Personal Story

Unlike our history of income I posted earlier, the history of our spending and saving does not go back quite as far, at least with 100% accuracy. It was only in 2010 that we started tracking all of our spending, first in spreadsheets, then in YNAB, and now back to spreadsheets (since 2016). This tracking coincides with the first year we were living together, so it seemed like a good place to start. Even though I do not have the exact numbers for the years leading up to 2010 I can make some pretty good estimates about our spending and saving that I will highlight in this post. Starting in 2010, the numbers in this Google Sheet are the exact amounts that we spent each year. If you compare this to our income, the difference (after taxes) is what we saved and in most cases invested. The exception to this is 2018 where we spent much more than we earned after taxes which I will discuss later in this post. If you haven’t done so already, I encourage you to read our History of Income post first, and then also read our post on our History of Investing. Reading all three posts will help provide a lot more context that was just too much information to put into one post. The history of our income also gives our rationale for being willing to share this information so openly on the internet.

[Read more…] about Our History of Spending and Saving

Before launching this blog I had a long conversation with my spouse about how open we wanted to be and how much we were willing to share online. I knew that at some point I was planning on sharing my real identity so we had to consider that once that veil of anonymity was pierced all of our finances would be open to the world. In the end we decided to go ahead and be completely open and transparent for several reasons.

First, we wanted to share our personal path and story with all the details so that anyone reading could make comparisons to their own circumstances and find things that may be similar or that they could identify with that could be modeled, considered, or learned from (good and bad). We think the more unique voices that share their stories online the better, and we wanted to add our voice in the most honest and transparent way possible.

Second, anyone who knows who I am can easily go online and look up my salary, including my previous salary by year since I am a public employee in North Carolina. To be honest, I wish all jobs shared everyone’s salary whether the job is public or private because I think It would be one step to showing both systemic and individual inequities. Whether this would promote change, I don’t know because even with public knowledge of salaries at my university there are still a lot of pay inequities based on non-relevant factors…

Finally, and one of the main reasons we are willing to be open and share our complete financial picture and history is that we are already in the public space for a much different, larger, and more important set of issues. It is hard to imagine being more of a target (online and offline) than we already are from some groups, so sharing our financial details seems so small in comparison. More importantly we want to be a voice that can say that even with certain circumstances, barriers, and systemic challenges we are still in a position to pursue financial independence. Don’t get me wrong we still have benefited from certain privileges, and in some cases luck, but we want to acknowledge and discuss all of the elements of our journey, positive and negative, as well as what is a result of our actions versus luck or circumstance.

So with the background of why we are willing to share this out of the way, this is the first in a set of three posts where we are opening up about more than just our current income, expenses, and net worth. I wanted to share the history of our path as best as it could be reconstructed that got us to this point. In this post I am going to share our income history, is followed by a post about our spending and saving and a final post on our investing history.

[Read more…] about Our Income History

Since rebooting our blog two months ago, I have had a few people send me messages asking about the gap between when we first started thinking and blogging about financial independence and now. First, I am excited to know that there are a few people who are currently reading the blog, and second this is a topic that has been on my list to discuss for the last several weeks. I have been trying to capture the details of why we essentially had our project go off-track (but not off the rails). Part of the reason I wanted to post something on this topic was to provide a little context to our path, and always be willing to show and admit that sometimes not everything goes as planned. I think too often there are some in finance, especially blogging, where everything posted seems to paint this perfect picture and path if you follow a set of well established guidelines and principles. While this may work for some from a purely mathematical or logical perspective, real life tends to be far different and varied especially when we add emotion, changing circumstances, privilege, luck, and other variables typically beyond our control. We all also have changes in plans that that we purposely make that has an impact on our goals as well as our life perspective. For us we simply want to be open that sometimes things just don’t go as planned, and even if you are extremely committed to something, there are still events that can seriously change the approach, focus, and outcome while pursuing financial independence. 

[Read more…] about A Project off-track but not off the rails