The newest addition to our family is a couple of months old now. It has been the wildest ride imaginable. I don’t think anything could have prepared us for what we have gone through…although that’s kind of the point of this post. We’ve thought about the things we have learned and are currently learning and […]
The new arrival in our household has meant that blog post ideas have been generated more than actual blog posts over the last few weeks. I’m not sure anything can completely fully prepare you for a new baby, but after an absolutely manic few weeks we are starting to find our rhythm. 2022 was a […]
The terms savings is used quite generally. Putting money into savings can mean different things to different people. Even having to “dip into savings” could carry wildly different implications. Are you spending money in a cash reserve? This is, potentially, absolutely fine and a world away from having to sell off things like investments. A […]
Transitioning to a single income household for 18 months is an interesting challenge for Shortbread and I. Aside from having to tolerate her making jokes about becoming a trad-wife (without all the right-wing stuff), we have to have a look at the process by which we earn and spend. We will be losing a huge […]
I just noticed that our brokerage, Interactive Brokers, offers interest on cash balances. They have an initial tier of currency you have to hold which pays nothing, but then a low rate is paid on the rest. They also have a minimum Net Asset Value (NAV) to receive the full rate. Essentially, if you have […]
With a baby on the way we are, for the first time, assessing how safe our lifestyle is. What would happen should we be hit with unexpected bills? What would the plan be if something unexpected comes at us? 10 years ago we didn’t consider this all that much – we had been teachers for […]
It was written a while ago, but Part I of our “So how do you actually do this investing thing?” series can be found here. Now we have a brokerage, understand that we are buying ETFs and have considered taxes, now is time to think about what we are investing in. Asset Allocation is the term […]
Given the cryptocurrency & NFT implosions over the past few months (including various exchanges going bust and locking out customers from their accounts, values crashing, scams etc), I’ve read and heard people using the phrase “the bigger the risk, the bigger the reward” more than usual. I think it’s worth examining it a little as […]
This is an idea popularised by Ramit Sethi that we really liked. We decided to create our own. It’s a nice way to set rules based on intentionality. By discussing our personal money rules we are being intentional and really considering what is important to us. While these rules are more guidelines than anything, creating […]
The last few months have been pretty crazy for the neophyte investor (I suspect it hasn’t been all that much fun for experienced investors either). Our portfolio is currently worth about $30k less than what we paid for it, although if we count our gains from the bonanza that was 2021, we are down close […]