Wow! Time flies so fast! And man, Month 1, at over $1300 savings…how will I top it! Well, turns out I won’t. Especially with the extra expenses we had this month… hello income taxes, vet bills, and kiddo doctor appointments. Oh my!
Never fret! We aren’t letting the few unexpected setbacks set us back. Financial independence and retiring early IS doable. And we are still well on our way. Don’t worry, we won’t go back to trying to keep up with the Jones’ family, up to their eyeballs in debt! In order to retire early, it’s important that you make enough money now. I’ve heard a lot of people talking about investing in stocks to try and make more money. Apparently, by following some of the guidance on websites like https://www.stocktrades.ca/, people are able to create significant amounts of money now, giving them financial security when they’re older. That’s the sort of thing we want to do, invest money now and see profits later when we’re retired. For now, we’re just trying to save as much money as we can.
Last month we saved almost $1400 in monthly expenses by slashing the cable bill, cell phone bill, grocery expenses, etc. you can read the full post here. This month, we continued all of those things. We also saved even further on the grocery bill by growing some of our own food and buying food in bulk.
- Reduced grocery bill by another $50 per month.
- Reduced individual spending money by $30.
- Avoided spending money at the school book fair, that is a $70 savings compared to the last two book fairs.
- Dramatically reduced mileage by riding our bikes to ball practices and as many outings as possible. We will call that a savings of $25 for the month and countless “imaginary” dollars in better health. One caveat is that I’m not sure as a self-employed person if I can deduct mileage on my bike off my taxes. Does anyone know? It might be a question for my accountant. Getting an accountant like Dave Burton will, not only, show you where you need to change your financial outgoings but how much you could potentially save in day to day life.
- We have survived our first month without cable, and that’s pretty sweet. Not missing it at all.
Things that we are working on:
- Selling our boat. Yep we have one of those monstrosities. Luckily it is finally becoming boating season and so I expect it to go away quickly. That will save us dry storage, boat payment, and insurance. And we should make money on it too. So yeah…that will be a big one.
- The hubs fancy new Mercedes (before we started this financial freedom journey). Which he loves, so not SURE we will give it up. It does get like 40 mpg BUT damn maintenance, gas, insurance, payment is expensive.
- Further reducing our bills. It’s no wonder that people decide to compare energy prices when they are looking for ways to save money. Quite often, a large percentage of your earnings will go on your utilities and this was certainly the case for us. Our friends over in Texas told us how they compare corpus christi electricity providers regularly and that it saves them lots of money each year, so that’s definitely something that we should take the time to look at.
All-in-all not as exciting as the first month, but still big things on the horizon. I thought after reading Mr. Money Mustache for the first time that it was like “holy hell this is new info!” Funny thing while organizing my DropBox I found a presentation I gave my hubs on retiring in 2 years! I still credit MMM with lighting the fire under are asses to get back in the game, and he has a better plan than we did!
How is your plan going? Let me know below!