Dear Mini Donut and Babe, I’m not sure what to tell you at this point in our lives. We are all pretty new to this whole father/son thing especially after Babe came around and the dynamic changed a little bit. All I can do is tell you what I’ve determined so far. All The Stuff You guys come with a lot of crap. No offense but when it was just your mom and I we could leave the house within…
I noticed a growing trend on the interwebs lately, interview series, and instead of ignoring it I realized it actually is really cool. You get to see people’s responses to questions they wouldn’t normally be talking about on their site. It only seemed fair for me to do my questions before issuing out a challenge to anyone else so today I’m going to answer a few questions of my own. 1. Who are you and why are you here? Well…I…
We have had two windfalls in our lives. The first was when Ms. Blue Ribbon’s grandmother passed away. The money we inherited was used to pay off some new windows on our house (naturally, we financed them). It wasn’t much and wasn’t expected but I feel like we used the money wisely. The second windfall we received was $20k from a family friend who had passed away. This was considerably more and we took our time figuring out exactly what…
New Year’s Resolutions are great in theory. Who doesn’t want to lose 10 pounds or quit (insert annoying habit here)? The problem comes with sticking to these resolutions which is why I don’t believe in them at all. I’d much rather have solid goals throughout the year with clear points to achieve them by and specific measurable ways to validate if I completed them or not (also doesn’t help to have a website that I list them on and have…
What a long strange trip it has been. 2017 seemed to just fly by (a true sign I’m getting older). 2017 brought many things in our household. A new baby, a new side project (this site), plenty of goals, and major financial milestones. If you want to read more about them take a look at Quarter 2 and Quarter 3 updates. Otherwise, let me tell you about this last quarter. October Quite a busy month. We blew through a lot of our…
There are a lot of things in this life I’ve wanted to do and things I have yet to do. I have studied abroad in England and traveled to many countries. I graduated from college with a degree in Software Engineering and spend 8 hours a day typing complete jibberish that makes a little box do awesome things. There are things I still want to do like travel to more countries and own rental properties. During one of our purges…
Woot! It seems like this day would never come. We are officially a quarter of a millionaires! Yes, I know we have a long way to go but it is still pretty exciting. Our assets minus liabilities, for now, are worth about $250k. I wanted to take this milestone to join the ranks of the J Money’s Million Dollar Club. Over at Budgets are Sexy, J. started the Million Dollar Club in order to push himself and others to that…
Heads up! Baby 2 is officially going to be known as Babe (Like Babe the Blue Ox) I thought I would take a minute and talk about my experiences as a stay-at-home-dad for the last 8 weeks. I don’t blame you for zoning out or skipping this altogether but it could come in handy in the future. To start off I do have an advantage over my wife’s maternity leave in that…the kiddo was 13 weeks old when I took…
I have talked about early retirement and why I want it and what is my motivation. Those things are important but don’t mean much without a plan. Yearly goals keep you motivated during the year but they are a small sliver on the timescale. Let me tell you about my three levels of goals. The Bucket List Shortly after Ms. Blue Ribbon and I got out of debt I started thinking about the long term. We have the house and kids…
I’ve mentioned from time to time that we have done a lot of the things to speed up FIRE. Get rid of/avoid debt, have a plan to add more to retirement accounts, and trying to be more frugal. There are things we could still do like get a side hustle, get a higher paying job, and sell our house. Problem is I haven’t found a good side hustle I would excel at and be able to fit in during my…