to find blogs with great content as well. Anyways, the articles I want to highlight this week are:
Goals For 2014 and Beyond
Even though the year is half way over, I think it is important to establish my goals for the remainder of 2104. There are two financial marks I desire to reach and two different personal marks. In addition I want to discuss long term goals.
2014 Goals
Goal # 1 – Maintain at least a 50% savings rate for 2014
I think that I am at a good start in this area, although I did have a lively debate with Dividend Mantra over what should be considered an expense. I would prefer to hit 60% in this category, but I have a huge expense that will be occurring either this month or the next. I contemplated capitalizing this expense, but I don’t think it will increase my home value dollar for dollar necessarily. It may, but I don’t plan on selling my home either.
Goal # 2 – Reach $45,000 Net Worth by year end
Originally I was going to go for $50,000, but as I said I have a large upcoming expense, that I will post about when it is all said and done.
Continue reading
Income and Expense for 1/2 of 2014
Since I am starting this blog in July, I figured I will get everything caught up income and expense for the first half of the year in a single post. So this one might be longer than normal. At the beginning of the year, I wanted to see if I could save at least 50% of our net income. Now, by savings I mean anything that will increase my net worth. So contributions to retirement accounts, HSA, brokerage account, principle amount towards debt, and any increases in my checking account.
Now I haven’t stated my goals yet for the remainder of the year and I feel like this is an area in which can be revised upwards. I am striving to make each month better and to try to eliminate unnecessary expenses. Now between my wife and I we don’t even gross six-figures in income. In fact, I would be THRILLED if we got that high before we are financially independent. Not because the income matters, but because we will be able to get financially independent that much quicker! Really, I am just a bit above the median household income level in the US. So if anyone wants to argue you can’t save on the median income, send them my way. I am not here to prove someone wrong, I am here to prove it is possible. Continue reading