Back to School Savings

On Wednesday, I officially started teaching (although I’ve been in teacher work days for a week and a half). On Monday, the boys return to school. The summer has ended.

In order to get ready for these auspicious beginnings (and because I had no idea how much energy I’d have left after the end of a long day at school–answer, not much), I spent a few days before I started work cleaning out the boys’ closets.

This is an annual tradition at our house, and one that is very much in keeping with my minimalist roots and a good way to sift through hand-me-downs that we’ve stored for the boys’ future use.

This year, Mr. ThreeYear commented that the boys have a lot of clothes, and recommended we reduce the amount of clothes we keep on hand for them.

So as I went through their dresser drawers, I made a big donation pile for anything that no longer fit or was badly stained.

Even though it’s been two years since Junior ThreeYear has received any hand-me-downs, he still had one Tupperware bin of clothes left that didn’t fit him yet. He wears a size 14 in pants, meaning the clothes I once packed away for some giant of the future now fit.

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Letters from the Past

Last week, I got a letter from my past self. I wrote it the previous year, on August 5th, 2018.

This time last year, I had lived in my new town a mere month. I had no idea what the future would hold, nor what the school year would be like for the boys, nor how working remotely would work out for Mr. ThreeYear.

But I hoped and I wished. Here’s what I wrote:

Dear Future Me, 
What a surprise to get my second letter from the past today! This time last year, I had just come back to New Hampshire from South Carolina. I hoped to have spent my entire trip South there this year. It feels almost unbelievable that we’ve actually moved to North Carolina, that we actually live full time in the South now. We reached our goal a full year earlier. We’ve reached so many of our goals. We paid off our debt. My blog has continued to grow. I am a freelance writer. We have an exciting Disney trip coming up next month. We’ve improved our grocery spending.

In some ways, it feels hard to think about next year at this time. When so many goals and plans have come true, where do we go next? I know I’d like to find a way to make money that doesn’t rob my focus on my family. Is that writing full-time? I hope I’ve figured it out by next year, that I’ve taken my time and figured out the right path.

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Broke to Financially Woke: Guest Post on Peerless Money Mentor

Do you remember a time when you were broke? Not just a temporary “I can’t afford X today,” but a period where you couldn’t afford anything?

It’s hard for me to remember those days, honestly, but I think it’s good to try and remember what it felt like to sweat every purchase.

When I was in my twenties and we were just starting out I remember playing the gas game. I’d drive up to the pump and put in $20 because there was no way I could spare $60 to fill up the tank of my BMW X5. Ironic, right?

I remember having $10 or less in my checking account in college. That happened a lot. I drove to the ATM, would check my balance, then if I had enough ($10 or more!), I’d go join my friends at Checker’s or wherever else we were eating/drinking that night.

While I’m really glad to be on the other side of that now, I think it’s important to remember the Russian Roulette money days, when we had to decide what bills to pay and what bills had to wait and couldn’t imagine ever getting out from our mountain of consumer debt.

Jerry from Peerless Money Mentor has a series on his blog about people who’ve gone from “digging in the couch cushions to go to McDonalds” to “on the way to FI.” So I reached out to him to see if I could share our story in his series, From Broke to Financially Woke.

Jerry is a millennial from Baton Rouge who graduated with degrees in Business Management and IT. Despite his supposed business acumen, he still made the typical financial mistakes and ended up broke. He wised up, started some side hustles like driving for Uber, and began to make better money decisions. He started his blog to document his journey toward FI and help others make better money decisions.

Jerry’s series details the stories of people like him (and me) who went from major debt to financially literate.

Here’s an excerpt from the post:

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Quit Like a Millionaire: Book Review

This post contains an affiliate link or two. If you decide to buy the books I recommend, instead of checking them out from the library like I do, I may get some pocket change. I appreciate it because who doesn’t want a little extra pocket change?

I am, unsurprisingly, a fan of personal finance books. I dutifully read anything related to personal finance that appears on the market, usually placing an online hold for the book through my library.

I’ll often read an article about the book then log in to my online library and get in line, so to speak.

