Tag: pay off debt

Your Three Year Experiment: Claudia from Two Cup House

Hi there! It’s Wednesday and time for another installment of Your Three Year Experiment, featuring people who are sharing their own three year experiments–their plans, goals, and dreams for the next three years. 

Today’s post is from Claudia from Two Cup House. Claudia is a personal finance blogger, SEO consultant, and trainer who moved into a tiny house with her husband Garrett in order to get closer to financial independence. 

Claudia and her husband paid off six figures in debt in just a few years by downsizing to a tiny house and starting their own business. Now, they’re pursuing FI, but not RE (that’s financial independence, but not retiring early). Read on to find out:

  • how they were able to pay off $200,000 in a short time
  • how they’ll balance building their business with travel
  • the one place in their budget they’re not frugal

If you’d like to be featured in the series, send me a note! My contact info is on the Start Here page.

What’s your background? Early years, education, married, kids, jobs?

We grew up in different parts of Pennsylvania and have spent most of our lives here.  Unsurprisingly, we’re Penn State grads.

My husband, Garrett, and I live in a 500 sq ft house in Lancaster County, PA.  We don’t have kids (and don’t plan to have kids).

Today, we’re self-employed.  We run our own marketing consulting and training business.  

How did you come to the realization that something needed to change in your life?

At the end of 2014, we heard a radio program about personal finance.  People were talking about getting out of debt, which was unusual to us.  After hearing enough episodes, we sat down to take a look at our own debt and found we had more than $200,000 in debt (including a mortgage), which made us both feel quite uneasy.

What will that change look like?

Deciding to downsize and sell our home was the first big step.  I found a full-time job.  And, we started a side hustle.  All of this happened within the first four months of 2015.  Once we put a plan in place, we wanted to make all the big changes as fast as possible.

Now, we’re pursuing some level of financial independence.  We seek to invest enough to have dividends to cover our basic expenses, so we invest half of our income toward the goal.

Two Cup House Interview www.thethreeyearexperiment.com
Claudia and Garrett sold their 1,500 square foot house and downsized to a 500 square foot house to pay off their debt and reduce their living expenses. They now live mortgage-free.

How are you employing a three-year experiment to make it happen (i.e., what’s your three-year plan)?

Since we’re doing well with our finances, we decided we don’t have to rush to the finish line.  Balancing work and life is the focus this year.

The first year of our three-year plan will be 2019.  We will begin traveling the US and invest half of our income.  And, we’re launching a new project that will help us grow our business.

The second year of our three-year plan is to bring in a partner of sorts to help us grow your new project (and subsequently our business).  Scaling this new project requires more help than we have today, a necessary step to maintaining work-life balance.  We’re planning to travel more of the US and then also take a trip to Europe for a few months.

The third year of our three-year plan is to improve our second-year efforts by looking at the data, figuring out what works so we can continue doing more of that, and eliminating what doesn’t work to make us more efficient.  We’ll be traveling around our favorite parts of the US and abroad to find a small plot of land we can call “home” in the future.

What have been some challenges you’ve run into?

With respect to our personal finances, we have a tendency to push the “easy” button when it comes to dinner, so we’re not always the most frugal.

What have you found easier than expected?

Living in a small house makes life a lot easier.  We don’t spend as much time cleaning or maintaining a home as we used to.  We find we’re happier than we were in the big house.

Two Cup House Cats www.thethreeyearexperiment.com
The Penningtons share their 500 square feet with their cats, too.

Do you think you’ll reach your goals in three years? Longer? Shorter?

I think it’s going to take us more time than we expect to grow our business, but since we’re on the slow road to financial independence, we’re not all that concerned if it takes another year to get there.

However, I think we’ll find our next patch of grass sooner rather than later.  We’ve wanted to relocate for several years and have already identified a few places we like.

What are you looking forward to once you’ve reached your goal(s)?

Having the ability to take our business on the road with us is the goal, so I’m looking forward to the start of our travels 2019.  Achieving financial independence will just be the icing on the cake.

Continue reading “Your Three Year Experiment: Claudia from Two Cup House”

Your Three Year Experiment: Trevor

Hi there! Today is the second in my new series, Your Three Year Experiment, featuring people who are sharing their own three year experiments–their plans, goals, and dreams for the next three years. 

Today’s post is from Trevor, a freelance writer who writes on behalf on Porsche Atlanta Perimeter. In his free time, you can find him running with his dog, spending time with his family, jamming on his guitar or outside enjoying about any type of fitness activity imaginable. In this interview, he’ll share:

  • the surprising tipping point to him finally getting sober
  • his three-year plan to create a massive savings fund for himself
  • how’s he able to make a living as a freelancer

If you’d like to be featured in the series, send me a note! My contact info is on the Start Here page.

