Long before I wrote a blog (and before we had two kids), I was an avid movie watcher — Maybe one movie a week. These days, with a family, and a blog to babysit, my time is much more limited. Now, I only watch a couple movies a month… so I make absolutely certain they’re really good movies to watch before I invest my time watching one…
Read more
Now that spring is here, the rain is finally starting to dry-up in the Pacific Northwest (PNW). For all the readers that don’t live in the area, we have a very bipolar weather pattern — 4 months of constant rain and clouds in the winter, and then 4 months of absolutely no rain in the summer.
It’s a weather pattern as regular as clockwork…
Read more
There comes a time in everyone’s life when our parents start to age. They begin having trouble completing basic tasks, or perhaps develop more serious health issues that require full-time care. Either way, they start needing help. This is going cost you either time or money.
If you happen to live nearby your aging parents, that additional care might be limited to just time…
Read more
I need to admit I made a mistake. At first glance, master limited partnerships ( ‘MLP’ for short) always seemed like the kind of investment I would automatically dislike — With flat share prices, large debt levels and high dividend yields. They ticked a lot of my “don’t invest” boxes pretty quickly.
It should come as no surprise, that I’ve essentially ignored MLP’s for years…
Read more
It’s long been a goal of mine to have a dividend income that roughly matches our family’s annual expenses. I say *roughly*, because in any given year we might have a random irregular expense that causes us to overspend our cash generation a little.
(The purchase of a new car, an expensive family vacation, or repairing the roof on our home would be good examples of this)
This year, I’m going to be pretty close to that goal…
Read more
Raising kids isn’t easy under the best of conditions. Most of the parents I know work a 50+ hour work week. To deal with after school care, they enroll their kids in after-school programs, at considerable cost to themselves. It’s a kind of “two steps forward and one step back” situation that makes raising kids and saving money difficult.
The average family I see, only gets to spend nights and weekends together…
Read more
When it comes to cooking meals at home, absolutely no-one wants to cook a separate meal for the kids and a separate meal for adults. Yet adults often prefer bolder, spicier flavors with more exotic ingredients. Kids tend to enjoy simpler fare — carb heavy dishes with much milder flavors. At least my kids do — pizza, spaghetti, macaroni & cheese, sandwiches and so on.
It definitely puts smiles on their little faces, but I can only eat so much of it before I’m craving something more exciting…
Read more
Ah, spring is in the air! It means the kids are out-of-school on spring break… and that means I need to take my stay-at-home-dad duties a lot more seriously.
While many families choose to travel somewhere warm or exotic during spring break, we’re just hanging-out at home. Both of our boys can have a great time even if we don’t travel somewhere, and as I mentioned in a recent post, they don’t fly particularly well yet…
Read more
When you think about it, money is a pretty funny thing. For a couple thousand years humans used precious things to represent this idea of “money” — ivory, colorful shells, precious gems, livestock, silver, and most notably gold. This worked well for humanity for a very long time… as long as the values were small.
The general inconvenience of physically carrying a whole bunch of “precious stuff” eventually gave way to paper certificates…
Read more