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.
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…
We were warned not to write this article by well-meaning friends in the world of personal finance. “Banks won’t touch you if you talk about that,” they said. See, the most lucrative way for a personal finance website like ours to make money is by…
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…
It’s the 2020s. Your stock broker isn’t some guy you call on the phone and ask to place trades for you. When you want to invest money, you click a mouse or tap a screen a few times, and it’s done inside your brokerage account…
Expense tracking, budget making, checkbook balancing, bill paying, stock trading — all of this stuff requires an endless input of time and brain power. That’s why, for the last eight years or so, Lauren and I haven’t done any of those things. Being good with…
“Early retirement?! In this economy? You must be insane! Interest rates are near 0%. The stock market has seen some of the quickest drops ever recently. Unemployment is through the roof. People are living longer than ever. Social Security is doomed. And you think your…
In January of 2016, we were headed back home from the high of a 6-month honeymoon in Hawaii. Ready to buckle down and get full-time jobs again, we figured it’d be a good idea to buy a house, so at ages 25 (me) and 26…
If you’re a typical middle-class American, your car is probably the single easiest thing you could change to become way richer, way faster. Saving money on even bigger expenses like housing has a huge financial impact too, but shifting your mindset about cars doesn’t require…
Growing up, it was expected of me to go to college. I had the grades and the drive, just not the money. To be fair, money was always pretty tight in my family’s house, and my baby brother didn’t make that any easier when he…
Whether you're at home or on the road, the best way to save money on food is to cook it yourself. But when you're traveling, you're not always going to have a kitchen in your hotel room or want to bust out a propane camp…
Recurring costs eat away at your wealth stealthily, in bite-sized chunks that you don’t always notice. A cable and streaming TV bill of $100 a month could add up to around $130,000 across 25 years if it were invested in the stock market instead. “Cutting…
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…
Everybody knows where to go online for low prices and fast shipping on almost everything imaginable — its domain name starts with an “A”. While Amazon is ubiquitous for online shopping, there are a handful of items I’d never dream of buying anywhere else but…
In the three years following graduation in 2012, Lauren and I extended what you might call our “college lifestyle” into young adulthood — living in low-cost, one-bedroom apartments, getting our groceries at Walmart, riding bicycles instead of driving, sharing one car, skipping TV subscriptions, and…
Daydreaming about a grand adventure can be enjoyable on its own, but the real fun comes when you actually leave home. It’s much easier to turn dreams into reality when you have a realistic picture of what it will cost, and while it may be…
In 2012, we became relatively broke (but debt-free!) college graduates. We were wide-eyed and ready to take on the world. Fast forward a couple years to 2014, and somehow college had become a distant memory. We were about to get married, and we were each…
Whether we’re trying something new on the road or enjoying a neighborhood coffee shop, we’re constantly bombarded with opportunities to sign up for rewards, loyalty programs, and bonus points. There are so many that most people just ignore them and default to an immediate “NO”…
