Q1 Budget Check-In 2018

I understand that time moves faster the older you get, but HOW is the year 25% done?! I feel like it’s crawling and then look at the date and feel like it’s flying by. Fascinating. I wanted to check in on my goal to decrease my spending from $18,436.60 last year by $436.60 to a solid $18,000 this year. Let’s see how it’s going.

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2017 Spending

2017 is at an end. Let’s see how I did with my goal to decrease my spending $4,491.86 from $22,491.86 last year to $18,000. Reaching this goal would prove to me that I can live on $18,000 in retirement though I’m budgeting to withdraw $20,000. The $2,000 buffer would be used for additional healthcare expenses and unexpected costs. 10% of my retirement budget would be a buffer. This safety nets make me feel like I have a warm security blanket wrapped around me. So let’s see how I did!

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Q1 Budget Check-In 2017

Oooh maybe I should get another ledger like this.. And yes I’m that girl that always gets an itemized receipt 🙂

It’s 3 months into 2017 and we’re already 1/4 done with the year. Woah…that was fast. I wanted to check in on my goal to decrease my spending from $22,491.86 last year by $4,491.86 to $18,000 this year. Let’s see how it’s going:

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My 10 Year Plan

Based on my end goal of financial freedom I’ve accumulated information from various books, blogs and traditional retirement calculators to determine how much I need to save to be able to live off of indefinitely. Overall I’m basing my calculations on the updated Trinity Study from 2009 that reinforces the 4% safe withdrawal rate for investments with a 75% stock, 25% bond asset allocation even when adjusting for inflation every year. Mr. Money Mustache makes a lot of excellent points about how this study in itself even builds in a large safety margin by assuming that a person would not adjust spending to account for economic reality, such as a recession, or substitute goods to compensate for the inflation of an individual item.

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