LivingAlmostLarge's Personal Finance Blog

I'll start by breaking down our pretty boring path down savings lane. High income helped and it did increase a lot, but we do live in a very expensive area with lots of expenses. That'll be another day, another post.

Income let me explain that in 2000 when we met I had landed a job paying $25k and DH started out in graduate school making $18k. Yes we were living in sunny Southern California being pretty poor. Trust me our "rent" for a one bedroom was $900/month. I moved to LA and lived in bachelor apartment, apartment without a real stove or fridge for $750/month. Basically 2 stovetops, a microwave, and a bar fridge. So you can imagine $40k in CA is not $40k in Texas. Definitely below what you seriously needed to live well, thank god we were young and healthy and had health insurance. And we had car loans and student loans. We were young and in love. However since 2004 I can look at our joint tax returns and see some of the story.

2000 - $20k maybe?
2001 - $43k
2002 - $43k
2003 - $35k - I started graduate school at $20k salary
2004 - $39,562 - OMG maybe we didn't break $40k those years before!
2005 - $147,728 - company paid relocation taxable income
2006 - $111,289 - company benefits added to taxable income
2007 - $92,417
2008 - $106,390
2009 - $112,790
2010 - $143,487, single income had DK1
2011 -$172,303 - $25k Rollover IRA to Roth conversion
2012 -$196,459 - $25k Rollover IRA to Roth conversion, added DK2
2013 - $200,524

So yeah our income has gone up a lot, 5x what we made when I have my first pdf tax return. We've maxed out since 2006 DH 401k and two IRAs.

As you can see below starting when the market was terrible in 2006 it was not hard to see balances going up but going down since we were saving more than it went up. But we stayed the course period.

Savings - Retirement, Cash
2005- $6500, $13762
2006- $34,782, $23,296
2007- $67,785, $18,680
2008- $74,245, $4,441 - started paying MBA cash, considering we were adding $25k to retirement a year not including company match and it went up $6k...ugh
2009- $117,055, $4,798 - also not really tracking our cash in EF/taxable accounts until 2012
2010- $196,398, $5,060
2011- $232,534, $3,968
2012 - $302,841, $90,924 - started tracking better
2013 January - $396,055, $74,496
2014 January - $439,650, $218,816

Have you changed our spending? Not really. But we did start really making steep savings. Our mortgage is another topic for another day.

I guess I'll try this for a couple months before really getting going on a full on blog again. I used to blog about finances but time constraints and my total inability to figure out how to code stopped me. But where to start?

Perhaps by saying I never considered early retirement or financial independence until January of 2014. Though my DH and I have been long term Living Below Yours Means (LBYM) people, it still never occurred to either of us. To us we were to live frugally, save, and then raise our heads at 55 and determine if we could retire like our parents.

It's never occurred to us to accrue debt, spend more than we can pay on the CC, and not save the maximum. We've never really grown into our incomes. When we got our first jobs the only question was "what's the maximum allowed to save?" And that would be the first line item and everything else would fall into line.

Our lifestyle has always been determined by savings first then everything else like a puzzle we fit together. We aren't line item budgeters. We aren't tracking every penny people, rather we're pay yourself first people then spend. And our pay ourselves first has been all savings at the maximum then we have to figure out to live on the rest. Even if the rest is pennies.

And I will admit our income has increased a lot. I will have to go back and see perhaps the next post.