First time sick in a couple of years. My spouse is about 3 days ahead of me in terms of illness levels. I don’t like my immediate future outlook.

Definitely wishing I could lay in bed instead of working, but I don’t feel bad enough to justify using a PTO day. At least I have a job that is remote so I don’t have to worry about spreading this crud further.

Preaching to the choir here. I think crypto is a scam. But I don’t control what my spouse does with their money. We largely keep our finances separate because we have such different investment philosophies.

We went to Peru last year. It was incredible, though I packed way too much into a 2 week itinerary, so it was exhausting. It would’ve been much better if we could’ve done the same itinerary through slow travel. My spouse was not a big fan of the third world amenities in a lot of the places we stayed though.

I think my all time favorite vacation was the time we rented a campervan in New Zealand and drove it from Queenstown to Auckland. The free camping there was unreal.

Decided to use the holiday weekend to get a jump start on my taxes. Turns out my “crypto bro” spouse realized 6 figures in capital gains on a coin. Guess I have to claw back my Roth IRA contribution from 2025 because that puts us over the income limit.

I don’t think I can do the backdoor Roth because I have existing Trad IRA contributions from before I got married. My 401k only accepts rollover funds and not direct contributions to an IRA, so I think the pro rata rule is going to bite me if I try. Not sure if it’s worth the tax hit to convert my existing funds to Roth or not to open up the backdoor as an option.

Oh boy. A ton has changed over the past decade for me. Ten years ago, I was in grad school and living in my parents basement. I had some small internship income and basically no expenses. My spreadsheet for Jan 2016 shows I spent $160 that month and earned $230. I’d started investing the previous year and had a net worth of roughly $40k.

Now I’m married with dual tech income, have a dog, own my house. My spending for last month was roughly $3000. I have expensive hobbies, go on big exotic trips once a year, spoil my dog endlessly,etc. My life is so much fuller than it was back then. My net worth nowadays has crossed the 2 commas club.

Eh markets are always at all time highs. So I don’t really care about that. I’ve been hearing about high CAPE ratios and the impending market crash since before I started investing in 2015. The market can be irrational longer than expected.

It helps that I have a lot of built in flexibility with my targets. My original plan was to reach my goal at 40, but am on track to reach it at 38 (if not sooner). I also have a planned “drop dead” quitting date at age 45, since I am fairly risk adverse and am expecting some amount of one more year syndrome.

My biggest concern with retirement isn’t market performance, but the health care situation, frankly.

Somewhat meaningless accomplishment: I passed $401k in my 401k. Unfortunately, I missed seeing it at 401xxx and only noticed at 403xxx.

No financial changes. I’m deep in the boring middle executing the plan. Once I max out my IRA this year, I will possibly start building up a bigger cash fund since I’m only a few years away from my retirement goals.

Took a quick weekend trip for a sports event. Slept for 10 hours last night and still feel like a zombie today. This is the worst case of the Mondays I’ve had in a long time. Hoping to recover by my sporting event scheduled for this weekend (fortunately it’s local and no travel required).

I was so tired yesterday I forgot to do my monthly spreadsheet. Trying to do it at work today on my phone was a bit of a pain, since its the first spreadsheet day of the year. Will have to make some updates later this week on my laptop, once I have time.

Aldi has announced they will be building stores in my area! I am so freaking excited to finally get to enjoy the frugal grocery game they should bring

Nice. When I had an ESPP I always sold immediately and treated the discount as a small bonus.

Considering my first foray into churning. Normally I ignore these offers, but one I got in the mail for a bank account seems like a pretty decent return.

I’d get $500 if I have $7000 direct deposited within 90 days of the account opening. I don’t think bank transfers count, only job and government funds allowed.

Anything I should watch out for? Seems like amazing returns if there isn’t some gotcha in the fine print I missed.

In a recent conversation with my parents, they asked what I’ll do if my job is taken by AI.

I responded, “Guess I’ll just be a bum!”

They don’t know it but I’m roughly a few years out from my RE number and could possibly make it work if my job went away today. Thanks past me for starting down this path so that I don’t have to fear mass layoffs in the present!

Yeah our C-suite was heavily pushing RTO, but money talks. When our office lease was up for renewal they ultimately decided it made more sense to save that money and allow us to go fully remote.

I’ve been quietly ignoring the hybrid mandate for the past year, so being remote isn’t a new thing. But my setup after snagging all the office hardware is much nicer!

Our office is being shut down and we are going fully remote. I got an email today saying they decided to give away monitors and such for free! Home office upgrade incoming! 😁

A bit of a bummer this weekend. I got news my expensive hobby is raising monthly rates by 40%. I knew it was likely a price change was coming since we just moved to a new facility and they got a bunch of new gear despite not raising prices for years, but damn there’s some serious sticker shock.

Oh well, guess my FIRE number is increasing.

Yes! Just keep consistent and ignore any market swings. This is a marathon.

*When I started investing, I was in the red for the first 6 months. It was nerve wracking and I definitely questioned it, but I stuck with my plan and you can see from my post below how well that’s worked out so far.

I’m personally a full on Boglehead. I think the simpler the better, so I stick with the 3 fund philosophy. If I was starting today, it’d be the 2 fund philosophy since VTWAX/VT was released.

Spreadsheet day! If you asked me how the market was this past month, I would’ve thought we were down. Instead I’m up >3% month over month. I also crossed into the 2 comma club in terms of net worth. This is why I track monthly.

Sometimes the decision makers in the corporate world baffle me. There were layoffs last month at my company. Turns out one of my peers, who was working on the company’s literal highest priority, was one of the chosen ones. Now they are floundering trying to move people around to cover the loss.

I’m probably going to have to cover a second team at work, given I’m one of probably 2 options available. Just absolutely baffled by all this.

At least I just got back from a 2.5 week vacation and had literally wiped my memory of all the insanity that was going on when I left.