I’ve had enough people ask me about this topic now that I feel it deserves an additional blog post. I briefly addressed it here, and I’ll address it briefly again. Why pay off a low interest rate mortgage (~3-5%) early when you could earn ~8-12% in the stock market? To most people, the smarter and … Read more
Don’t get me wrong, I love Costco. But today, I want to pose the following question to you: Are you really saving money at Costco? If your experience is similar to what mine is usually like, then the answer is probably not. Here’s how it usually goes. We drive over to Costco planning to get a … Read more
Last month, we set a goal of paying off the mortgage by 2020 and to have a net worth of at least $1M by 2025. Each month, I’ll be posting an update on the progress of the goal. Mortgage progress: Over the first month, we were able to pay down $4,824 towards the mortgage, which … Read more
Is retirement bad for your health? What do people do after they retire? Do people get lonely? What are some things that can make retirement better? These are some of the things I’ve been asking myself as I reflect on my goal of early retirement / financial independence. Thinking about retirement makes me think about my … Read more
I applied to law school. I got in and even received scholarships to a couple of schools, but I decided not go to this year. I spent about $545 on the law school application process (LSAT, CAS, app. fees) and also got a LSAT prep book for about $43 for a total of $588. I … Read more
I’ve now given 51 rides as an Uber driver and about 9 as a Lyft driver. Let’s do an analysis on my Uber earnings to see what you could expect to earn as a driver in the DC metro area (specifically Fairfax, VA, a suburb of DC). Total earnings: $559.04 Earnings from driving: $409.04 Total hours online: 21.6 … Read more
Lately, I’ve been getting a lot of personal finance questions from 20-somethings, so I decided to come up with a list of 10 personal finance tips. Here they are: 1. Get out of debt and stay out. If you’re in your 20s, chances are you have at least one of these forms of debt: car payments, student … Read more
This post may contain affiliate links. Please read this disclosure for more info. I created this page as one of my pages on the menu at the top of my blog, but I figured I might as well make this a blog post too. Enjoy! SAVING MONEY Cash Back for Online Shopping – Ebates – Ebates is one of … Read more
Mrs. Frugalee and I have had “budget meetings” before, but I consider today our first REAL budget meeting. We both sat down to look at how much we actually spent in February (we tracked spending using the Every Dollar app/website) and examined each category together. I call this our first REAL budget meeting because … Read more
We started tracking our spending this month on the Every Dollar app/website. I created a trial budget for February 2016 to compare how much I think we spend in each category vs. how much we actually spend. I was pretty accurate on most of the categories since most of our spending is relatively fixed every month. However, … Read more