A Personal Finance and Money Saving Blog in Alaska

Another awesome blogger took the Roth IRA Challenge! Here’s Harmony Smith from over at Creating My Kaleidoscope to tell us about how she added $5,500 (the amount of money it takes to max out a Roth IRA) to her budget and what she did with the money:

Debt sucks. We’re still deep in the hole, but working hard to dig ourselves out. 2015 was a pretty momentous year in that we welcomed our third child into the family. I was pleased to look back on our finances and realize that we were able to pay off more than $20,000 in debt over the year, despite taking extended parental leave. Our success was due to the combined effect of saving money and increasing our income. This is how we came up with $5,500 of our debt-repayment money, an amount which we’d much rather be investing in a Roth IRA.

February 2016 Plan Update

By MaggieBanks

On March 2, 2016

In Plan Updates

I love the beginning of the month. It’s the time to sit down, figure out where we stand on the plan, and track the numbers! Overall, this was a great month at the Banks’ house. The most exciting news? Our post about putting your kids to work was featured on Rockstar Finance! Dreams do come true! February was spent touching everything in our house and getting rid of tons of stuff. We started with organizing our clothes, moved on to purging books, tackled the bathroom and kitchen organization (and found a million bag clips and hairbands!), and then worked our way through the rest of the house.

Lessons from Decluttering Everything

By MaggieBanks

On February 29, 2016

In Plan Updates

We did it! We have successfully touched every single thing in our house. I have taken 6 loads to the thrift store. Everything left in our home has a place to go. We spent this weekend double checking all the rooms, dusting, vacuuming, changing sheets, and mopping. I can tell you that my house is really and truly cleaned and organized for the first time ever and it feels amazing. I’ve written updates on organizing clothes, books, and the bathrooms and kitchen. Tackling decluttering for real was life-changing. Here are a few things I learned along the way:

Gratitude: An Antidote for Temporal Discounting?

By MaggieBanks

On February 26, 2016

In Research Highlights

GRATITUDE AND TEMPORAL DISCOUNTING

Everybody is impatient to some degree. When it comes to money, we want money now. We want to spend money now. This economic impatience is called temporal discounting. In short, temporal discounting means that we value $50 today over $50 tomorrow and it’s one of the main reasons most people don’t have enough money to retire. The ability to overcome temporal discounting would be considered an economic super power! You would be the world’s greatest saver! Unfortunately, there isn’t a way to overcome temporal discounting entirely, but there are ways to lessen its impacts.

The Financial Independence Anthem

By MaggieBanks

On February 24, 2016

In Goodness

We’re big fans of They Might Be Giants. They make catchy, intelligent children’s music. My kids were listening to one of their favorite CDs by They Might be Giants, Here Come the 1,2,3s. The Seven Days of the Week song came on and we all started singing loudly. I realized this is it. This is the Financial Independence Anthem. It’s about never going to work and living a dream. Maybe your dream is to play the trumpet. When you reach Financial Independence, you can practice all day every day so Sunday you play best! “Oh no, no I never go to work…”

Fight Back by Changing the Rules

By MaggieBanks

On February 22, 2016

In Goodness

“Think back to your days on the playground. There was always a big bully and countless victims, but there was also that one small kid who fought like hell, thrashing and swinging for the fences. He or she might not have won, but after one or two exhausting exchanges, the bully chose not to bother him or her. It was easier to find someone else. Be that kid.” – Tim Ferriss, The 4-Hour Workweek

I love this sentiment. Being a fighter is a great way to survive, but so is getting out of the situation entirely. I changed the rules.

Roth IRA Challenge: How We (Could Have) Fully Funded an Account

By MaggieBanks

On February 19, 2016

In Roth IRA Challenge

We’re starting a new guest series. I’ve wanted a way to highlight awesome people and awesome bloggers. So, I issue a challenge: The Roth IRA challenge is about documenting how you found or earned an extra $5500 and what you did with the money. It’s called the Roth IRA challenge because that is enough to max out one Roth IRA in a year though I realize most people will have other specific goals for that money. Today, our friends over at Two Cup House kick off the challenge. Enjoy! Over to you, Claudia:

When we kicked off our personal finance journey exactly one year ago this month, we started by addressing the most obvious area: spending. After cutting our spending significantly and setting a realistic budget we could live with, I imagine that we could have met the prerequisite of this Roth IRA challenge within a few months. But we had other plans for our cash.

Kitchen and Bathroom Organization

By MaggieBanks

On February 17, 2016

In Plan Updates

In our effort to touch every single item in our house (see our success with our clothing and our books!), we tackled the bathrooms and kitchen this past week. We anticipated these projects being quite simple since we open up all the cabinets in both the kitchen and bathrooms daily. But these projects were beasts! Every hidden corner had hairbands and bag clips! It would have been so easy to just open all the cabinets, say “yup, we’re good” and close them up again. I’m not backing down on my goal to touch every single thing, so I pulled everything out of every cabinet and wiped everything down! (It feels great to know my clean silverware is no longer sitting in a layer of year-old crumbs.) Mr. T and I actually touched and discussed every dish.

I Found the Hairbands and Saved Money!

By MaggieBanks

On February 15, 2016

In Personal Finance

Sarah over at The Yachtless wrote a poignant piece that was featured on Rockstar Finance called Small Things about losing hairbands and tracking your spending. This is a response to that awesome blog post.

Hey Sarah, Maggie here.

I’m just writing to tell you I found them! Yes, ALL the hairbands.

This was a pretty big week for me. Mr. T and I cleared out our bathrooms and our kitchen cabinets. Both of these things we figured would take a couple of hours total, but they ended up being a much bigger deal than we anticipated. I was in that bathroom for hours. And, just as you supposed, every dark corner hid at least a couple of hairbands.

Northern Expenditure’s 100th Post!

By MaggieBanks

On February 12, 2016

In Uncategorized

We’ve made it. 100 episodes. That’s over four seasons if we were a standard American sitcom! And that means… it’s time for a clip show! That’s right. Here’s where we would put together a moving and hilarious series of vignettes of us laughing together and crying together. Unfortunately, in blog form, this is the best I can do to capture our collective experience: