money
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January was one of the most professionally chaotic months of my life – that I managed to stay employed for, at least. As a result, I barely paid attention to the stock market (not that I’ve been hanging on its every word, lately) and so as I’m sitting here writing this up, I’m finding myself…
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Ah, another high spend year. This is my second year tracking our spending in u/BloomingFinances excellent spreadsheet, which makes writing up this report particularly easy. As I noted to a friend while writing up this post, each year I seem to look at our spending and say, “Wow! That’s a lot!” and then make almost…
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Well, it’s a new year, and while 2025 was apparently a great year for the stock market, it ended its last week on a slump. Being up 16% for the year obviously makes up for it, but overall, it hasn’t been a very relaxing year with the stock market, nor one in general, so it…
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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…
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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,…
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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…
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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…
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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),…
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August was a high spend month, thanks to buying a bunch of plane tickets to Japan and several other travel-related expenses, so thankfully it was also a high income month, being another stock vest month. Putting aside $10k for travel expenses and immediately consuming $9,300 of it was not the best feeling, but feels better…
