We originally planned to space our first couple of posts a few days further apart, but we were honestly surprised by how many people viewed our first post and didn’t want to leave people hanging with just one lonely post. Now that you know a bit more about us, let’s get started.

It doesn’t look great, but I promise, it looks better than it did. We made some bad financial choices early on, and we’re digging out of that hole. I (Tyler) chose to go to a private university for a very specific degree, while Nicole went to a very reputable state school for her degree. I graduated with around $70,000 in student debt, and Nicole graduated with about $22,000. We also only had about $1,000 in our checking account and probably $4,000 in savings when we got married a little over 2 years ago. We also feel like we spent a little too much on my car, and we had to finance about $12,000 which we've been working really hard to pay off since then. Here's where we're at today:


Checking Account
~$4,000
Savings Account
$10,697
Investment Account 1
$3,579
Investment Account 2
$1,030
Tyler’s 401K
$8,935
Nicole’s 401K
$16,148
Credit Card Balances
$0
Tyler’s Private Student Loan
$38,675
Tyler’s Federal Student Loan
$15,297
Nicole’s Federal Student Loan
$11,220
Car Loan
$4,341
Tyler’s Monthly Take Home Pay
$3,532
Nicole’s Monthly Take Home Pay
$3,252


As far as other things that probably have some of you scratching your heads go, we realize the two small investment accounts are weird. The smaller one is a result of impulsively opening one account and then finding a far better deal about two weeks later. We realize that paying off debt is a far better use of our money than further investing right now (including our 401Ks, but we’ll fight that fight in another post), but these investment accounts are set up more as high-yield savings accounts. We wanted to have a larger emergency fund because of our new baby, but didn’t want all of that money sitting around collecting 0.3% interest. Our investments are mainly in lower-risk index funds, bonds, and a few select equities. We’re hoping not to touch this money for a long time and let it grow slowly, but still have it fairly easily available in case of an emergency.

There you have it! That’s where we stand. We won’t pretend it’s the perfect set-up, but we feel happy with where we’re going.

Next post we’ll share our monthly budget and a little bit of our plan for paying off our debt ASAP.

Thanks for reading, and please let us know if you have any thoughts, questions, or ideas for future posts!

•

October 2017 - How things look

Friday, October 20, 2017




We originally planned to space our first couple of posts a few days further apart, but we were honestly surprised by how many people viewed our first post and didn’t want to leave people hanging with just one lonely post. Now that you know a bit more about us, let’s get started.

It doesn’t look great, but I promise, it looks better than it did. We made some bad financial choices early on, and we’re digging out of that hole. I (Tyler) chose to go to a private university for a very specific degree, while Nicole went to a very reputable state school for her degree. I graduated with around $70,000 in student debt, and Nicole graduated with about $22,000. We also only had about $1,000 in our checking account and probably $4,000 in savings when we got married a little over 2 years ago. We also feel like we spent a little too much on my car, and we had to finance about $12,000 which we've been working really hard to pay off since then. Here's where we're at today:


Checking Account
~$4,000
Savings Account
$10,697
Investment Account 1
$3,579
Investment Account 2
$1,030
Tyler’s 401K
$8,935
Nicole’s 401K
$16,148
Credit Card Balances
$0
Tyler’s Private Student Loan
$38,675
Tyler’s Federal Student Loan
$15,297
Nicole’s Federal Student Loan
$11,220
Car Loan
$4,341
Tyler’s Monthly Take Home Pay
$3,532
Nicole’s Monthly Take Home Pay
$3,252


As far as other things that probably have some of you scratching your heads go, we realize the two small investment accounts are weird. The smaller one is a result of impulsively opening one account and then finding a far better deal about two weeks later. We realize that paying off debt is a far better use of our money than further investing right now (including our 401Ks, but we’ll fight that fight in another post), but these investment accounts are set up more as high-yield savings accounts. We wanted to have a larger emergency fund because of our new baby, but didn’t want all of that money sitting around collecting 0.3% interest. Our investments are mainly in lower-risk index funds, bonds, and a few select equities. We’re hoping not to touch this money for a long time and let it grow slowly, but still have it fairly easily available in case of an emergency.

There you have it! That’s where we stand. We won’t pretend it’s the perfect set-up, but we feel happy with where we’re going.

Next post we’ll share our monthly budget and a little bit of our plan for paying off our debt ASAP.

Thanks for reading, and please let us know if you have any thoughts, questions, or ideas for future posts!

Read More



Welcome! Thanks for taking the time to read our blog. Before we dive into the hard numbers, we thought we’d introduce ourselves a little. 

Nicole and I met in high school through mutual friends and have been together ever since,. In fact, today marks 10 years since we started dating! We continued our relationship through college, and got married two weeks after I graduated.

