When I was laid off from my dream job over 8 years ago, I committed myself to the fast track to financial independence. I had a rough go of it for a while, trying one job and then another that turned out to both be very bad fits. I’m lucky—some former coworkers had scooped me up to freelance for them, and that turned into a new dream job. One thing that my two dream jobs have in common? Lots and lots of spreadsheets! Obviously, I love spreadsheets. Interestingly enough, when I started this blog, I had barely ever used them before. To start getting a hold on my finances, I cobbled together my e ..read more

Editor’s note: The idea of getting evicted has always been scary, but the problems of the pandemic have magnified the issue and made it particularly terrifying to face. When the pandemic moratorium on evictions was coming close to disappearing entirely, Mackenzie from Lifeat23k posted an extremely helpful Twitter thread on how to prepare when facing eviction. I’ve asked Mackenzie to come here and expand out those tips, which unfortunately come from her own experience. Here’s what she has to share about what to do when you’re facing eviction: Housing insecurity happens all the time. It can hap ..read more

It’s April 1st, 2020… and it’s time to come clean. Ordinarily, I’d be releasing another net worth update around this time. But last month, I released my final one. In it, I recapped 13 years of net worth updates, and the changes I’ve been through in that time. I also wrote a retrospective last year about getting to my first $100,000 in savings. Lies, dirty lies of omission, abounds in both of them. And throughout this whole blog. Now, of course, on any blog there will be things left out. I’m not expected to narrate every single pack of gum or straw bale that I buy, nor every coin that lands i ..read more

[Editor’s Note: It’s weird to put an editor’s note on my own blog post, but this one needs it. This post was written mostly over the course of January and February 2020, before the COVID-19 virus caused major economic upheaval. I’m getting around to finishing and publishing it right smack dab in the middle of a pandemic, but it’s important that as you read it, you realize that except for this note and the epilogue at the bottom, what you are reading was written before the pandemic and stock market crash that’s happening with it.] And so, we have reached the end of an era. It’s been 13 years si ..read more

This update isn’t coming out until nearly Christmas, and I’m totally okay with that. December is crazy enough for most people, but this is my eleventh consecutive December working in online retail, and I do thrive a bit (or a lot) on the chaos, and have also learned to accept and expect it. I told many people that I could not commit to helping with even relatively small things this month, and said often “To my family, I don’t exist until the evening of Christmas Eve. For everyone else, I don’t exist until after Christmas.” So really, it’s a Christmas miracle that this is getting posted before ..read more

This post is laaaaaaate and I have almost no excuses. The good news is that before the end of October, I finally finished switching my net worth spreadsheet over to Tiller, which automatically imports my balances into the spreadsheet directly. Before this, I was hand-copying each balance from either Mint (if I was lucky) or from each bank/financial institution’s website. One. By. One. So part of my delay in getting this post out was just… making the spreadsheet pretty again once I got it all hooked up. I’m sorry that I wanted to make it pretty for you! Alright, well, let’s get i ..read more

When we last left our intrepid hero… I was coming down from two months of being extremely busy, and rushing off to #FinCon19 to hang out with money nerds, which is different from usual only in that I stayed in “the city” (Washington DC) for several days and a whole ton of money nerds flew out to join me. Well, not me specifically, but all of us. I drunkenly tried to order an $80 pie at 1:30 in the morning and Bank of America cut me off (the audacity!), so I went for chili cheese fries with people from the internet instead. Good times! (I also made some business connections that I haven’t had t ..read more

Last month was busy, and this month really didn’t let up… at all. It’s all been a big lead up to this coming week: back to school for my kiddo and FinCon for me! FinCon, the financial media conference, is now an annual thing for me (or at least it will be, after this coming week). Last year I had the pleasure of attending during my birthday, but the dates move around a little every year, so I’m not the birthday girl this time. But, it is happening in my area (Washington, DC!), so at least I don’t have to fly in! We’ll see how FinCon affects my numbers next month (mostly, the effect will be fro ..read more

When I was pregnant with my first child, I tried as hard as I could not to overbuy stuff. There’s no shortage of media out there trying to tell you all the things you must have for a baby. I wanted to be frugal and to avoid stuffing our small apartment to the gills. What I really needed to know was which things you need right away for a newborn. I must have overdone it in terms of not buying stuff, because I ended up making an Amazon order with Next Day shipping from the hospital! It was just a few things we had missed, but I decided to keep track of all the things we actually used that first ..read more

I’ve been busy before at various times in my life. Like when I was in college full time and working 3 jobs and writing for someone else for free (somehow I didn’t die of exhaustion). But I swear, this month took the cake. Work’s been busy, my kid has been in swim classes and also sick this month, I have a non-optional volunteer position that requires most of my time and attention in July, I signed up for an online course and launched a new side hustle, and I hosted a sold-out film screening with a Q&A panel right in the middle of the month. I managed to get through the month without pullin ..read more