FIRE Month Savings Progress Report for January 2023

Happy New Year! What happened this last month? Last month ended down, but this month ended up significantly. Our final invested number was the second highest it’s ever been. The highest was back at the end of December 2021 when the markets were at their peak. There are a few things to note about our…

Saving Money On Medical Expenses

This entire post is born out of a recent frustrating experience we had with ProMedica, one of our local health systems. We had to go to a specialist and in the process he suggested we get 3 different tests done to eliminate possibilities. The tests were scheduled and we had a idea of the cost…

Money Saving Win of the Week – Broken Washer

Our 12 year old washer started throwing out an error code recently and wouldn’t complete a wash cycle. I ended up looking up the code online and it pointed to the washer pump not working correctly. I checked all the hoses and the trap for something blocking it, but couldn’t find anything. The pump did…

Money Saving Win of the Week – Internet

I found out recently that our internet provider, Amplex, offers a discount for paying for a full year of internet service at once. I promptly called them to get on the plan. The deal is basically pay for 11 months, get the 12th month for free. For us, that will save us $5/month!

How we got paid $11 for 3 months of cell phone service

Let me start by saying this isn’t a scam. We were able to make money on a month’s worth of cell phone service using many of the things I’ve described in this blog. We’ve used Total Wireless for our cell phone service. There is no reason to go into a lot of detail here because…

Early Retirement – What does it mean to you?

I think many people fall into two groups when they think of an “early retirement lifestyle”. One group thinks that since you’re not going to save for the same amount of time as everyone else (30-40+ years), you’re likely going to retire with very little. If you retire with very little, you’re going to live a very meager…

Early Retirement? Why Not!

Over the past several months, I’ve been fascinated by the idea of early retirement. Just the term early retirement can bring up a few different questions. What is early? I consider early to be anytime before when most people would retire. A quick search on the internet brought up a US News article where they surveyed…

Simple trick to pay down debt slightly faster

We’ve got one last debt to pay off… our mortgage. We’ve made pretty good progress, but I wish it were paid off yesterday. A while ago I came up with a plan to pay it off slightly faster than we were, but without messing up our budget or putting us in a crunch. I ran by…

You Need A Budget!

Unless you’re independently wealthy, we all have a limited amount of money to go around each month. Without paying attention, you can easily run out of money before you run out of things you need to spend it on. That’s where a budget comes in. For quite a long time, we used Microsoft Money or Quicken…

What is this Home Energy Audit from Columbia Gas Anyway?

We’ve had icing issues on our roof the past few years and I know it’s because we live in an old house that lacks the proper insulation. So a couple of months ago, I called a local insulation company to get an estimate. He asked if I had the Columbia Gas audit done yet. I told…