Susan's Scoop 10 Years Left Last week we found out that AI may very well destroy all of humanity within a decade. This admittedly is not great news, but I figured if I have to spend all of my money down in the next 10 years, I’d better figure out a plan. I promptly ordered some new patio furniture, test drove some fun little Mini Coopers, and researched the cost of private jets (which sadly turns out are still too expensive for my budget, even with the 10-year time horizon). My family thought...
7 days ago • 3 min read
Susan's Scoop Avoiding the Zeros One very important concept in both our health and money is avoiding the zeros, which we talked about last week on our Wealth Wednesday call. What exactly is a zero? A zero is something you can’t easily come back from – in the case of health, this would be death (which at least for now we cannot come back from), and in money this would be having zero dollars, which no longer can compound into anything. So when we’re thinking about what risks we’re taking in...
14 days ago • 3 min read
Caitlin's Corner Sometimes the Best Financial Decision Is to Make Less Money I can write for years about all the ways we might choose to reduce or completely halt our income long before retirement age. Sometimes it's hard to pick just one angle that spotlights this concept, but when news hit last week about the tragic flooding in Nepal, I recalled a vivid example from my own life when choosing less income gave me something way more valuable in return. In 2011, I asked my employer for an...
21 days ago • 3 min read
Caitlin's Corner Monopoly & The Way We Behave with Money I never played Monopoly as a kid, which feels somewhat ironic considering I became a real estate investor as an adult. So over the weekend, I experienced the board game for the first time, with my husband and our 7- and 10-year old daughters. This board game went about as you'd expect a game in our family to go; we all started with high hopes and little by little, people (the kids, I swear 😉) started melting down when "chance" cards or...
27 days ago • 3 min read
Susan's Scoop The Comfort of Having Problems that Money Can Solve The past few weeks have been frustrating for our family. While visiting our vacation rental cabin in Tennessee, we discovered a major roof leak. Then while we were still on that trip, we got a call that a tree had fallen on one of our rental duplexes back in Austin. Our truck then started having some quirky mechanical issues, and when we finally got home, we discovered that our refrigerator had completely died. I’m prone to...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
Susan's Scoop How We Save Thousands on Family Travel After our trip to Puerto Rico, I promised to follow up with some of our money-saving travel hacks, so here they are! None of these are particularly glamorous, but together they've saved us many thousands of dollars. Every time I see travel influencers online, they're opening 20 credit cards a year, flying first class around the world, or staying in overwater bungalows in the Maldives on points. Good for them...but that doesn’t really work...
about 2 months ago • 5 min read
Caitlin's Corner How the Money Gears Spin the Other Way During a workshop I held last winter, we went around the circle sharing one thing that had always eluded us about money. This exercise is great because there's no shortage of confusing money concepts, and thanks to the tangle of our financial system, the hard part is picking just one. One participant closed her eyes, raised her chin, and said, "I know this seems simple, but I can't wrap my head around how I actually take out my money in...
about 2 months ago • 4 min read
Susan's Scoop Your Ingredients for a Rich Life When I early-retired over 3 years ago, I was focused on the financial numbers – was our nest egg big enough, did we have enough cash flow coming in, could we financially survive a downturn, etc. But I had spent very little time thinking about the intangibles that would actually make my life FEEL rich. Identifying these has very little to do with whether you're working full-time, retired, taking a career break, or just starting out. The...
2 months ago • 2 min read
Caitlin's Corner Vacation Spending: How to Track & What it Means Happy midsummer, friends. Our family recently got home from an east coast vacation, and after several loads of laundry, unpacking suitcases, catching up on sleep, and returning to (sort-of) real life, I sat down to do our monthly spending review. I know that's not as exciting as vacation, but if you're a data nerd like me, you might just geek out a bit when you can do a little retrospective on how spending went while on your...
2 months ago • 3 min read