Reduce your expenses, save and invest more money, reach financial independence, and retire young so you can follow your dreams. We’ll show you how.
Retiring early is normally pretty simple: Just spend less money than you earn, invest the difference in index funds, and follow the 4% rule. The 4% rule says that once you have at least 25× your annual expenses invested, you can withdraw enough money to…
For the most part, I consider myself to be sort of a minimalist. Aside from being notoriously frugal, I also don’t feel like I need a ton of stuff to be happy. But with that said, I’m cool with a little extravagance when it’s free.…
When you’re trying to research an investment of any kind, you probably go straight to a historical price chart before anything else. There’s nothing wrong with that, except that most people have absolutely no idea how to read a stock chart correctly. It seems like…
When we tell people that we took six months off work for our honeymoon in Hawaii, or that we spent seven months on the road visiting every National Park in the US, or that we later retired early at age 29, we often receive an…
When I buy shares of VTI (Vanguard’s Total Stock Market Index Fund), I get a tiny slice of almost every publicly traded company in the United States. I own a piece of the entire stock market. Historically, this type of low-cost index fund has delivered…
We’ve been blogging about saving and investing money for nearly three years now, and somehow we’ve never actually shared what’s inside our own portfolio. Oops! I guess the main reason is that it’s really nothing special. We don’t have any super secret investments that helped…
We get a lot of “interesting” comments on TikTok and Instagram explaining why saving tons of money to enjoy life more is a dumb idea. In the past few months, the most popular argument against us has gone something like this: “By the time I…
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…
Do you know the interest rate on your savings account? If not, don’t feel too bad — most people have no idea. But since nobody really pays attention to this number, big banks get away with paying way below the fair market interest rate on…
In his early twenties, Jeremy Schneider founded RentLinx, a website that helps landlords list their properties for rent on multiple platforms simultaneously. At age 34, he sold that business for millions of dollars, invested the proceeds into stock and bond market index funds, and retired…
The year is 2021. You’re a happy Apple customer with a brand new iPhone 12. Your previous device was an iPhone X, which you managed to keep for nearly four years before replacing it. You look at your X and think, “Nobody wants this ancient…
“Pay yourself first” is popular wisdom in the world of personal finance. The idea is simple: Every time you make money, you must save (or invest) a fixed amount of that income before doing anything else. Then, you can spend the rest however you like,…
It’s time to come clean: We’ve done a lot of unnecessary spending in the past year. It started last August, when we moved out of our perfectly good, paid-off condo in Gainesville, Florida, and bought ourselves a fancy beach home for $204,000 instead. Sure, we…
We don’t own cryptocurrency. We have no immediate plans to buy cryptocurrency. And we believe that cryptocurrency is unsuitable as a long-term, buy-and-hold, wealth-building investment. Simultaneously, the technology, mathematics, and philosophy behind cryptocurrency is super cool. It has lots of practical applications. And I would…
I have an addiction to Starbucks cold brew iced coffee. If you’re not familiar with cold brew, it’s prepared through a slow extraction process that’s kept cool or room temperature from start to finish — the coffee never gets heated up. This results in a…
Ever since college, I’ve done physics tutoring as a side hustle — a way to make a little extra cash here and there. But in 2016, after returning from a travel sabbatical in Hawaii, I found myself jobless, and I decided to try turning my…
Anyone can write an investing book and seem smart in the moment. A “hot” stock-picking strategy might even get lucky and succeed for a few months or a year, as more people jump on the bandwagon — enough time to make the author rich. But…
A stock market crash is coming. Is it because interest rates are at an all-time low? Is it because there’s a pandemic sweeping the globe? Is it because nearly 20% of all US Dollars in existence were created out of thin air in the last…
It’s that time of year — you know, the beautiful, magical, spendy holiday season. When you’re trying to save money or pay down debt, holiday gift-giving can really throw a wrench in your plans. You want to give meaningful gifts that show you care about…
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…
Imagine that you walk into a bank to open a savings account, and you’re offered a bizarre opportunity instead. Here’s how it works: You make an initial deposit, and each month it sits, the balance gets multiplied by a random number between 0.9 and 1.12.…
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…
By writing a series of blog posts about personal finance and stock market investing intended for his daughter, JL Collins (somewhat by accident) reached an international audience of millions. Now, in the world of financial independence and early retirement (FIRE), few authors are as well-respected…
