By way of background, I am pretty new to the frugality / personal finance / early retirement blogging community. Not that the general principle of "spend less than you earn" had escaped me prior to finding this online community of writers, but my savings side of it has been...well...lame. Quite frankly, for the last several years, I've frittered away a lot of income that I could have been saving and investing on restaurants, trips, hobbies, clothes, etc. (A rather typical urban consumer, and pretty far from being a mustachian.) At the time, I felt fine about it because I always paid my CC's off each month. My husband, too, had a similar money mindset...while he was decent about staying out of debt (also paying off CC's each month), he also brought little by way of savings/investments into our marriage.
Some of our current numbers: Our non-mortgage debt is my $37.5 consolidated student loan from grad school (3.13% interest) and a $15k interest-free loan my husband received from his mother. We have 2 paid off cars and a mortgage. We also have 31.5K in an emergency/float fund, 2k in a sinking fund for car insurance, repairs, etc, and about $180k in retirement savings & investments. On the income side of things, I'm a partner in a small consulting firm but for all practical purposes, I run my own business and I have fluctuating income month-to-month as well as year-to-year (hence the float fund). Husband's income is stable.
Cut to some months ago, when I got pregnant and we realized that my income, in particular, was going to diminish significantly in 2012. To be conservative, I estimated my annual income would drop by 50% compared to my 2011 income, which was an unusually high income year.
It was this expected (and significant) contraction of our 2012 household income that forced us to really start looking seriously at our finances and we started talking about consulting a financial planner to help us figure out how to move forward. This is also what inspired me to start looking online for whatever I could find about money management.
I've since been devouring information from all kinds of sources, and as resident "CFO" in my marriage, I've been working hard to put together budgets and budget reports that will help us track everything we're doing. Luckily I had been using Quicken for all of 2011 so I had good data on where we spent our money. I've thus got a good handle on how/where we can reduce spending categories for 2012, and I feel confident we can make the numbers work this year to keep us out of further debt and keep funding H's retirement fund. I am willing to make the spending changes it will take to make that happen, though my husband has been more reluctant to embrace the reductions I've recommended.
I also expect 2012 to be an unusually low income year, so I'm optimistic that 2013 will see my income go up by at least 25% over 2012, if not return to 2011-like levels (due to some new income streams I am thinking of developing). This should both loosen the purse strings a bit for more "fun" but also enable us to pay off our non-mortgage debt.
So here's the question: for the last several months we have talked about meeting with an independent financial planner/advisor (one that is highly recommended by close friends of ours whom I know to be good money managers themselves), but now that I have spent so much time reading online, I am questioning whether we need that outside expertise. Is it anti-mustachian to spend money getting professional advice from a financial planner?
