With 1 year old twins, carving out time to accomplish finance related goals is difficult. After they go to bed, all my wife and I want to do is relax and enjoy each other’s company. Her idea of a relaxing evening does not involve logging into Vanguard and contributing to our Roth IRAs. Because of this, at the beginning of 2022 her Roth IRA was not maxed out for 2021. Luckily everyone still has until…
At my older brothers’ birthday party (they have the same birthday), I hit an inflection point with my personal finances. After one of my brothers received a book by Dave Ramsey, my aunt remarked that his advice can get you the basics but not much further. As a college junior, I was already interested in personal finance. Friends were already calling me Frugal Jon. I had even done research on how to invest. But at…
Can you recall a single important memory spent idly on the internet? A single moment when scrolling on your phone was the best thing you could have been doing? I can’t either. I’ve made many mental justifications for why I needed to be on my phone in the moment. “I just need to mentally check out for a bit” was a particularly easy one. But now, with a full time job, two little ones to…
Get 1% better. It seems small and simple. But getting 1% better consistently results in huge long term benefits. Getting in 1% better shape every few weeks would result in the best shape of your life after little while. In personal finance, there’s a lot of room to get 1% better for most folks, myself included. Today, I’m going to look at a product that is the bane of commuters: gasoline. The price of gas…
I have a simple relationship with coffee. I typically only drink it on the weekends. I enjoy the taste of coffee, but I’ve worked hard to not develop a dependency on caffeine. On Sunday mornings, my wife and I had a simple routine after Mass. We would get Dunkin’ iced coffees before going to my parents’ house for brunch. But then one day I saw a new sign pup up a quarter mile down the…
After years of faithful service, my iPhone 6s is finally being replaced. This phone got me through the latter half of undergrad and through grad school. Four+ years is pretty good for a smart phone that’s actively made to slow down over time. For the past 6 months or so, the phone has been randomly dying and the battery lasted as long as an Atlanta Falcons’ 4th quarter lead. So when I found out that…
As a single guy living the grad school life, budgeting was simple. I didn’t have student loans, my 2003 Honda was paid off, and my food costs were pretty low. I just had to balance my spending with my research assistant’s paycheck. That was always easy to do. One paycheck covered the rent, the other paycheck covered everything else. Over my two years of grad school, I even managed to squirrel away a decent chunk…