Category: Money Management

We’re working towards financial freedom. How we save, invest, and spend is a big part of that. Read about what we do to save more, invest better, and spend wisely in alignment with our values (family, travel, and FI).

How We Stacked Financial Wins to Grow Our Net Worth

Ten years ago, in 2009, we had just started getting paying off our $38,000 in debt and had very little savings to speak of. We had a 30-year home mortgage on our house in Atlanta, and because we’d only put 5% down and the market tanked so bad, we had negative equity in it.

I thought we’d never get our debt paid off, but we finally did, in December of 2009. For awhile, we were only focused on building up an emergency fund, and didn’t think about our net worth at all.

But once we found the FIRE community and began to learn more about personal finance, we wanted to grow our net worth and become financially free.

Here’s what we did to stack our financial wins and grow our net worth to the level it is now.

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February Net Worth Update

Happy March! We’re (slowly) entering my favorite time of year in the South, Spring. As we drove home yesterday, I noticed that there were tons of blooms on trees and our street (shown in the picture) is blooming.

We’re still getting lots of rain, but there are many sunny days interspersed with the drizzle, at least enough to keep me hopeful that better weather is on the way!

Our Progress

Like many others in the personal finance community, we enjoyed a net worth gain this month. We’re now firmly in the 50%+ camp, meaning that since we started this experiment, we’ve increased our net worth by over 50%. Only 50% more to go this year! I joke, because that’s a lot of net worth to add in a year at our net worth level. Nevertheless, we will keep saving and investing to see how much we can save up in 2019.

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What I Learned from No-Spend February

February is a depressing month. It seems to be that way every year for me. It’s the middle of winter. Even though we now live in North Carolina, and we no longer have a snow-covered backyard, the days are gray and largely rain-filled. Though some shoot push up through pinestraw-filled beds, Spring feels far away.

Our daily routine, which I have a hard time with on good days, feels unbearably heavy. (And as I write these lines I roll my eyes at myself, because, geesh, my life is so so good in the giant cosmical scheme of things. But feelings! They’re there for the feeling, right?).

On top of that, I added a No-Spend Challenge. Here were the rules of the challenge:

The Rules

  1. It started February 4th, because the weekend previous my parents visited and we did a lot of spending to celebrate family birthdays.
  2. It was for me only. Mr. ThreeYear traveled a ton this month and didn’t need or want to participate in the challenge. Same with the little guys.
  3. I spent on: groceries, gas, mortgage, bills.
  4. I did NOT spend money on: eating out, clothes, haircuts, home maintenance, entertainment, or pet treats for Lucy.
  5. Exceptions: I made an exception for a dinner we had planned with our neighbors, but we ended up pushing the dinner to March, so it didn’t apply.
I've never successfully completed a No Spend Month, until now. Here's what I learned from my No Spend February challenge. #nospendfebruary #nospendmonth #nospend #frugalfebruary #nobuymonth #debtfree #financialindependence
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How We Grew Our Emergency Fund

When our family started to get out of debt, we followed Dave Ramsey’s Baby Steps. Step 1 was to put aside $1000, as quickly as possible, for any big bills that might come your way.

Because Mr. ThreeYear had recently been laid off, and had received a three-month severance, we still had a little extra money in our bank account for just this purpose.

However, after we paid off our $38,000 of consumer debt, our next step was saving a larger emergency fund, one that could cover 3-6 months of our basic expenses were either of us unable to work.

Unfortunately, saving a larger emergency fund wasn’t nearly as easy as saving that first $1000.

It took us awhile (years, I’m afraid to say), and our methods were a bit unorthodox, but in the end, we had saved enough to pay our basic expenses for four months (we decided we needed an emergency fund that was on the smaller side, since Mr. ThreeYear works in a company with a no-layoff policy and the rest of our financial situation is quite stable).

Here’s how we did it.

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What Will Tank Your Frugality, Fast

Earlier in the school year, Little ThreeYear was really struggling. He has some learning issues, and moving to a new school almost put his brain on overload. The problem was, he couldn’t focus on anything, so he focused on absolutely nothing, and refused to do his work.

During those difficult few weeks, I wrote these words.

You want to do anything you can, anything, to lesson their struggles. Even though I know that some struggles are good for a child, I’ve watched my son’s square peg be wedged into school’s round hole for ages now, and it hurts. It hurts to watch him cry out, “I hate school! I hate everything about it!” It hurts to know that he’s just not happy and will never be happy being forced to sit and do endless math problems in order to prepare himself for state mandated testing.

Another part of me knows that there are things in this world that you just have to suck it up and do, and school is one of them. Yes, it’s hard and purposefully dull and boring, to prepare you for employment. I hated parts of school even though I was an excellent student, Mr. ThreeYear hated school (and wasn’t an excellent student). We both made it out okay.

But on the other hand, a small voice inside me keeps asking, “but wouldn’t he thrive in an alternative environment, like a Montessori school?” Junior ThreeYear is a maker. He builds and plans buildings, Lego sets, paper dolls, forts, comic book series. He can focus for hours on a project involving any of those things. But he completely tunes out his teacher and stares off into space during math, to the point where he struggles to complete a few problems. It drives his teachers crazy. I understand; I’m a teacher. I also know he’s not doing it on purpose. He just isn’t interested and can’t make his mind focus. 

He has counseling, he has meds, he has OT tools. None of it is working.

So now what? What do we do now? Private school is not in our FI plan. It’s expensive. Can we afford it? Yes. Should we afford it? That’s the nail-biting question. I don’t know. We go back and forth, “this would be an amazing experience.” “What if he doesn’t do well here either? What a waste of money.” “You and I sucked it up and got through it.” “Will he be prepared for high school?” “Will we be able to save enough for college?” “I’ll have to go back to work earlier than I wanted.”

