Money well spent- March 2019

When I started this blog, I thought I needed to do everything exactly like “successful” personal finance bloggers. That meant writing a detailed post (filled with affiliate links) of everything that I purchased in the past month. I actually wrote posts like that for January and February, but didn’t really enjoy writing them. In fact, I felt uncomfortable sharing that level of detail on our housing and childcare expenses. (Which are astrof*ckingnomical). After having an exestential blogging crisis, I realized that I am really only blogging for my own enjoyment. Therefore, instead of doing a full spending report, I decided to write a “money well spent” post each month.

In my “money well spent” post, I’ll write about what was unique about our spending for that month. And share some details about what we did as a family. Being a father is so much of my life right now (both personally and financially) it feels weird not to write acknowledge it.

So without further ado, here is my money well spent post for March, 2019.

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Federal employee off ramps

My last post about feeling “trapped” by federal benefits seemed to strike a nerve with my readers. (All 5 of you. Thank you, I mean it.) I was really shocked by how many comments I got on the blog and on Twitter by people who could relate to my ennui. The truth of the matter is that unlike the private sector, federal employees have a large financial incentive to reach MRA. Today’s post will describe a federal employee off ramp (or ramps) for those who want to leave federal service.

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Is FIRE even possible for federal employees?

(or: why I almost quit this blog project)

I started blogging because I was so excited about the possibility of early retirement. I had read all of the books. Mrs. Fig and I are natural savers. We both value time more than money. Our combined income is high. There’s absolutely no reason we couldn’t FIRE*.  Except once I started writing this blog about our path to financial independence, I realized FIRE is different for federal employees.

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The Joy of Not Working: a book review

I enjoyed “The Joy of Not Working” by Ernie Zelinski so much that I had to check it out from the library twice and am now planning on buying my own copy.  Ernie Zelinski fully strikes down any fallacies we have that working/busyness is inherently good. It also provides several great exercises on how to find happiness and fill your time if your unemployed/retired/FIRE’d/ or otherwise unoccupied.

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Early retirement options for federal employees

I have worked for the federal government since I was 18 years old and have never known a federal employee to leave before their “minimum retirement age” (MRA).  In fact, I have only known a few who have left for the private sector. The water cooler talk after these people left was extremely negative. People gossiped about why these people would ever “give up” their pension.  In this post, I examine what early retirement options are available for federal employees and what that really means for their retirement benefits.

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Daycare- the biggest obstacle to (early) retirement

If you’ve seen our monthly expense report, you know that we pay a shitload lot of money for daycare each month.  Unfortunately, our monthly numbers we’ve blogged about so far actually underestimate our yearly childcare costs.  (Summer care for the two school age children is about a third of our total yearly costs.). Today I wanted to write about how daycare is an obstacle to retirement for most families and an obstacle for early retirement for us*.

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Accidental zero based budgeting: Part 1-how we mangaged our finances before FI

This post is the first part of a 2-part series about how we managed our money with what I call “accidental zero based budgeting”. This post focuses on our spending patterns before starting our FI journey. Our next post will focus on our current financial picture.

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I did not pull myself up by my bootstraps

Every financial independence blog has a story arc; a blogger decides to chase FI, saves money, and then achieves FI.  Not everyone starts the story arc at the same place. There has been a lot of discussion on personal finance blogs recently about where the story arc starts (i.e. privilege).  I want to write a post explicitly stating that I did not pull myself up by my bootstraps. While I got a head start on the FI journey, I hope to convince you that my story arc is still worth following.

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Making Crayons- Frugal Family Fun

Hi!  My first frugal family post is about our new favorite activity of making crayons.  Raising kids is a huge part of our lives right now.  While kids can be expensive (and childcare is certainly expensive!), there are plenty of ways to have family fun in a frugal way.   It turns out these inexpensive crayon molds (affiliate link) were our kids’ most loved Christmas presents.

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