Hello. I found this blog through that big article, been reading through it all and loving it, now I want to start getting involved on here. I immediately related to the general philosophy, although I must say it never occured to me that early retirement could be such a possibility, even on my income.
I would say my biggest challenge with putting all of this into practice is that I was already doing a lot of it. My wife and I have never earned a lot of money (working mostly in education/ non profit fields) and we're frugal by nature which has made that work. Examples, just referring back to the "zero to hero" post:
-never even occurred to us to get cable
-cheap cars, no debt on them
-clamshell prepaid cell phone
-vacations mostly involve camping or staying with relatives or friends
-live close to work, ride bikes a lot
-renovated our garage and now rent it out to a friend as living space
I am going to try to start biking more, and I'm going to start putting some of the advice on grocery savings into practice. My question is, what other suggestions do people have for someone who more or less practices this philosophy instinctively?
Some details if they help:
I work full time doing sales and marketing for a retirement community. Great job, pay is decent. I take home about 2500 a month plus bonuses of up to 1000 a month. My wife works part time as a school librarian, takes home about 1700. Including the rent on the garage, that gives us a monthly income between 4500-5500 (after taxes, health insurance, 401k contribution). Mortgage/taxes/home insurance is about 1300, we make bimonthly automatic payments and kick in an extra 100 toward the principal, so 1400 there. Our daughter starts kindergarten this fall, so we'll be done paying for her preschool. We pay about 650 a month for a friend of ours to watch our five month old son when my wife is at work. I just signed up for mint to start tracking our food spending, I think its about 400-500 a month. Internet, electric, natural gas, trash, etc. add up to about another 250. So now that we're past the maternity leave we should be putting 1000 or so in savings each month, but it seems like that never quite happens.