Nobody can avoid the Expensive Month. You can be consistently hitting the same spending mark for half a year until it takes you by ambush. A car breaks down, an annual bill comes due, or something else requires repairs. Suddenly all your diligent savings seem to be for naught. It breaks up your rhythm, saps you of your frugal mojo. But I’m here to tell you that it’s going to be okay. The systems and…
Old Dracula movies always have himuse the weirdest hand gestures. Bram Stoker is responsible for a lot of modern vampire characteristics. From garlic warding them off to driving a stake into a vampire’s heart, that’s all in the popular imagination because of Stoker. Another interesting aspect of Stoker’s Dracula is how he enters into his victims’ lives. Dracula cannot sneak through an open window and start sucking your blood. He must be invited in. All…
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…
Private sector vs public sector is a decision for many professionals. For the beginning of my career, I found employment with the federal government. As a fresh graduate, the salary is pretty competitive with what I could receive in the private sector. The private sector has its own perks, but here I’m going to focus on what’s good about the public sector. I’m focusing on the best part of federal employment: the sweet benefits and…
I’ve been eyeing side hustles for some time. I like the idea of having some income coming in on the side that I can put towards investing to turbo charge my path to FI. My ideal side hustle would be something that I enjoy doing and could do whenever I have free time. Given, free time has been a premium lately (which readers can probably tell by the reduced blog output these past couple months).…
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…