Merry Christmas from the Banks

We’re spending the Christmas holiday in Hawaii, so we will be taking a virtual break until the New Year when we will return on Monday, January 4 with a December plan update. We hope you have a wonderful holiday season with family and friends and spend time on what is the most important. Also, I had another post planned about some little-known facts about reindeer, but Mental Floss beat me to it, so I recommend checking that out. Also, we were interviewed over at Even Steven Money so go check us out there! 

As we prepared to send out our annual Christmas card and letter this year, I realized how much we are leaving out. Our letter includes only event updates of the year (don’t worry, I let my kids write it, so it’s not boring). But to you, who are part of our financial journey, I will write a real letter of all the things that really happened this year.

Dear friends,

Happy Holidays! This year has been very exciting for the Banks family. During the summer, we had a job scare for Mr. T. Don’t worry, he kept his job, but the scare led to real conversations about what we wanted to do in life. It turns out, Mr. T wants to do his own thing. So, we’ve outlined a path to financial independence and early retirement and we started this blog to document our journey. In 2022, we hope to be mortgage-free with $500,000 in investments to allow us to walk away from work to something else. We’re super excited about our new path and the possibilities that are now in our future. I want to be able to say: “okay guys, next summer, we’re going to move to another country. Which one should it be?” and let the kids decide. We’ve made some great progress on our way there. We’ve finished up the Alaska Energy Rebate Program (with $7,700 coming our way in 2016), we got over $10,000 on this year’s PFD, and I got a 33% raise!

Alaska is still fabulous and we love being here. We caught 35 salmon this year which Mr. T cooks up weekly. We also got to see the belugas as they migrated through, climb on a glacier, take a hand-tram across a river, do some ice skating, and enjoy the occasional moose out our window.

This year has been amazing, and you are part of that. So, thank you. We’re grateful for this space we’ve created here at Northern Expenditure and we’re grateful that you choose to share it with us. It has grown more than I could have imagined in six months. This blogging journey has already been life-changing already and we look forward to 2016. It will be cool to see how much we can accomplish in one full calendar year of being on this new path!

We hope your path is as exciting to you as ours is to us. We hope you’ve solidified your dreams and have exciting plans for 2016. We want to hear all about them!

Love, The Banks (Mr. T, Maggie, Penny, Florin, and Lui)

Penny and Florin say: “Have a SUPER Christmas!”