Tag: Family Finances

A Year of Good Money: Stop Eating Out

I started this blog in 2017 (okay, technically it was the end of 2016) as a three-year experiment. I planned to spend 2017, 2018, and 2019 with a very focused goal in mind–to double our net worth and become location independent. In an absolutely shocking turn of events, our family became location independent last year, mid-way through the experiment.

Our location independence looks a little different than I envisioned, but it’s been a great decision for our family. We live in one place, in an idyllic small town in North Carolina just north of Charlotte. Mr. ThreeYear and I both work remotely. Our kids attend the great public schools here, and we travel as much as we can during breaks and summer. Most importantly, we are close to our family and the weather is a lot warmer.

Now that we’ve reached one goal (and it was, truly, the main goal), where does that leave us in 2019? Of course, we still have to double our net worth, and unfortunately we have almost 50% more to go, due to losing equity in our house and a market downturn at the end of last year.

But, because we know that we’ll eventually reach that goal, and it’s not quite as pressing now as it was when we thought we’d be leaving our jobs for several years, what should be our focus in 2019?

Each year of the experiment, I’ve picked a theme, a “word of the year,” before it was a thing.

In 2017, I picked one new habit each month to get better at, so we could improve our productivity with investing and earning.

In 2018, I focused on spending 20% less, each and every month, at the grocery store, so we could save more.

Week 5 Aldi www.thethreeyearexperiment.com
Last year, I reported on our monthly buying habits at the grocery store.

In 2019, I thought about a lot of behaviors we could focus on. We want better relationships, better health. But we still struggle with over-spending, too. And our spending experiments have worked pretty well to change our behavior.

So 2019 is the year for money experiments.

Each month, we’ll perform a different money experiment to see how we do.

Continue reading “A Year of Good Money: Stop Eating Out”

Budgeting a Month Ahead

I know there are many people who don’t budget, but for me, it’s been a lifesaver. I am a natural spender, not a saver, so putting artificial boundaries around my money is important. Over the years, I’ve trained myself not to touch some of it, to keep it off limits, and giving myself artificial boundaries around eating out and entertainment has helped us spend less over time.

One thing I’ve never been able to do (and I say “I” because Mr. ThreeYear has pretty bad money anxiety and doesn’t look at the budget) is get a month ahead in our budgeting.

We’ve been budgeting for ten years this month, and it’s the first month I’ve gotten a month ahead in the budget. Previously, I’d budget one paycheck at a time, so I wouldn’t fully find my budget categories at the beginning of the month (I have a habit of throwing any extra money we get into investment accounts). It worked, but I was never budgeting all at once. With budgeting one month ahead, you use this month’s income to fund next month. So you need to have a full month’s income saved, in addition to what you need to pay your bills for the current month.

Part of the reason I never got one month ahead was that I didn’t see the benefit. As long as our budget was working, why fix it? Sure, it was a little awkward to fund our essential expenses and then later fund our nonessential expenses (using our 50/50 budget) but it had worked for years, and we always had investing, saving, or debt payoff goals that seemed more important than getting a month ahead with our budget. Continue reading “Budgeting a Month Ahead”

How to Ski on the Cheap

Our family lives in Northern New England, so we have lots of ski slopes very close by our house. Unfortunately, skiing is very expensive and can work against our ability to save, so if we want to ski, we have to be smart about it.

Admittedly, skiing on the cheap is very difficult. Skiing is an expensive hobby, with expensive equipment, clothing, and lift tickets. And since our family is on a three-year journey to save as much money as possible so we can become location independent, we have to be careful about what we spend on entertainment costs. But our family gets around a lot of those expenses by utilizing some of the following “tricks”: Continue reading “How to Ski on the Cheap”