The Personal Finance blogging world is full of posts on which order you should contribute to retirement funds, the Roth vs Traditional IRA debate, even arguments about whether paying off your mortgage early makes the most financial sense. Here at Northern Expenditure, we don’t pretend to know what’s best, and we are big proponents of the best financial plan being the one you’ll actually do! If you read early retirement blogs, you know that most of these people are saving over 50% of their incomes, maxing out 401ks, IRAs, and Health Savings Accounts with savings left over to dump into brokerage funds. This is not us. First of all, we don’t love the savings percentages, because they are heavily biased toward making a lot of money. Though our goal may eventually be to hit that 50% savings mark, that would leave us a lot less to live on (for a family of five!) than people that make sometimes triple what we make. But this blog is about encouragement. Even us… a family of five that make significantly less than $100,000/year can achieve financial independence! And so can you!
Category: Plan Updates
Another month has come and gone and this one shot by fast. At the beginning of the month, we received our annual PFD checks, so this month’s numbers reflect that chunk of money! Mr. T and I reflected upon how we love it when people say “That looks like a lot of work” and we also participated in an awesome financial date night where we really pinned down our current goals. Also, this month, our family got to take a family trip out to the Midwest to see siblings, cousins, and for me to work in the office for a few days. We had an absolute blast swimming, partying, going to pumpkin patches, and eating. I even managed to grab myself a 33% raise while I was in the office! Hopefully that will go through next month. The weather here has turned colder and we got a couple inches of snow this weekend. Another lovely month for the Banks.
Yesterday was PFD DAY! YAY! Unfortunately, this is a September update, so these numbers are true through September 30 and do not include that extra $10,000+ we just got… but tune in next month to see that money added to the numbers… (at least we can count on our mortgage numbers to improve… the market may be a different story).
September is fall around here (sick of moose-in-fall leaves headers?). The leaves are entirely orange and red and all over. The belugas migrated through and we got to sit on a rock and watch them swim around on Labor Day. The sun is much lower in the sky and the ground is kissed with frost in the mornings. We got our first snow this week. The darkness has returned, which means we’ve had some great Northern Lights shows out our window. We did not attend FinCon this year, but we participated from afar. This is also my birthday month. We celebrated with Mr. T making a three-layer fudge chunk cake with chocolate mousse in between layers and drenched in chocolate ganache on top. Oh, and homemade vanilla ice cream. It was absolutely divine and better than any purchase he could have made. Overall, it’s been a lovely month.
Based on an original series by Think, Save, Retire and continued by Our Next Life (the blog), I’m completing the “Our Next Life” series for Northern Expenditure. This means discussing the transition, the quitting, and the goals and plans for life after “work.” This is an interesting subject for me to tackle because instead of having super definitive plans, we’re sort of all over the place. But here’s where we’re at today:
We live very seasonally in Alaska. That’s just the lifestyle. The summers are glorious, but short, so any day where the weather isn’t terrible, we’re doing something outside. Our house and garage get all kinds of messy during the summer because our bikes are always out and ready to ride, we have a million projects going on, and we’re exploring this state as much as we can.
August began with the death of my Grandfather and a trip to Oregon for the funeral. Then Mr. T’s bike got stolen. Things turned around when mid-August brought a visitor to the Banks home. M, a dear friend from my youth, flew all the way from NYC to experience as much of Alaska as four days could provide. Our family drove all over, climbed glaciers, picked berries, explored gold mines, ate out, looked at furs, watched Beluga whales, hiked, used a hand-tram, and laughed a lot. It was a fabulous visit and we all had a great time.
School also started which means we now juggle trying to keep up our adventuring before winter comes while also trying to find a schedule. It’s a tricky transition, but things seem to be going fairly smoothly so far.
The Numbers:
Our investments are up to $62,800 and we now have $89,000 left on our mortgage. Again, we’re not upping the ante on paying that down until we finish the Alaska State Energy Rebate Program. So, that puts our grand total needed to reach early retirement at $526,200! I’m hoping to get that number down to at most $500,000 by the end of the year. This year’s PFD (estimated to be around $2000/person) should help get us there as well as our energy rebate check if we manage to get all the projects done by year’s end.
The beginning of each month I’ll give an update on where we stand on our path to early retirement. Though I keep a very detailed and geeky Excel spreadsheet that tracks all of our spending, I won’t bore you with that minutia. I will mainly just give an update on the investments, the mortgage, and notable transactions from the month. Since this is the very first month, the notable transactions are: