Thriftism

While it is rather late in January to be posting about goals or resolutions, we figure better late than never. We have revamped our goal tracking and presentation for 2019 for better visual tracking and hopefully will lead to better goal progress. We have created visuals for each goal that discuss the goal, the importance of each goal, potential problems, and a tracking graphic to show our progress. Most of the goals we have broken down into sub-goals (such as monthly or weekly) to track and force us to check in more regularly. It also will cause us to re-evaluate throughout the year if we begin falling behind. The SMART goal check is listed on the first graphic as a reminder of how to set goals, but is not broken down on subsequent goals. Example of Goal Tracking Graphics We post monthly updates to hold ourselves accountable and allow others to follow along with us. Let us know your goals too - comment on the post, message us on Facebook, or send an email! If you'd like to

2019 is here, which means this is our 2018 year end budget recap.  For a quick reminder, we run our budget solely on my income of $2,400/month which gives us a gross income of $31,200. We do not include health insurance in our budget as ours is currently covered by our jobs, but if this was our household income we would also be taken care of by insurance subsidies. We do not include all discretionary spending such as traveling or major home renovations, but we do include all entertainment, grocery, dining out, and every day expenses. It is our essentials budget that we live on before adding in trips! If we can do it, so can you! The Budget Our goal budget is balanced with total income minus expenses equal to zero. Numbers in red are expenditures, while black is income. The green background indicates under budget. Red squares point out our overspending.  We did change up the budget a bit to reflect that the student loan is paid off. We spli

Happy New Year! We missed last month, but we are back will the final update on our 2018 goals. Some have fallen short and some have surpassed expectations.  How did you do on your 2018 goals? Financial Goals Gain Employment (Race) ☑ Done - Race started working in February. Save 50% of our income ☑ We rocked this goal. It did bounce around quite a bit throughout the year, but we finished much higher than we planned with a total savings rate of 84% for the year! We focused the most on this goal to set us up financially to be better prepared for future years and to focus on our other goals as well.  Increase passive dividend income by 25% We didn't quite make this one. As of December 31, we increased our dividends by 23%. This wasn't quite where we wanted it to be, but still a substantial increase. The main culprit behind us missing this number was due to diverting investment savings contributions towards paying down the mortgag