In 2017, we spent most of the year paying down our debts while also optimizing our finances and lifestyle such that we could start bumping up our savings rate to work towards our plan for financial independence. When 2018 started we began to lay the groundwork for maxing out our retirement accounts and investing the rest in a brokerage account (we dabbled with Betterment, but kept most of our investments in Vanguard). However, when I started running the numbers, I…
I remember thinking of income taxes as this magic art that only my mother, with her copy of TurboTax, could figure out for me and my siblings. She would buy the software every year and then run our numbers through the program and figure out what we owed. Most years it was nothing or a small (under $50) refund. One year I made the mistake of letting a few venues pay me directly with checks for gigs that the band…
Our strategy to reach financial independence is actually very simple – reduce our expenses, increase our income, and invest the surplus. I could go into detail for hours about each of these, but I will try to touch on each of them in brief here. Reducing Expenses Cutting costs is the most important part of our strategy. This is because it possesses the ability to stand on its own in terms of affecting life changes. Reducing expenses not only cuts…
