retirement planning Archives - Page 2 of 6

Estimated Lifestyle Change Spending: Canyon Lake Edition

We’re closing on our lot out in Canyon Lake this Friday and we’ve been doing a lot of reviewing of the numbers and seeing if we can make them work to start our Lifestyle Change. It’s difficult to know what will come of all of this, and how accurate they will be, because they are all estimates based off of our current house/utility usage, current lifestyle, and some moving forward assumptions. We have tracked our spending for over 2 years now, so we have that to go off of, but again, they’re all just estimates. Since that’s the best we have to work with, it’s what we’ll move forward with in our planning scenarios. The short answer is that we’ll be right around break-even or living paycheck to paycheck. We’ll only need to draw off of investments for travel and unplanned items that pop up, assuming I make zero money.

Phase 1 of the Lifestyle Change Begins: We’re Buying Some Land!

This past month has been a whirlwind in regards to our Lifestyle Change and life in general. It’s literally only been about a month or so since Prof. SSC proposed her idea of our revised Hill Country Lifestyle Change to me. Since then we’ve taken a couple of different weekend trips looking at property. We’ve scoured Zillow and google maps street view (if street views actually exist…) and even more so, we’ve begun looking at house plans. Great googly moogly it’s been busy! Who would’ve thought retirement life planning would be so hectic?

Couldn't be said better. — Couldn’t be said better.

During that time though, we’ve figured out what we find important in our property and it’s not what you’d think. Even though we’re looking around lakes, we don’t necessarily find a lake view as important as we thought. We found that we would take more seclusion over a lake view. Yep, seclusion and that feeling of our own space is way more important to us than being right on the water with a killer view. That’s what led us to decide on the lot we think will be a perfect fit for us. It’s almost 3 acres, heavily treed with mature oaks, and we can put a house on it and have it surrounded by big trees. As of last weekend, we’re under contract on it with a closing date early next month. Now the real fun begins!

March 2017 Spending: Our Money Went Where?

March was a pretty good month. The “year of spending” seems to continue as we had another month and another round of big ticket items show up. Specifically, the fence got replaced, well on 3 sides of the yard anyway. Our other neighbor didn’t feel like replacing the side we share, so that’s fine with us. On the upside, we also got about 30’ of fence replaced that no one paid for. Not us or our backyard neighbors. At $22/ft. that saved us about $330 (that’s going halvesies with the back neighbor). We dumped my bonus into the kids 529’s so they got a nice boost, but beyond that, there wasn’t a lot of craziness in our spending.

A quick look at our FI target shows that we’re still at 84% of our goal, down ~0.5% from last month. That’s all market driven as we’re still contributing the same and just watching and waiting. Some fun stuff that happened last month was our first trip out to look for property for the Lifestyle Change. For more details on that plus where the rest of our spending went last month read on.

By Mr SSC
Posted on April 12, 2017
27 Comments on March 2017 Spending: Our Money Went Where?

It’s Still About a Lifestyle Change – Not Early Retirement.

Over the last week or so Mrs. SSC has come up with FFLC (Fully Funded Lifestyle Change) version 3.0. I think it’s 3.0, but it’s probably more like version 12.0. This is focused more on how we see our Lifestyle Change and less on whether or not it’s truly Early Retirement. Version 1.0 was that we both quit at the same time and move out West, or to the East Coast and become full-time stay at home parents. Version 2.0 was that Mrs. SSC would continue teaching and I would quit and become a full-time stay at home parent, but we’d still be moving out of Texas, and definitely Houston. So what’s different with version 3.0?

Not moving close to views like this... — **Not moving close to views like this…**

Well, with the lack of jobs anywhere in the U.S. for Mrs. SSC to apply to, and the fact that she loves her current gig where she is now; this version of our Lifestyle Change has us staying in Texas, but moving out to Hill Country. Yep, there’s still no snow, still no snowboarding, but I’d be able to be a stay at home dad, she’d be able to continue teaching and we could live in a drier more hilly part of Texas. Again, we’d be Changing our Lifestyle, not necessarily focused as much on “just not working”. What’s driving this new change and where did it come from so quickly? In short, we’re making our own future and not waiting for it to happen to us.

January 2017 Spending: Our Money Went Where?

