Our family grew a little a couple of weeks ago…and boy has this changed things! Not everything has been as entirely smooth as we wanted, but our financial preparations ensured that money hasn’t been a source of stress at all this quarter – one of the biggest payoffs in pursuing FI I think it’s possible […]
We have been investing for two years today!* Shortbread’s love of portmanteaus necessitated creating a word. Recently I’ve been thinking about timelines and long term planning. It’s not something I’ve ever been particularly good at (Shortbread handles this part of our relationship!), but having the new addition to our little family on the way makes […]
When something has a good ratio of happiness to expense, we tend to refer to it as an ‘efficient’ source of happiness. Having a few cheap but enjoyable experiences a week has been vital to us sticking to our frugal ways and stops us from feeling like we are sacrificing too much. Here are my […]
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 […]
“The ground shakes… Drums. Drums in the deep.” A little melodramatic, but this is what the last month or two have felt like for our net worth. The market has continued to kick our arses and we now have to contend with the value of Pound Sterling (which is what our property is valued in) […]
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 […]
Obviously one of the upsides of being a teacher is summer break. The site needed to be upgraded via a migration, so hopefully all that has now been ironed out and set for a few more years! Having the time to migrate your website is nice (even if the actual migration was a bit irritating). […]
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 […]