What’s your background? Early years, education, married, kids, jobs?

I was the “good kid” in high school and even maintained that in my early days of community college. This was before addiction took hold. In my early 20s, I started partying hard. It felt like I became the “cool kid” I always wanted to be. I’d never say no to a night of drinking, and everyone knew it. They’d all call me whenever they wanted to go out, and I wasn’t one to disappoint. I’d close out any bar on any night of the week.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t long before I needed to drink. I dropped out of college to help my parents with bills, and things got progressively worse from there.   Continue reading “Your Three Year Experiment: Trevor”

Pay Off Debt or Invest?

There’s a big debate in the personal finance community over whether it’s best to pay off your debt, or keep low interest debt (like a mortgage) and invest more.

After all, with low interest rates, you can likely earn more over time investing more of your money in the stock market and keeping low interest debt around. However, while the math may support keeping debt around, it certainly doesn’t account for the behavioral economics side of things. After all, as smart and logical as we’d like to think we all are, it’s all too easy to prefer a new car or vacation over disciplined investing, especially if a partner is pushing for those things.

And what about the feeling of being debt free? Being indebted to no one? If you carry a mortgage, you have that debt burden (and responsibility) over your head. Continue reading “Pay Off Debt or Invest?”

Bank Your Raise

Most of us, when we hear we’re getting a 3, 4, or 5% raise, go out to dinner to celebrate and then, without even realizing it, slightly adjust our spending to the “new” income level.

One of the most powerful tools you have, though, especially if you find it hard to save, is your yearly raise. For the last six years, Mr. ThreeYear and I have used every cent of his annual raise to increase our savings and investing.

Why? Because we live a very good life at our current level of spending, and we don’t need to spend more. If we want to go out and celebrate, take a trip, or spend the money some other way, it will be waiting for us in the savings account. If we didn’t squirrel the money away where we didn’t see it, we’d spend it without even realizing it, and then all the effort behind earning that raise would be for nothing.

We’ve frittered away money over the years in exactly this way, and it always made me feel powerless over our spending. “But where did that raise go? How do we spend more now? Where is that money?” Now, as I watch our savings grow, I realize that we’re the ones in control of the money, and we’re holding on to it until we’re ready to use it in a thoughtful way (or invest it, which is my favorite thing to do with our money besides travel!).

Continue reading “Bank Your Raise”

The Financial Domino Effect

Have you ever made a change in your life–maybe a huge one, like getting out of debt, or maybe a small one, like deciding not to buy takeout coffee–that in turn, caused benefits that you never imagined?

The Financial Domino Effect--www.thethreeyearexperiment.com

Maybe getting out of debt made you realize that your house was too big, so you decided to move into something smaller. Maybe not buying takeout coffee helped you realize you could save in other small areas, and after a few months, you ended up with enough to go on a trip to Florida.

This is the financial domino effect, and it happened to me.

Like a chain of dominoes, where one tile makes the whole line fall down, one seemingly small change in your life creates scenarios that make it more likely you’ll create other small changes.

via GIPHY

One action that is, on the surface, completely unrelated to another action, causes the start of a wave of behaviors that can ultimately change your financial life. Continue reading “The Financial Domino Effect”

January Net Worth Update

It’s time for another net worth update! Are you in the midst of winter, or is it warm and deliciously summery where you live? The ThreeYears are smack dab in the middle of the coldest and snowiest parts of winter, but we made it through January and we’re raring to go for February (Little ThreeYear can hardly wait for Valentine’s Day and all that chocolate he thinks he’ll get from his classmates!).

January Net Worth Update--www.thethreeyearexperiment.com

This is the first report from 2018, and boy is it a good one. Subsequent reports may not be as juicy, given that the stock market may have more “small or significant corrections” coming up, so I’m focusing on January while I can!

If you’re just joining, our family of four is on a three-year journey to double our net worth and become location independent. Each month, I record our progress on our net worth and our spending (gulp!). Last year, we increased our net worth by 32% over the year before! This year, we’re trying to increase it by more than 65%! from where we started in December 2016. Given the wild ride the market’s likely to take us on this year, I’m not sure it’s doable. But we’re going to try!

We started the month of January off in warm Santiago. We took a three week trip to visit my in-laws, and had an amazing time.

La Moneda--www.thethreeyearexperiment.com
The boys had a blast during our visit to Santiago and San Pedro de Atacama in Chile, even if some of the smiles look forced!

I was very excited to see how our spending would look in January as compared to spending in 2017, given we have now eliminated the mortgage in Chile and our car payment. We’re also working to keep our food spending lower than last year.

Continue reading “January Net Worth Update”