Down on Frugal Rock

A few years ago we wrote a post outlining our 10 year plan .  As part of our annual planning we decided to do a check in to see, how are we doing? Well… we are doing okay. We’ve invested 18% (goal 20%) of our income over the past year (yay!), we’ve put 35% towards the house (goal 50%), and the remainder went to cost of living, which was a bit over our goal of 30%, double to be in-fact, eeek!  Well some things happened last year. We moved to a new neighborhood that had better schools for Little Rock. We ended up moving to a town where two cars was critical, so we picked up another car. We also decided Little Rock needed some socialization so we signed her up for a preschool 2x per week. So all and all, things we needed to do for our little one. Family first. So what did that mean for our goals? Well, we will try to work on that a bit in the new year. We can still make our house payoff by 2030 (and save 100k in interest, I’m not joking). We use YNAB to budget our money. We follo...

 Hello fellow frugal peeps, and welcome to the end of the year! It has been another doozy of a year in 2021, and also a fun one. Like many people do toward the end of the year we are at a moment of reflection as we look back at the good things, and the opportunities to improve. When it comes to financial planning we use the month of December as a way to review the year and plan for the coming year and reevaluate how we are doing on our long-term plans. To do a long-term plan, one needs to have goals. The goals that we have are 1) retire early (shocker), 2) have some fun (interesting?), and 3) enjoy life, 4) financial independence (FI). For our long-term goal of retirement, we do investments mostly, we track our monthly investment installments as a percentage of our income to see the trends over time. This year we did pretty well, with a mean monthly investment of 32% of our income. Our investments did really well, we mostly stick with index funds. I know it's not as sexy as crypto,...

A lot of people try to time the market. This single act creates panic, stress, and overall horrible habits in investing. We as a society have a knack for looking at the daily happenings for something, when we really should be doing is looking at the 5-10 year outcomes. The stock market has dipped, once again, like it always does, and this time for the Coronavirus. If you look at the past month, sure, it looks "bad". Credit, Vanguard.com S&P Actually yesterday we had a decent bounce back, yay? This is people panicking that don't have their investments on autopilot. This will always happen when something impacts business. People get scared, and they hold on to the money they would have invested. Let's zoom out a bit and look at the 5 year overview of the S&P. Credit, Vanguard.com S&P Woh, still on the rise! That is the lesson here. The market is a rollercoaster on the daily/weekly/monthly scale. If you zoom out and smooth out the graph to have...

Where will you be in 10 years? Uff-da, that's a tough one, but important! It's the start of a new decade and Mrs Frugal Rock and myself decided that we want to build out a 10 year goal for us. Planning long term is important so you do the things that matter most to you in this life. What we have realized in the past 35 years is that life is really short and you only get one shot at it. So here it is, in no particular order. First, we had to establish where we wanted to be in 10 years, or where we are gearing up to be. We love a simple life and nature. Time is the only true currency (book reference, Your Money or Your Life) and we'd like to spend ours with our close nit family and some forest. We currently live in a wonderful 2 story house on the far stretches of the city. We built a new build because it was actually cheaper and we had time left in our rent. It was are way of getting what we wanted in a house. It's a great place to be while the kiddo grows up, however ...

Neighbors are both a blessing and a curse. On one hand they help build out a community, they are people to lean on when you need a hand, and in some neighborhoods... friends. On the other hand, some people see neighbors as competition in this rat race we call life. This can turn toxic to your bank account and should be avoided if you can. Since the Mrs and myself are trying to run away from the rat race we realized that avoiding the Jones was an important step. It is just too easy to get into the mindset of "well they have it, I want it!". Here are some tips we came up with to help change our mindset back to frugal ways. 6: Stop and think, do you NEED this? It sounds so simple but yet time and time again I have caught my past self forgetting to stop and think. If you have a real challenge with buying needless things invoke the 7 day rule. If you feel you NEED x thing in your life, write it down and stick it on the fridge for 7 days. At the end of the 7 days if you still ...

We are excited to start "Down on Frugal Rock" blog today. Here you will find posts about various frugal things. From grocery tricks, recipes that don't break the bank, to how we find happiness in the simple things, and so on. We can't wait to share our journey with you. Over the past years we have learned a lot that we are happy to share and still yet more to discover. So stay tuned, and please mash that subscribe button. Cheers, Mr. & Mrs. Frugal Rock