January, thank goodness you’re over… It seems like once one thing gets taken care of another comes up. So how did January pan out for us – expensive. Lots of deltas, not too many plusses. Some of it was fun, some of it was sad, and some of it was routine things that snowball into more expensive costs than we expected. Here’s the rundown of our spending this month and where we are in relation to our FIRE/FFLC goal.

By Mr SSC
Posted on February 6, 2017
30 Comments on January 2017 Spending: Our Money Went Where?

2016 Spending: Where did it all go?

I’ve finally gotten motivated to pull our 2016 numbers together and put them out there for your voyeuristic perusal. That’s not true, Mrs. SSC did that about a month ago, but I’ve been feeling a bit unmotivated, so there’s been a delay. For those of you that don’t care to see charts or hit the nitty gritty, the summary is that 2016 was no 2015 in terms of savings. The overall outside 401k investing sums were down, however, I am happy in the fact that it wasn’t from lack of saving, rather we essentially piled it into cash in the event we suffered double layoffs. That didn’t happen, thank goodness, and instead Mrs. SSC took a teaching job with a huge paycut and we’re all happier as a result. That’s pretty much 2016 in a nutshell. Below I’ve put together more details on where our money went and a chart on how it compares to 2015, and what we plan to change for 2017.

By Mr SSC
Posted on January 18, 2017
40 Comments on 2016 Spending: Where did it all go?

The New Plan is “Relax and Be Present”

Welcome back everybody and I hope you had a great Christmas and New Year’s holiday! I took some time off and am back and ready to go, woohoo! There have been so many bloggers posting 2016 wrap-ups and 2017 goals I’ve just been enjoying reading them while I took a break from our blog over the holidays. In this post, we’ll discuss the state of the SSC household, what we plan to do the same and what our new plan is in 2017. Next week, we’ll be back to discussing numbers with our 2016 wrap-up and financial changes for 2017. With so much stuff to cover, we just couldn’t fit it all into one post! Well, not one post that wasn’t 4000 words long, lol.

November 2016: Our Money Went Where?

November, the month of high spending, at least around this household. I realized mid-month that last year we also had a big overage in November due to an errant $1200 grocery bill that month $350 of it was a wine/liquor restock that got moved to “shopping/misc” lol). This month looks like a similar high spending month, though not due to groceries. My thoughts for this recurring phenomenon are two-fold. First, I think we do a pretty good job of staying on track most of the year, so we’re bound to have some “off” months. Secondly, I think November is the month that we let down our guard because we’ve been doing so well relatively speaking from the rest of the year.

Like me and Calculus – as long as I diligently did the 2-3 hrs of home work every week, I could get A’s on the tests. As soon as I stopped doing homework because I thought, “I’ve got this, I don’t need to do the homework”, I get D’s on the tests. I only got A’s because I was mindful and worked hard at it, and staying on track with our spending requires a similar effort. I think this is why so many people find tracking spending or trying to stick to budgets so discouraging. You can’t be perfect all the time. Except, I’m okay with that, just not every month, lol. Without further ado, here’s how our November spending broke down.

By Mr SSC
Posted on December 1, 2016
40 Comments on November 2016: Our Money Went Where?

October 2016: Our Money Went Where?

October, us such a great month. You have Halloween, the leaves change, and you start to get cooler temperatures outside as well. Now that the month is over, a lookback on our spending. Overall, it was up about $1200 compared to September due to some big ticket one off purchases, and our 6 month car insurance renewal coming due. What else happened in the SSC household this month? Let’s take a look!

Time Changes Everything: 2 years blogging!

I can’t believe it’s been 2 years since we started the blog! Okay, it’s actually 2 months late, but, close enough for me. Going back thru all of our earlier posts and reading them (yeah I read almost all of them – again) I realized, “Holy Cow some things have changed a LOT since we started writing. Here’s what I found has changed in our Financially Independent Retire Early (FIRE) mindset, our myriad of plans, my comfort level with leaving the workforce at my peak earning years (who does that?!) and even how our timing has changed over the years. Before we get to the changes, I just want to say THANK-YOU to everyone that’s followed the blog, makes comments on the posts, and retweets the scant few things I put out there! You guys are an awesome community and I’m glad to be a part of it!