It’s January, so now’s a good time to look back over the year 2021 and post about our total expenditures. There was a time when I did monthly expense blogs, but alas I’ve fallen off these types of posts as my blog bandwidth has narrowed and my blog posts have slowed down. Pursuing FIRE isn’t the easiest in an ultra high cost of living area like San Francisco, but it’s not impossible. This is the land of the $8 dollar…
My mother had a saying when I was growing up and now it’s stuck with me like any good saying does when repeated over and over during one’s formative years. The saying is this: “Lazy people work twice.” It doesn’t take much imaginative work to guess that I probably wasn’t working as hard as I should have been as a youth to have been told this over and over again. Usually, household chores were the culprit. A half-ass job sweeping…
In the year 216 BC, Hannibal pulled off one of the greatest military maneuvers in recorded history at Cannae: the Pincer Movement. This occurred during the Second Punic War in a heated match between superpowers for control of the known world. At Cannae, the Carthaginian general Hannibal was able to encircle the Romans and annihilate them in battle using unit placement strategy and tactical maneuvering. Prior to this battle his army, including elephants, had crossed the Pyrenees and Alps via…
We went this past weekend to buy a fire pit for our backyard. After browsing online through Amazon to get an idea of pricing and styles, we thought it might be nice to see a few in real life. So we went to Lowe’s where we found a decent one, albeit one we hadn’t previously looked at. It was in our price range. And after looking over their stock we told one of their workers that we’d like to purchase…
In two months we were able to increase our savings rate from 25% of our net income to 50%. Since we gave ourselves a 7 year deadline to call it quits from the rat race, the importance of jacking up our savings rate in a timely manner was number one on our FI course correction list. Achieving a 50% savings rate in such a short amount of time is not impossible, as long as you don’t have a lot of…