Let's Money That!

 We married in 2012. I believe our current financial status is partially a result of the timing of our engagement and marriage. The housing market had bottomed out in the Bay Area and the timing was such that as we bought, we rode the wave of appreciation for the last eight years. The same happened with the stock market. However, intentionality, goal-setting and monitoring our expenses played a crucial part in growing our wealth and using the bull markets to our advantage. This blog is to share our experiences and to give insight into strategies that have worked for us. We have not hit our absolute FI Number in liquid investable assets yet, for the standard of living we would like to have, but we are well on our way. This blog explores where we've been and will explore and analyze strategies to continue to the finish line.  The commencement of our intentionality is when the wealth really began to grow. As we witnessed this by tracking our expenses and net worth, we realized wh...

 During Covid Lockdown/Armageddon, we moved into our dream home, to do dreamy things in the dreamy mountains, on dreamy lakes, in the dreamy woods and to dream the dreams! Granted, we were already planning on moving, but we moved it forward by two or three months to get out of our little 1950s shoebox tract home with a small lot in a fairly densely populated Peninsula town in the Bay area to a resort mountain town in North Lake Tahoe. We had been dreaming for a couple of years of moving to the Sierras and enjoying all the beautiful mountains have to offer. We love to camp, kayak and stand-up paddle, hike, backpack, ski, sit under the trees or next to a rushing river, go hunting for waterfalls, etc. We find it exhilarating, energizing and life-giving. Our minds slow down and live in the moment, taking in every smell, sound and breath of wind. Our bodies reward us after a hard paddle or tough climb up the trail. And all of the worries and angst of society, melt away with the snow rus...

  I grew up in a small town in Texas, my mother was a stay-at-home mom and my father began as a hired-hand for his uncle, progressing to leasing farmland to farm, then finally a seed salesman for farmers, later expanding that business to a farm equipment servicer.   I never knew this while we were little, but mom told me recently we qualified for free lunches at school in the late 1980’s and 1990’s. I never felt like we were that poor. I knew things were tight, but I don’t remembering feeling poor. There was always talk about “thrift”. We would go with mom and my grandmother to garage sales on Saturdays (they loved it!) and we found some good hand-me down toys that way. We didn’t need much, anyway. We had bikes, roller skates, rollerblades, a dog, some cats and kittens, so we were plenty entertained. I loved watching the baby kittens being born and mama cat cleaning them up. I loved watching them stumble around with their eyes closed for several days. We had a great childhood....

I moved to the Bay Area of California in the fall of 2009. I had been a nurse for about two years in Texas. Just as I was launching my new career, the financial world and real estate worlds would come crashing down. I remember reading headlines about the stock market crash, bankruptcies, Lehman Brothers going under, mortgage defaults and foreclosures and layoff after layoff. I left my first nursing job in Texas to become a travel nurse and explore the great big United States in order to scope out different areas and find a place to settle down (at least for a little while ; ). My first job was at at a university medical center in the Bay Area. I worked there for a few weeks, worked in Sacramento for a few weeks over the Thanksgiving holiday, then waited for another job at the university medical center to open up, because the Bay Area was a world of adventure, beauty, innovation, academia and so many different varieties of brilliance I had never encountered before being from the desert ...