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?

I’ve been a fan of the Starbucks Vanilla Sweet Cream cold brew since it came out and a lover of cold brew coffee since the days before Seattle’s Best Coffee disappeared. I’m not willing to buy coffee out every day, so I learned to make cold brew at home and mix reasonable replicas of my Seattle’s Best iced mocha and...

The American Rescue Plan became law on March 11th, 2021, and I was surprised to figure out that it changes the taxable income we want to aim for in 2021 and 2022 significantly.

When we got our first real jobs, we put our paychecks into our checking account and bought everything from there. It couldn’t be easier, and I’m sure many people do the same thing. The problem was that while we didn’t spend more than we had, we also weren’t saving up anything. When we wanted to take a vacation, it wasn’t...