Recent content by jstriding

I wonder if this is one of those articles where the author has run out of topics to write because every other finance blog / money blog has written it, and she is going after the shock and awe factor. You save pennies to spend many dollars by switching to any of those TP alternatives. The...

California is a horrible place to be financially. yes, the weather is supposed to "make up for it", but at some point the sunshine only does so much to dampen the realization that I live in a highly taxed tax and that I can save much less here because of the high cost of living as well. that...

Household/Personal Expenses/Auto $35,642.50 Excludes income taxes paid, but does include property taxes paid (part of "maintaining" the household). The above would be what I'd use to calculate emergency funding - so we have $40,000 in emergency funds (1 year +/- unplanned...

That's so silly to call Baby Boomers the self absorbed generation. Each generation is self absorbed. Human beings in general are self absorbed (Maslow's Hierarchy, anyone?)! People have called my generation (X) self absorbed. I look at Gen Y and I think "my god are they self absorbed". I'm sure...

I'm a Gen-X member, and when I read articles about retirement, I don't think of it as "oh look at the Baby Boomers and their plight". Instead, I substitute Baby Boomer for Gen-X because I know the very things can happen to members of my generation and Gen-Y as well. I've seen people in my peer...

Hm... this is getting me to think that we should get an umbrella policy as well. We do have a paid off home and $550K in nest egg so far (net worth excludes our home value). We're in CA and earthquake insurance I hear is very expensive here, but I've been reading some getting it. We're in...

Hilarious! :laugh: I remember once sending in that much in taxes, years ago. And yes, it was serious jack, even after accounting for the business deductions taken for operating the business at that level! (I think our combined was a hair shy of $400K.)

Thank you all for responding so far. The reason I set the $90K goal is because I tend to think of worst case scenarios where we may end up having expenses that would potentially hemorrhage the nest egg. "What if one of us get a stroke, become un-insurable, need in-home assistance, etc." You can...

Not sure if I did this correctly - but I put in $90,000 - tweaked the sum (this would be how much we had to save) and then put in 30 years. The # that came out with a 99.1% success rate was $2.5M. Making this $2.7M made it a 100% success rate, which I assumed meant we won't run out of money at...

Hi Amethyst: I was not sure if I needed to include income taxes, but yes - "paying the government" will continue to be one of our highest expenses. The W2 is relatively straight forward - income tax, health insurance, plus 401K that's taken out - drops the $130K income down to around $70K. The...

I was inspired by MDJO sharing his household expense in another thread. We're looking to retire at age 55. There's a 4 year age gap between us: One of us will be 43 next week and works in traditional employment earning ~$130K/year (with health benefits, employer-paid life/short term/long term...

Props to MDJO for sharing these expenses - I'm in the process of tabulating ours and couldn't figure out how expense numbers can diverge so much. I think "taxes" have a lot to do with the fluctuation. Household utilities, food etc... these can remain relatively stable for the family from year to...

Best financial move: paid off our house 25 years ahead of schedule (our only debt) and now can focus on other questions like "which life insurance" and "what asset allocation" moving forward. Worst financial move: working with a "financial advisor" (Broker!) for the very first time. It was a...