Last week, when the book Quit Like a Millionaire: No Gimmicks, Luck, or Trust Fund Required, by Kristy Shen and Bryce Leung showed up in my checked-out books, I was surprised. I’d forgotten I’d placed a hold on it, forgotten what it was about, forgotten who wrote it.

Turns out, the book was written by a Canadian couple who were saving up to buy a house in Toronto then decided to keep renting, pocket their savings, and retire early, traveling the world instead.

The book is primarily written by Kristy Shen. I’m not even sure why Bruce Leung’s name is on it. Shen tells his story, sure, but it’s really her story, which intersects with his, that is the most interesting. And we certainly don’t hear his voice at all in the book.

The reason I’m writing a book review, which I do extremely rarely, is because I found this book to be a breath of fresh air.

Normally, when people write personal finance books or even early retirement books, they say a lot of the same things. They write some very dense chapters on savings rate and investments, and then the thing’s over.

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One Year of Pet Expenses

Thank you for your patience with me, readers of this blog. In part because of my new job, in part because of my 40th birthday, in part because of my family from Chile visiting, I have taken a sabbatical of sorts this summer, and have not been posting as often. I hope to get back to a more regular writing schedule soon. I appreciate you reading!

Just about one year ago, on August 6th, 2018, we brought Lucy the dog home from the Amish farm.

Lucy is our labradoodle who we bought from an Amish breeder at a farm just an hour away from our house in Davidson, North Carolina.

I resisted getting a dog for years, and with good reason: a dog is a ton of work. Taking care of Lucy has felt like taking care of another child, in a lot of ways. We had to potty train her (housebreak her), sleep train her (crate train her), set up playdates (dog park outings), and find babysitters when we go out of town (pet sitters).

There has been no small amount of expense related to my furry white daughter, as Mr. ThreeYear calls her (as opposed to my hairless Latino sons, I suppose?).

And although I am very firm in my decision that she is the last family pet that we shall have (stating it on the internet makes it official), she has brought a lot of joy to our lives.

In this post, I’m going to outline allll the costs involved in taking care of Lucy for the last year. I will include all the direct costs, like vet visits, food, and toys. I won’t include all the indirect costs, like the cost of replacing my favorite pen that she chewed up, or replacing my sister-in-law’s slippers, etc. We’ll just call those bonus expenses.

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Four Money Lessons from Four Decades

On Wednesday I turned 40. I started this blog with that birthday in the forefront of my mind. The three year experiment was an exercise in using the last three years of my 30s well, in reaching a financial and lifestyle goal before I hit the big 4-0.

To celebrate this auspicious occasion, I went with a group of friends to a Korean restaurant where we rented a private karaoke room. Several friends drove or flew in to Davidson to help me celebrate. I had that perfect, happy feeling of being well celebrated and surrounded by people I loved all night.

Time is a funny thing. The memory of my 30th birthday is so clear, and yet it happened a decade ago now. Junior ThreeYear was two then and now he’s twelve.

Celebrating Junior ThreeYear’s second birthday at our house in Atlanta. I turned 30 a few days later.

I’ve done a lot of living in those ten years. Just ten months after my 30th birthday, we moved from Atlanta to New Hampshire, and then eight years later, on to North Carolina. We had a second child. We sold two and bought two houses in that decade. I’ve run over ten half- and full-marathons. I’ve had half a dozen jobs. We lived through eight New Hampshire winters. We’ve gone on countless trips. I’ve made lifelong friends.

We’ve done a lot with our money in that time–we’ve grown our net worth substantially. We’ve paid off our apartment in Chile as well as many cars and large chunks of mortgage debt. We’ve built a college fund for the kids. We’ve gotten a month ahead with our budgeting. We’ve learned to be a bit more frugal, to spend according to our values.

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Mid-Year Goals Update

In January, I made the decision to set my goals a little differently for 2019. I decided on the top three values for our family for this year, which have changed a bit since we’ve moved, and made a list of daily behaviors I wanted to work on in order to live those values.

Now that six months of the year have passed, I thought I’d report on how I’ve done.

Our Top Values

In New Hampshire, we became very focused on our financial goals. Part of the reason for that was because we didn’t have our family or long-time friends around, so pursuing financial goals gave us something to focus on.

