June was an exceptionally good month. Life was good. Really good in fact! Our financials held-up well (all things considered) during the pandemic, and the kids finally finished school in June. Which means we have the resources and time for some family adventure!
In Washington State (where we live), our “stay-at-home order” has finally ended. Things are definitely not “back to normal”, but we can at least get out of the house a bit more…
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Argh! Believe it or not this is the second time I’m writing this post. I was just about ready to publish the first (original) version last Friday, but upon hitting the ‘publish’ button, the post disappeared into a puff of digital smoke.
Damn! Hours and hours of writing completely gone due to some strange technological fart.
But my little blogging mishap is a very very small problem compared to the incredible difficulties many people are living through at this very moment. It’s been a very difficult year.
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Imagine for a moment that you’re stuck at home. There’s no sports, no concerts, no festivals, no new movies, and the federal government (in all its infinite wisdom) has decided to write you a check! Woohoo! Free money!
But what could you do possibly do with that money? Assuming you’re one of the lucky folks that still has a job, you might elect to spend that money on consumer goods…
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Travel. Ask any random person if they like to travel, and undoubtedly most will say “Oh yes, absolutely!!”. Then after some careful thought, they’ll hedge that claim with “…but I probably won’t do a lot of traveling right now”.
Travel used to be a pretty big chunk of the average consumer’s budget. Now, with quarantine periods for international travelers and “stay home” orders in-place, most families are simply sticking to home…
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In my opinion, Spring is one of the best times to be alive. After a long cold winter, when spring finally hits it’s like rocket fuel for my happiness level. The comes sun out, the plants are green, and the flowers are blooming again.
May also happens to be one of the best months for spring in our area (the Pacific Northwest).
It’s too bad that May didn’t have the same kind of energy this year…
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If you’re the kind of person that’s not afraid to talk about money, sooner or later you’ll encounter the phrase “She’s good with money”, or “He’s bad with money”.
It’s an interesting turn of phrase… one that implies some individuals have a greater ability to make money (or build wealth) than others. Living in today’s very unequal world, this appears to be the case.
On one hand we have billionaires with so much wealth they could literally spend one billion dollars a year and still not outlive their own fortunes…
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Do you consider yourself a frugal person? I used to think Mrs. Tako and I were pretty frugal people. If you remember our backstory, the two of us were good savers in our 20’s and 30’s which allowed us to reach financial independence by age 38.
We saved, but we didn’t suffer. We traveled internationally quite a bit, ate delicious meals, and generally had a very luxurious life — all while saving a good chunk of our income.
That was the past, and this is now…
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There exists an urban legend about Einstein. You’ve probably heard it before. Supposedly Einstein once said that “compound interest is the most powerful force in the universe.” It sounds pretty cool, and smart — like something Einstein might actually say. Whether Einstein actually said these words or not is subject to debate.
We’ll probably never know the truth about that Einstein quote, but the important part is the truth within it — Compound interest, or more generically “compounding” is an extremely powerful financial force when it works for you…
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April 2020 was a weird month. A really weird month. Inevitably it will go down in the history books as one of the strangest on record. Not because it was a particularly good month (far from it), but because everything was just so gosh dang weird.
The stock market (for example) acted very weird in April. It did the opposite of what you might expect during a pandemic and recession…
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