Recent content by jeroly

Breaking things down into discretionary / non-discretionary can get a bit complicated. My biggest expense is my rent, around $40k/year. Is that a discretionary expense? I have to pay my rent so from that perspective it's non-discretionary, but I could move tomorrow and only pay perhaps...

I got my sweetie a dozen Krispy Kreme Valentine's donuts. With tax and service incl. tip, it was pricier than a dozen roses most times I buy roses. They may not have smelled as sweet, but they sure taste sweet!

I (64 M) was FIREd before I met my sweetie (53 F) ten years ago. She's still working. The arrangement mostly works for us but might not be great for everyone. A big part of it is that my sweetie is not the jealous type and is completely okay with me taking off every month or two for weeks at a...

Retiring without knowing about SORR is a bit like being driven around without wearing a seat belt... oh wait I did that back in the '70s too. There really wasn't much 'science' to retiring back when I FIREd in 2001 - I wasn't much different than Peter Lynch or Dave Ramsey in my approach save...

I don't use a single rate, but rather will play around with different inflation assumptions to see how the overall picture is affected by changes to inflation. It's right up there with the most important variables impacting the viability of financial plans. I'll look at rates from 2% up to 5%...

Getting ready to BTD on 2024 travel. Well actually it's already started...some plane tickets purchased, some car rentals booked, some airbnbs paid for... New Zealand in a month for a month (hiking and touring) Indonesia in April (visiting a friend on Java then exploring Sumatra and Sulawesi)...

I am more or less using this approach. By supplementing (inflation-adjusted) Social Security benefits with cashed-in (inflation-adjusted) I-bonds annually, I will have an annual inflation-proof income that will be enough to comfortably live on - if not luxuriously, then at least without need of...

I don't have a TV with 'Google TV' built into it, but I do have a 'Google TV with Chromecast' dongle that plugs into an HDMI port on my ten-year-old TV that works pretty well. I use a lot of streaming apps including YouTubeTV instead of cable, so perhaps that makes a big difference.

I'm back from two weeks in Korea. The airfare ($1,400) was a real BTD, but otherwise prices were very reasonable. Total for the trip was around $3k, which is more or less in line with what I'm currently budgeting for a two week trip. Next up is Costa Rica over Christmas which may well be a real...

This may not seem like a big BTD deal, but it felt like one to me... I shelled out an extra few hundred dollars for a nonstop flight to Seoul instead of one with stops and/or long layovers. Fourteen hours instead of forty, no long airport walks between gates, no sleeping in corners of the...

Just returned from a week-long holiday in Yorkshire with my sweetie! It's funny how it wound up being much more of a BTD than I expected, but everything adds up. Airfares were relatively cheap for the summer, and our AirBnb plus an extra night in a motel near Cambridge was a good value, but...

Thanks, skyking1! I had another BTD moment related to the hiking trip... I was able to book campgrounds in both Olympic and North Cascades NP at which I will set up my tent, but Mount Rainier was another story - all the campgrounds were booked except for the two most appealing ones - and those...

I continue to blow my dough on travel - I've added a camping trip to the three Washington State national parks in July (on top of earlier-this-year trips to Cancun, Chile, and the Baltic States, and later-in-the-year trips to Yorkshire, South Korea, and Costa Rica). I've also started to blow my...

I've been budgeting about USD $15k per year (for about 15 weeks of travel) prior to this year, but in a ‘blow that dough’ frame of mind i decided to not limit my travel spending this year and figured I’ll spend under $33k. So far, though, I’m on target to spend around $23k i figure… after two...

VOO tracks the S&P 500 whilst VTI tracks the total market. They tend to move in á highly correlated fashion but aren’t quite the same thing. If you have access to VTI it is a better proxy for ‘owning the whole market’ but since S&P 500 index funds were a thing before other index funds, you might...