Now that we live in North Carolina and enjoy something like location independence, although I have a full-time location-dependent job starting next month (but not summers!), our values have, admittedly, changed.

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June Net Worth Update

The first month of summer has now passed. For the ThreeYears, it was a whirlwind of swim practices, swim meets, and a job acceptance. That’s right; as of August 1st I’ll officially be gainfully employed (although I don’t actually start teaching until the end of the month).

I also took a bit of a break from blogging. I had been blogging three times per week; that’s a lot of writing. I took a rest from getting up early in the mornings and blogged once or twice per week instead.

While the boys had a great experience in swim team, it reminded all of us that we don’t like to have lots of activities in the evenings. For the first two weeks of June, we didn’t eat dinner as a family once (and we almost always do!).

Our Progress

In June, our net worth came back up to 65.6% of our goal, having gone down by several percentage points last month. Our goal was to reach 100% of our December 2016 net worth by December 2019, that is, to have doubled our December 2016 net worth in three years. While we’re still a long way from our goal and I don’t think we’re going to get there, I’ll start getting paychecks in August, so my 403b contributions will start then. I’m looking forward to making more progress than we would have otherwise for the last five months of the year.

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Teaching Kids Perseverance

I’m spending the week at the beach this week with my family for the upcoming Independence Day celebration.

Last evening, the boys and I went kayaking with my dad. Junior ThreeYear and I had our own kayaks and Pata (my dad’s grandpa name) and Little ThreeYear shared a two-man vessel.

We put the boats in at high tide from the slip off the back of our house and paddled through the marsh. We got all the way out to a channel of ocean water, with a strong current, and pulled our kayaks up on a sand bar to enjoy our own private beach.

It was one of those magical experiences that I knew the boys would remember forever, as they made giant sandcastles out of the soft, wet sand and slung sand balls at each other.

Dad and I decided to go back when the sun got lower in the sky and we knew we only had an hour or so of light left.

As magical as the kayaking experience was going out, coming back, it was an exercise in frustration for Junior ThreeYear. Because he was paddling his own kayak, he was responsible for getting back across the windy channel, then paddling himself all the way back through the marsh to our house.

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Paying Too Much? How to Unstick Your Money Habits

Earlier this year, my family switched to an HSA Health Insurance plan. Unfortunately, I found out after we switched that we’d no longer pay a low $10 or $20 copay for our prescription meds. Instead, we paid upwards of $100 for each of my two boys’ ADHD meds each month.

We suffered through these costs for a few months until one evening, Mr. ThreeYear saw an advertisement for the GoodRX app on TV. “You should look into it,” he prodded me, for maybe the tenth time. “Okay, fine, I’ll download it, but it’s not going to save us anything,” I said. I was convinced that there was no way there could be much of a price differential between our meds, because I’d looked online at our health insurance’s price comparer, and thought I’d found the cheapest pharmacy.

Well, it turns out that I was in for a delightful surprise. In a strange twist of fate that has only happened a couple of times in our marriage (ha), Mr. ThreeYear was right and I was wrong.

I downloaded GoodRx and found out that the local Publix Pharmacy carried our meds for less than HALF the cost. Instead of Little ThreeYear’s meds costing over $150, they now cost $58. I was floored! How could they be so much cheaper? I had our prescriptions transferred and went to the pharmacy, and not only were the medicines cheaper, the service was much better and the pharmacy techs were more knowledgable.

A few weeks later, when we needed antibiotics for strep throat, all four of our prescriptions were $0 at Publix! (That $0 is to be read as “no additional cost” since my father, who abhors the term “free,” occasionally reads this blog).

If Mr. ThreeYear hadn’t pressed me to look into the cheaper option, I would have kept paying more and going to a worse pharmacy, probably for years.

When we got Lucy the dog, I began calling around to find out vet prices. All of the vets I called cost about the same, and charged around $400-$600 to spay young puppies. I dutifully took Lucy to her first check up at the vet, and paid $150 or so. Then, a friend came into town and I mentioned the high cost of a spay to her, and she recommended looking for a Humane Society close by where she thought they’d offer services for cheaper.

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