Category: Taxes

March Update//Trusting Your Process

Our assets as a multiple of our annual spending have reached their all-time high at 18.7X, up from 17.9X last month. This 18.7 number is actually artificially low as we’ll show below. Breaking Down The Numbers On the assets side, there was not much change. Our portfolio was up by .82% over the past month, […]

Lessons From The Train Wreck

The dominant topic in the news is the extremely divisive presidential election. Each of the major party candidates is deeply flawed and wildly unpopular for reasons we have all heard way too many times. So instead of rehashing things that could be read a million other places around the internet, I would like to employ […]

Why We Say No To Robo-Advisers

Last week,my dad brought the most recent issue of Consumer Reports with an article about investing to my attention (I’ve created a monster!). The article focuses on “The Rise of the Robo-Adviser”.  My dad wanted my opinion on whether a robo-adviser is better than what we are doing with Vanguard. As is their reputation, Consumer […]

Let’s Stop Choosing!

We’ve never been shy to share the many financial mistakes we’ve made.  Most have been related to investing and tax planning.  These topics were very confusing and so we threw our hands up in the air. Investing and Taxes Simplified The first person who really simplified investing for us was the blogger Jim (JL) Collins.  The […]

January Update

OK, Let’s Get This Over With Yeah, that graph is looking pretty pathetic.  Our average monthly spending is actually down slightly.  However, the .2% improvement in spending has been slightly overwhelmed on the chart by a 5.5% drop in our asset value. It could look even worse.  In addition to continuing our normal monthly investments, I […]

December Update

Thank You! It is that time where we share our progress and a few ideas or actions we’ve taken over the past month. Before that, I want to take a minute to say thank you to all of you who were kind enough to take the time to comment or send us private messages in […]