Calling all Fort Collins Area Mustachians!
The NoCo FI/RE Fighters are meeting on Sunday, May 21st at the Harmony Library in Community Room H from 2pm to 5pm.
https://www.meetup.com/NoCo-FIRE-Fighters/events/237157353/
- My wife, Ellen, will give a brief overview of our family's 3 months in Ecuador and introduce the FI website we've been working on during our time abroad.
- Ellen will share the results of the Airbnb experiment we've been conducting at our home while we've been away.
- I'll discuss Mint.com and Personal Capital and share some nuances to how Ellen and I implemented these tools.
- I'll give a walkthrough of the spreadsheet I developed to encourage us along our journey to financial independence.
The spreadsheet in question is a fairly low maintenance tool. When used in conjunction with Mint.com and Personal Capital, it can be kept current with about 5 minutes of effort each month or about 10 minutes each quarter if you prefer.
Some features of the spreadsheet include:
- Tracking your monthly income and expenses, including trailing 12 month averages
- Tracking your net worth over time, with or without your primary residence
- It produces a helpful Wall Chart (a slightly modernized adaptation of the Wall Chart found in Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin's book 'Your Money or Your Life')
- It produces a dashboard for reviewing net worth needed and your savings rate
- It projects your future net worth
- It provides a number of helpful tactical ratios to encourage your progress from month to month.
- It tracks your credit score over time
- It provides a monthly report for reflection and/or discussion
I plan to make the beta version of our spreadsheet freely available to any interested group members following the meeting because I'd love to get feedback from you all before we publish it.
I'm looking forward to seeing everyone again at the May meeting and hope to follow it up with some fun and frugal outdoor activities with everyone this summer.
- SSS aka Michael
NOTE: I updated the title of our Meetup group from 'Fort Collins Area FI/RE Fighters' to 'NoCo FI/RE Fighters'. While we started in Fort Collins, members have been attending our events from cities throughout Northern Colorado since our first meeting. Our admins live in Fort Collins, Evans, and Longmont and members have expressed interest in holding our Meetups in cities throughout the Front Range so I think NoCo is a better fit.