When we first moved in, this place was our never home. I don’t think there was one thing that Christy liked about it. But over time, we’ve changed it and made it our own. The walls were dingy and covered in finger prints. The dark blue carpet was yellow with cat piss (sounds unbelievable, but…
Author: John
Working Toward Retirement – September
Things aren’t looking as good as they were in August due to some down days in the market, but at least we aren’t negative growth. One positive is, even though we didn’t have any real gains, at least we were able to invest $1,435. Just the act of steadily contributing and growing that base will…
Saving for the future – September
Here is where we stand for the beginning of September. Our regular savings received the expected $500 and we are also able to put away an extra $386, but…we had to transfer $400 to pay for an auto repair and $76 to cover some bills going out of our checking account. Plus, my new life…
Sacrifices on home improvement
The one home improvement that Christy has really wanted since we moved into our home was a new kitchen. That was 15 years ago and we are on the verge of that happening, just not the way we had planned. As we’ve mentioned many, many times (can you tell I’m bitter yet), I had an…
Working Toward Retirement – August
Here is our retirement fund update for August. I’m pretty happy to see how the market has been doing lately. Prior to COVID-19, our rate of return on my work 401k was around 17%. During the low of COVID, it got down to 4%. As of today, our rate of return on that account is…
We’re open for business (A Shameless Self Promotion)
Designs On A Dime is now open for business. We recently launched our new store to 1) Get some of the crazy ideas I have out of my head and bring them into the material world, and 2) To try and find a new income stream to help us support our family of 7 after…
Saving for the future – August
Here are the latest numbers for our August savings update. We made a little more headway than we had planned. In addition to the planned $500 into our general savings, we were able to save an additional $236. Not bad. We also earned an additional $14.19 in interest. Our vacation account grew $200 as planned…
Term Life: Preparing for the unknown
Back in May, I wrote about the importance of proper term life insurance coverage to take care of your loved ones and my lack of ability to lose weight. At the time I decided I just needed to get the coverage. That search led me to both lose weight and take the steps towards securing…
Working Toward Retirement – July
Christy gave me the idea to start documenting our savings in a post every month. After writing the first one, that gave me the idea to document our retirement savings. Saving for retirement has been a big focus of ours lately. We wish we would have started being more focused on it years ago, but…
Independence Day 2020 – The lock down edition
Like many cities around the United States, our Independence Day was a little…off. But despite New Jersey being in lock down, we had a pretty great 4th of July this year. Our borough didn’t have a parade this year. Which to be honest, was kind of nice. We love bringing the kids to the parade…