Month: March 2018

Ladies, Time to Figure Out Your Worth #WomenRockMoney

It’s International Women’s Day. Go women!
Do you know why women are awesome? Well, here are a couple of facts:
  • More than half a billion women have joined the world’s labor force over the past 30 years, and women now account for more than 40 percent of workers worldwide (IMF, 2012).
  • When a mother has control over her family’s money in the world’s poorest countries, her children are 20% more likely to survive (Melinda Gates).
  • 90% of married women identified themselves as the principle household shopper in their household (Statistic Brain). #mamacontrolsthemoneyhoney
Women have come so far in the last fifty years! It is amazing. However, in the areas of financial literacy and business development, we still have a ways to go.

Continue reading “Ladies, Time to Figure Out Your Worth #WomenRockMoney”

February Net Worth Update

It looks like the stock market is giving us some buying opportunities this month. While our net worth took a dip, we hit our savings and spending goals, so I feel proud of our progress this month.

If you’re just joining, our family of four is on a three-year journey to double our net worth and become location independent. Each month, I record our progress on our net worth and our spending (gulp!). Last year, we increased our net worth by 32% over the year before! This year, we’re trying to increase it by more than 65%! from where we started in December 2016. Given the wild ride the market’s likely to take us on this year, I’m not sure it’s doable. But we’re going to try!

February was a month of full-on winter antics in New Hampshire. Our time in Santiago, just a month before, seemed like a dream, an impossibility! Our lives were cold and snowy this month. We enjoyed a bit of skiing, one week of winter break where we all got sick several times, and of course the Winter Olympics!

This is the second month in our net worth and spending reports for 2018, and although the market had a small “correction” that did negatively affect our net worth, we are still making progress towards our goals.

Continue reading “February Net Worth Update”

A Year of Good Food: Use Cash

We are already entering the third month of the year! Crazy stuff! That means it’s time for another update in A Year of Good Food.

A Year of Good Food: Use Cash--www.thethreeyearxperiment.com

This year, our family is challenging ourselves to spend less on food, so we can reach our goal of location independence by the end of 2019. Last year, I challenged myself to adopt one habit a month that would translate into better money moves for our family. You can read all about what I called A Year of Good Habits here.

This year, we are challenging ourselves to do better at our food spending. Our family spent an average of $966 US per month on groceries in 2017 for our family of four. That’s almost $12,000 in just groceries last year.

For 2018, we’ve adopted the modest goal of shaving 20% off that number, each and every month. That means we would spend no more than $772 in groceries in any month of the year.

The extra $200 per month is going into a travel savings fund, so we can see and benefit from our reduced spending in the food budget.

We could have adopted a radical goal to keep our spending under $500 or something like that. But we know better. We thought it made much more sense to consistently hit our modest target, month after month, for an entire year, to show ourselves we could do it, than to maybe hit the $500 goal once or twice and then face plant with more $1000+ grocery bills.

And if we consistently hit sub-$772 spending, then perhaps we’ll challenge ourselves next year to shave off more.

Continue reading “A Year of Good Food: Use Cash”

How We Are Working Towards Location Freedom: Guest Post on Keep Thrifty

Today I’m excited to guest post on Keep Thrifty. Keep Thrifty is a personal finance and travel blog run by Chris and Jaime, who live in Madison, Wisconsin. They’re run some amazing lifestyle experiments in the last few years, including living in half their house, moving to an apartment, and taking a one-year mini-retirement. I love how brave and willing to think outside of the box they are for their family.

In the post, I share how I caught the travel bug, met and married Mr. ThreeYear, and then settled into… life as we know it! I share the reasons we’ve embarked on our three year experiment and what we hope to get out of it as we work towards location independence, or location freedom, as Keep Thrifty calls it! It sure is freedom!! Not being tied down to one job or one place is such a freeing thought. Gives me goosebumps just thinking about it! Continue reading “How We Are Working Towards Location Freedom: Guest Post on Keep Thrifty”