The US stock market grew 25.7% in 2021, causing a lot of personal finance influencers to show off their investment gains. They posted about passive six-figure growth over 6-month periods and preached about the power of investing. The same was true for us, actually…Investing is…
We've avoided the subject of debt payoff on this site for a long time because we've never had any debt ourselves. Somehow it felt less than genuine to talk about how to do something that we've never actually done personally. Up to this point, our…
I recently saw a pretty sneaky TV commercial for an insurance product that I’d never heard of before. It’s called "return of premium life insurance." It’s a form of term life insurance, and here’s how it works: You pay a monthly premium for a fixed…
We kinda hate tracking our spending. I know it’s a sin among personal finance bloggers, but on the 8-year path to accumulating our savings, we never tracked our expenses much at all. Once we learned that money can buy freedom rather than material things, our…
No matter where you’re at on your financial journey, you’ve probably heard some stuff about credit cards. Unfortunately, a lot of popular advice about them is complete nonsense. Credit cards aren’t evil, scary, or complex, but using them correctly does require you to know a…
Transportation might not be your number one expense, but if you’re a typical middle-class American, it’s probably the single biggest thing you could change to become way richer, way faster. Saving money on even bigger expenses like housing can pay off too, but shifting your…
If you make a decent living, and you’ve found ways to slash some of life’s biggest expenses, you’re naturally left with a surplus of cash every month. The next step is to get that money working for you ASAP by investing it. But this whole…
In 2012, a year before taking my first "real job" as a public school teacher, my heart and mind were focused on earning a Ph.D. in particle physics from the University of California, Irvine. As I worked toward that goal, I found that the most…
Wanna know how you’re doing in life financially? You might look at how much money is in your savings account, how much you have invested, or how much debt you have left to pay off. You could also look at your income or your credit…
On the way to financial independence, reducing your expenses is the most powerful thing you can do. Whether you rent or own, housing is probably one of your largest bills. While it's fun to claim small victories like eking out a 44% discount at Taco…
In the three years following graduation in 2012, Lauren and I extended what you might call our “college lifestyle” into young adulthood -- skipping cable TV, sharing one car, riding bicycles instead of driving, strategically living in one-bedroom apartments in mostly low-cost-of-living areas, getting our…
Can money buy happiness? The commonly accepted response to this question is a simple “no.” Most people seem to agree that because money is exchanged for material things, which can never fill a void in the human soul, spending your life obsessed with the accumulation…
