I was reading news when I received a notification that the car loan balance was paid off. I definitely felt some relief, as from now on I would be saving $301 a month I had already planned for. Paying it off early felt like the end of the story. But that was actually the moment…
I needed to start planning a road trip that I put in my calendar a long time ago. What crossed my mind, places to stop, hotels, food, rental or driving my own. That would be a whole evening of research. I had a framework I refined over a few trips. It involved deciding on dates…
I was going through my annual spending and budget review in late December. I already had a budget in place for the last year and an emergency fund built. I went through every category, comparing what I had spent against what I wanted to allocate going forward. At first, I built a simple spreadsheet with…
I was sitting on my balcony with a laptop, running math and thinking about emergency funds. My goal was to put my emergency fund into a high yield savings account (HYSA). I had hours blocked off in my head before I even opened a browser. In my mind, this meant researching banks first that had…
I was already investing $400 a month and it wasn’t enough. But I wanted to do more. The problem was I couldn’t find where the extra money would come from. I had a budget and I was following it. I still couldn’t figure out where the money was going. I sat with my bank statements…
Early morning, my phone rang. A call from a mechanic talking about my car’s transmission. Once I heard “transmission” I already pictured a big payment. I mostly skipped the explanation until he reached the number, $2,500. I had $4,500 in my savings account, two months of expenses. I figured that was enough to start with….