-

The financials of this trip are a little different than previous trips, since I had a medical event during the trip and also the purpose was celebrating my friend’s birthday. I ended up deciding to exclude the medical and celebratory costs from the vacation spending, since they fall outside normal vacation behavior for me, but…
-

As I’m looking at what we ate in November, I’m realizing that I did not make a single dinner that I had not made before. Something to think about for December, though we’re now 12 days into it and the year is clearly getting away from me. On the plus side, I made challah for…
-

Continuing on our now three year tradition of traveling to the rust belt in fall, which is actually entirely coincidental up until this point, we took a long weekend trip to Detroit, Michigan to visit my friend for her 40th birthday. I’ve always been interested in seeing Detroit – its rise to being an economic…
-

The month of October got away from me! Usually I have a post a week queued up, and I work on this recipe roundup post throughout the month as I’m making the meal plan each week or executing some of the dishes and want to jot my thoughts down on them. But here it is,…
-

Another month has flown by, and as I’ve continued to avoid paying too much attention to the stock market, it’s up another 2% and some change. Work has been pretty consuming, so dwelling on money movements has been less appealing than usual. I continue to be suspicious about the growth we’re experiencing, but as usual,…
-

Lots of new recipes this month! The cover photo here is from when I substituted poblanos I grew for the jalapeños I usually use in this pepper/cheddar sourdough recipe. Both my husband and I ended up liking the poblanos better than the jalapeños, as they had a deeper, richer flavor than the more bright and…
-

Happy government shutdown day to all who celebrate! 😛 I did not spend a lot of time looking at the stock market this month. I don’t know if it’s a side effect of dialing back my MBDR savings, or if I’ve just had different things to think about this past month, but other than a…
-

I totally missed calling this out in the last net worth update: we finally have more than $2MM in assets! We’ve been net worth millionaires since April 2023, but as our finances are totally commingled, that really just meant that we were individually half-millionaires. I’m trying to remember to celebrate the small wins as they…
-

This European summer vacation ended up being about $4,000 less than our prior year’s European summer vacation, in large part due to using miles/points to buy our plane tickets. This was partially offset by some unnecessary extra spending (including $200 thrown away on a non-refundable hotel when we switched our departure from Milan to Naples),…
