FancyPantsFIRE

We’ve got a fixed percentage of bonds in investment accounts, but we’ve also been accumulating i bonds for the last 7 years, so I suppose we have been (slowly) building a mini i bond tent (or maybe sleeping bag).

🤔Is this a work from home joke or do you make your own coffee in the office?

We haven’t, but we’ve also been accumulating them since at least a few years before the inflation spike. It’s not a big enough chunk of my portfolio that I’m worried about hyper optimizing. If the spread with other options widens I’ll probably change my tune.

Are these renovations fun or just necessary? We’ve had to do quite a bit with our century home, unfortunately most have been the not fun kind.

Got it, that’s fun then at least! Do planned renovations figure into your larger RE strategy at all?

We’ve done $225k(ish) in renovations over the last four years and there are still two largish projects on our wish list. I want to wrap up the (known) big stuff before RE.

Question for the week: Do you leverage tax loss harvesting? Why or why not?

We’re a one car household and went through something similar when the second kid was on the way. We had a ten(ish) year old car in good condition and it was fine when we had one kid. We realized it’d become impractical to haul three adults (something we do frequently since the grandparents are in the area) once we installed another car seat.

We ended up upgrading to a plugin hybrid mini van and we’re mostly happy with the decision. Almost all our driving is electric and we can comfortably haul four adults with two car seats installed.

We mostly approached it from lifestyle point of view and what we wanted out of a car. Spending the money sucked, of course, but it sets us up for the hopefully the next 10+ years.

My pie in the sky number is $4.5M, we’re about two thirds of the way there after working for 15 years. There’s a good chance I throw in the towel sooner, though, I’m super burnt out.

You guys have time for hobbies? 😅

I’ve got very little free time these days period, but some of my low(er) budget hobbies include running, coding projects (did some fun raspberry pi projects with old hardware obtained from a local buy nothing group), and listening to audio books / podcasts.

Our income is variable, but we’re somewhere in the 3-6% range on average. That number is low partly due to income and partly due to a higher than average down payment.