Shortly after I wrote this panic-stricken missive, I sat down with his teacher, the vice-principal, and a wonderful counselor who’s been at the school for 30 years. The counselor introduced a small little “tweak” in Little ThreeYear’s day that has produced a dramatic turnaround in his productivity.

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A Year of Good Money: No Spend February

This year, my family is focusing on making better spending decisions. To that end, we’re (I’m) engaging in twelve money experiments designed to help us reexamine our spending patterns and hopefully, get better at them. I’m calling this the Year of Good Money.

Last month, we launched the year off with the “Stop Eating Out” experiment. We pledged to not eat out at all for one month. We’ve always spent several hundred dollars per month on restaurant eating, and that has vaguely bothered me for a while, because I don’t feel like we’re getting as much value from eating out as we’re spending.

In the past five years, our eating out has averaged a whopping $258.40 per month. If that money were going to one amazing meal that we enjoyed with friends, or something of that nature, it would be one thing. But most times, it’s a couple of visits to the Mexican restaurant, a night of take-out, or other underwhelming food choices that we don’t even enjoy that much.

January’s Experiment

So how did we do last month with the experiment? Honestly, incredible! We spent $0 in our Eating Out category. We had one exception when Mr. ThreeYear insisted we go out for sushi, paid for my his birthday money, so we did. I didn’t count it because it was his birthday, and his birthday money.

Other than that, we enjoyed an eating-out-free January, and the best part was, aside from the sushi excursion, no one seemed to miss it.

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January Net Worth Update

Ahh, January. What can I say about my least favorite month? You’re cold. You’re long. You’re at the beginning of the year and don’t really contain any fun breaks or holidays (not forgetting about you, MLK Jr. Day and Presidents’ Day, but you’re not quite as fun as say, Spring Break).

We have made it through our first January in North Carolina, and I have to say, although we didn’t suffer through -14F temps like we did last year in New Hampshire, it was still pretty darn cold most days.

I struggled to keep up with Lucy the dog’s massive energy, and tried to walk her each and every day, even as my fingers and nose protested bitterly in the wet and chilly 20F temps of the early morning.

Our Progress

We eeked out another small gain with our net worth this month. We’ve definitely seen a difference in our net worth growth with me not working (it’s been slower!).

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The i401K: Your Best Friend as An Independent Contractor

The i401k (also known as the Individual 401K, one participant 401k, or Solo 401K) is the 401K plan for Independent Contractors or sole proprietors. Just as a traditional 401K offers myriad benefits for employees like tax deferred retirement savings and the benefit of lowering your tax bill, the i401K plan was set up to offer the same benefits for independent contractors and individual business owners. The IRS defines it here. 

Tax Savings for Independent Contractors

Since I’ve worked as an independent contractor for several years, the i401K allows me to contribute in two ways:

  • as an employee, making salary-deferred contributions of up to $19,000 in 2019
  • as an employer (because I own a sole proprietorship), making profit-sharing contributions of up to $56,000 (including the $19,000 salary deferral) a year, tax free, for retirement. There are a couple of caveats to this, so read on for more details! Continue reading “The i401K: Your Best Friend as An Independent Contractor”

A Year of Good Money: Stop Eating Out

I started this blog in 2017 (okay, technically it was the end of 2016) as a three-year experiment. I planned to spend 2017, 2018, and 2019 with a very focused goal in mind–to double our net worth and become location independent. In an absolutely shocking turn of events, our family became location independent last year, mid-way through the experiment.

Our location independence looks a little different than I envisioned, but it’s been a great decision for our family. We live in one place, in an idyllic small town in North Carolina just north of Charlotte. Mr. ThreeYear and I both work remotely. Our kids attend the great public schools here, and we travel as much as we can during breaks and summer. Most importantly, we are close to our family and the weather is a lot warmer.

Now that we’ve reached one goal (and it was, truly, the main goal), where does that leave us in 2019? Of course, we still have to double our net worth, and unfortunately we have almost 50% more to go, due to losing equity in our house and a market downturn at the end of last year.

But, because we know that we’ll eventually reach that goal, and it’s not quite as pressing now as it was when we thought we’d be leaving our jobs for several years, what should be our focus in 2019?

Each year of the experiment, I’ve picked a theme, a “word of the year,” before it was a thing.

In 2017, I picked one new habit each month to get better at, so we could improve our productivity with investing and earning.

In 2018, I focused on spending 20% less, each and every month, at the grocery store, so we could save more.

Week 5 Aldi www.thethreeyearexperiment.com
Last year, I reported on our monthly buying habits at the grocery store.

In 2019, I thought about a lot of behaviors we could focus on. We want better relationships, better health. But we still struggle with over-spending, too. And our spending experiments have worked pretty well to change our behavior.

So 2019 is the year for money experiments.

Each month, we’ll perform a different money experiment to see how we do.

Continue reading “A Year of Good Money: Stop Eating Out”

How to Help Your Economy

Over the last several years, household debt across the world has been slowly increasing. That debt includes mortgages, car loans, and credit card debt. China’s household debt now stands at 49.1% of GDP, relatively low compared to many developed nations, but worrisome because of its 30 percentage point increase in the last decade. Shockingly, Switzerland leads the world with household debt at 127.5% of Gross Domestic Product. That means, for every $100,000 of GDP a household produces, they hold $127,500 in debt!

The average citizen in Switzerland, which has traditionally been an extremely wealthy country, has substantial assets (net worth) underpinning this debt, or at least four times more assets than the average American.

Even so, Switzerland, as well as nine other economies including Canada, Finland, and Australia, have debt levels that are high and rising quickly, at a pace that mirrors that of the US right before the housing bubble. 

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