LivingAlmostLarge

So what happened this month?  Things were not good for our networth that’s for sure.  We kept our cash steady mostly because we still owe another $3k for DH’s next summer course paid for yesterday.  But we unfortunately lose $5k of 5% of our retirement portfolio.  Not a huge deal when you look long term, [...]

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Money Magazine interviewed Suze Orman in an article.  Very neat.  One thing is Suze is switching out of Index funds into Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs), which are basically the same thing except they trade like stocks and have more diversity.  DH and I personally own a bunch of ETFs because you can tailor it better [...]

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The question asked is $1 Million dollars enough to retire?  On Yahoo Finance, the article questions whether it is or not.  The article thinks that $1 million dollars is not enough to retire on today, but in previous generations it was.  The idea is withdrawing 4%, will give you a 90% chance of having enough [...]

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I had a very heated debate with my mom and aunt when they were visiting over racism in the US.  They are both in their 50s and have not been exposed to many other cultures.  They believe that racism is still rampant in the US.  Neither believe that Barack Obama can become president. That the [...]

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This month our net worth should be taking a beating. DH’s tuition is all due and basically I paid $6k in cash with another $6k due 6/10. Sigh.  So much for our savings.  I do understand that it’s all fake savings because we save every month for something coming due in 3-4 months, but it’s nice [...]

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This is a fantastic month for us in our retirement accounts.  We finished our 2008 Roth IRA contributions.  So between our $10k contribution to our Roth IRA and our standard 401k contributions we increased our retirement portfolio to $93104.  I think we should break $100k I am guessing by the end of the year for [...]

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So following along the same line of thought about salaries, I was asked again over email “How much do you make?”  In fact here’s the questions.
I found your post about “how much do you make?” interesting.  My goal for asking the question was not to judge you; but, to determine how you allocate your income [...]

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A question was asked here on Savings Advice about “how much do you make?”  The question was asked because why are Americans so afraid of asking each other what we make.  Unlike other countries, where everyone is very open and shares their salaries. 
I’ve posted in the thread if you read through it and one particular [...]

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It was a really good month for us investment wise and spending wise.  However we did have a few big expenses.
 First our cash and stock positions increased by $4200.  Our retirement went up by $3400, which while it was mostly contributions, I’ve very happy we are at $78k.  After all the first three months of [...]

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I tried again the cash budget. I have no idea what I spent where, but I believe I spent $120 on groceries, and $142 on eating out. I still feel as though we could have spent less, but I completely lost track of our cash spending. Defintiely the eating out was higher than expected because [...]

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