money
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Okay, I’ll admit, it’s a bit of a clickbait title, but I made a change to my retirement withholdings at the beginning of August, and while the change was carefully planned and thought about, it’s still occupying a lot of space in my mind. So I might as well write about it. Next year, I’m…
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Another European summer vacation in the books, where our investments grew more than we spent in the time we were away. This has happened in 2023, 2024, and now 2025, though we notably did not travel in 2022, when it may have been a different story. (Actually, looking at the graph of the S&P500 during…
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As I write this from my European vacation (what a pretentious way to start a post), I’ll note that I don’t usually pay too much attention to the market when I’m traveling. However, two days ago I remembered to open Monarch and refresh our retirement account balances, and discovered that I was quite close to…
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One foot in front of the other this month. It felt like the first two weeks sped by, then everything ground down to a much slower pace. It was also one of those annoying months where my semi-monthly pay schedule had my first paycheck arriving on a Sunday, which moved it to Friday the 13th…
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Well, on a month where the stock market went up over 6% and I vested another tranche of RSUs, it’s not a surprise that everything is looking green this month. Our cars even marginally increased in value, somehow. Of course, the whims of the market and a certain hair-trigger head of state make this feel…
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I’ll open this by saying: this ended up more expensive than I thought it would. I’m not really sure why I thought it would be cheaper, considering the impetus for going on this trip was spending $2000 on plane tickets, but here we are. Nonetheless, once you take out the big categories of airfare and…
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I have to admit, when, at the peak in February, our investments reached $1,071,XXX, I thought to myself, “We’re probably safely above a million now.” I’m a fairly superstitious person, but I am pretty sure that I didn’t knock on wood, and April made me regret it. I don’t usually show the monthly chart of…
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Happy tax day to all seven of us who celebrate! My condolences to the rest of America. I’m one of those weirdos who really enjoys doing taxes. I’ve been doing our family’s taxes myself for the last 17 years or so, having started in the slimy grips of TurboTax but graduating more recently to FreeTaxUSA…
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I don’t think my cover images are ever particularly subtle, but this one is probably the least subtle yet. We seem to have returned to a tariffs era, for better or for worse (at present, “worse” seems like the more obvious outcome), during a time when we’re still struggling with inflation and weirdly, the price…
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As I write this, we are halfway through the month of March. Our investments are down $28,105.19 since the start of the month, despite contributing $4,902. This is not the first time I’ve watched our account balances go down, and in fact not even the worst two week stretch I’ve watched in recent history, but…
Violet Sky 