She graduated a year ahead of me and that really helped us starting out. Nicole was able to pay off a tiny bit of her student loans and pay down her car loan enough that we were able to pay off the last $2,000 with money from our wedding. Being the more fiscally disciplined one, Nicole kept us on track early on when she was working and I hadn’t found a job yet. During that time I started picking up cooking and computer programing, both of which helped us with getting our finances in order. We were in a small, economically-depressed city near where we grew up and went to college, and her $36,000 salary was not going to be enough as we had student loans starting to come into repayment and I hadn’t found a job yet.

About three months after we got married, I got a job offer in my field in another state. We packed up and moved so I could take an entry-level job making barely more than she made before, but there was room for advancement and it was in a large enough city that Nicole could find better-paying work as well.

Just about two months after moving, and before Nicole had found a new job, we found out she was pregnant. After going through the initial phases of terror, excitement, panic, and joy, we tightened our belts a little more and started saving. Not long at all after that, she got an offer to work as a financial analyst, and we started to see that we were going to be just fine. We did our best to live on just one of our salaries, while we used the other to start paying off debt and saving so she could take 12 weeks off of work to be home with the baby. This undoubtedly changed our plans to pay off our student debt before having kids, but we couldn’t possibly be happier than we are having our little daughter join our family.

I can’t say that we’ve been perfect in our management of our finances, and I’ll even talk about some of the dumber things I’ve done in some future posts. What I can say is that we spend every dollar intentionally, making sure that we make the most of what we have and keep our priorities in line. We try to be generous with our money, avoid impulse spending, and prioritize where we put any extra we’re able to squeeze out.

The reason we’re doing all of this is to keep money from being a limiting factor in our life goals, and having more money should never be a goal in itself. We want to be free of debt, so that our money is ours to decide how to use. We want to be generous and have a positive impact on those around us, so we aim to have extra money in the budget to help whenever we see a need arise in our community. We want to be less-reliant on full-time work, so that Nicole can stay home with our kid(s) if she wants to at least part-time. And finally, we want to be able to actually retire at a reasonable age.
In our next post, we’ll talk a little bit about where we stand today and translate this whole story into some hard numbers.

Starting Out Together

Thursday, October 19, 2017




Welcome! Thanks for taking the time to read our blog. Before we dive into the hard numbers, we thought we’d introduce ourselves a little. 

Nicole and I met in high school through mutual friends and have been together ever since,. In fact, today marks 10 years since we started dating! We continued our relationship through college, and got married two weeks after I graduated.

She graduated a year ahead of me and that really helped us starting out. Nicole was able to pay off a tiny bit of her student loans and pay down her car loan enough that we were able to pay off the last $2,000 with money from our wedding. Being the more fiscally disciplined one, Nicole kept us on track early on when she was working and I hadn’t found a job yet. During that time I started picking up cooking and computer programing, both of which helped us with getting our finances in order. We were in a small, economically-depressed city near where we grew up and went to college, and her $36,000 salary was not going to be enough as we had student loans starting to come into repayment and I hadn’t found a job yet.

About three months after we got married, I got a job offer in my field in another state. We packed up and moved so I could take an entry-level job making barely more than she made before, but there was room for advancement and it was in a large enough city that Nicole could find better-paying work as well.

Just about two months after moving, and before Nicole had found a new job, we found out she was pregnant. After going through the initial phases of terror, excitement, panic, and joy, we tightened our belts a little more and started saving. Not long at all after that, she got an offer to work as a financial analyst, and we started to see that we were going to be just fine. We did our best to live on just one of our salaries, while we used the other to start paying off debt and saving so she could take 12 weeks off of work to be home with the baby. This undoubtedly changed our plans to pay off our student debt before having kids, but we couldn’t possibly be happier than we are having our little daughter join our family.

I can’t say that we’ve been perfect in our management of our finances, and I’ll even talk about some of the dumber things I’ve done in some future posts. What I can say is that we spend every dollar intentionally, making sure that we make the most of what we have and keep our priorities in line. We try to be generous with our money, avoid impulse spending, and prioritize where we put any extra we’re able to squeeze out.

The reason we’re doing all of this is to keep money from being a limiting factor in our life goals, and having more money should never be a goal in itself. We want to be free of debt, so that our money is ours to decide how to use. We want to be generous and have a positive impact on those around us, so we aim to have extra money in the budget to help whenever we see a need arise in our community. We want to be less-reliant on full-time work, so that Nicole can stay home with our kid(s) if she wants to at least part-time. And finally, we want to be able to actually retire at a reasonable age.
In our next post, we’ll talk a little bit about where we stand today and translate this whole story into some hard numbers.
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