Learning to budget and invest put us on a path to retire early, but our choice to keep the same budget for eight years (adding all of our raises to saving) enabled us to retire really early. In this post, I’m going to explain how we accomplished that.

Once you retire, which accounts should you take your retirement spending from first? If you retire before age 59.5, how do you get IRA money out at all? Are there any retirement tax surprises to watch out for?

You’re ready to start saving for retirement, but there are several different accounts you could use. Brokerage accounts, IRAs, Roth IRAs, 401(k)s. Where should your retirement savings go, and why?

In “How Much You Need To Retire”, you learned that you need to save about 25 times your retirement spending to retire. When I first heard that number, I thought saving that much would take forever. Fortunately, there are two giant tailwinds to help: compounding returns and decreasing spending.

So, you’ve decided to start saving for retirement. How much money will you need to save up?

I recently decided to make a local and second-cloud backup of our digital photos, and decided to see if I could optimize them in the process. I figured our phones would produce decently optimized JPG photos directly, but it turns out that a quick pass with an optimization tool reduced the sizes by half with no difference that I could...

You’ve made a budget, done some initial saving, and now you finally have some savings to invest for retirement. What should you invest in, and how do you go about that?

We retired early (the first time) in 2014 at age 33. Within two years, we were both back at work. After knowing what went wrong, we made adjustments, and I’m happy to say that we retired again in 2020 and it’s been going much better. Without further ado, here are five things we did wrong (and five we did right)...

Quest for Glory 1 is one of my favorite role-playing games, and one of the first I played. Sierra walked the line between adventure and puzzle games beautifully in the series, making something that still feels unique. Ultimately, though, what keeps bringing me back is the setting and the story, told with impressive graphics, great music, and witty dialog that...

So you’ve made a budget and now you’re starting to save. What should you do with the money?