Early Retirement Extreme

Financial independence, frugality, self-sufficiency, ecology, capitalism, and voluntary simplicity

With record oil prices is it time to buy winter clothes?

Published in July 16th, 2008

If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!The reason our utilities are so low is due to a) We live in CA and b) We keep the thermostat set really low or really high. Last winter, we did our first season together without any heating(*). It [...]

Advanced cash flow diagrams

Published in July 7th, 2008

Posted by Jacob in budgeting, personal finance

No Comments

One of the things I get paid for on a daily basis is to sit and stare at large amounts of numbers and try to make sense of them. The thing that has repeatedly helped me understand those numbers is to develop some way of visualizing these numbers. It is not a popular method because [...]

Cheap fruits and vegetables via loss leaders

Published in July 3rd, 2008

Posted by Jacob in budgeting, cooking, frugal

4 Comments

The cheapest fruits and vegetables are the one’s you grow yourself (we’re working on it). A secondary choice for the more social and enterprising kind is to ask people if you can come and pick it off their lawn or trees in exchange for, say, half the loot. For the less enterprising, I suggest loss [...]

Early Retirement Extreme’s budget

Published in July 1st, 2008

Posted by Jacob in budgeting, household

19 Comments

I just went over the budget again just to give you an idea of where we’re at. In 2007, we had a combined income of $87k, a 12% tax rate, and living costs of $24k leaving $52k for frivolous stock purchases, etc.
Being a few sigma off the mean (but I do know people — yeah, [...]

How to get a solid desk for free (this opportunity doesn’t last)

Published in May 24th, 2008

Posted by Jacob in budgeting, expenses, spending

2 Comments

When it comes to consumer durables, I rarely pay retail. These days stuff is generally well made (lasts for years), yet people have a desire to buy things as if they were going out of style — well, maybe they are, I wouldn’t know — so I prefer to pick through people’s overflowing garages and [...]

Why this early retirement blog continuously talks about cycling and cooking?

Published in April 28th, 2008

Posted by Jacob in budgeting, cost of living, financial independence

14 Comments

Financial independence comes from the combination of having enough money and spending sufficiently little so that interest from the former covers the expenses of the later. The biggest sources of personal expenses are generally

Children
Housing
Transport
Food
Taxes

Reducing expenses in these areas will make a much larger impact that token efforts such as using CFLs, turning the thermostat down, [...]

Let’s play some hockey (my guilty pleasure)

Published in April 14th, 2008

Posted by Jacob in budgeting, fitness

2 Comments

I first got introduced to hockey in phys ed. in elementary school. Our teacher handed out these yellow plastic sticks and put two mylec goals at each end and let us have at it. I saw a similar spectacle a couple of years ago. This time the kids were wearing gloves and full head gear [...]

The real reason it is so easy/hard to get ahead

Published in March 20th, 2008

Posted by Jacob in budgeting, saving, spending

4 Comments

DW and I were talking about how personal finance can be easy in theory and hard in practice. I think the reason is that theory, like language, occurs in two steps. Passive and active. Understanding and speaking. Passively, yes, sure we understand that we should spend less than we earn, that we should save money. [...]

No need to save millions - here’s a quicker way to financial independence

Published in February 18th, 2008

Posted by Jacob in budgeting, cost of living, financial independence, standard of living

22 Comments

With a name like early retirement (extreme) I get a lot of inquires about how many millions one needs to become financially independent. A brief search in the personal finance blogging world reveals several bloggers that are aiming for the millions. Not this guy.
The idea that you need to be a millionaire is predicated on [...]

Now you can have a 7 year car loan. Outrageous!!

Published in February 16th, 2008

Posted by Jacob in budgeting, consumerism, debt, economy, sub-prime

4 Comments

In an effort to sell cars to debt laden consumers Toyota is now offering 84 month car loans(*). The immediate effect is to lower the monthly payments. In the long run this could have two effects.
The first long term effect is an increase in the price of new cars (relative to inventory) just like lower [...]

« Older Entries