Happy New Year! 2025 is complete and time continues to hold no meaning 🙂 . I’m writing this while watching snow fall on my idyllic little town. It’s quiet and beautiful here, which is a nice contrast to the festive madness that encompassed December. So let’s see what I got up to!
Continue reading “The Month Of Festive Cheer: December 2025 Recap”
This is only my second time writing a post like this. In retirement I’ve posted about my spending, my income and that’s basically it.
But I wanted a place to talk about my money moves in general and sum everything up for the year, so that’s what this new annual post is. So let’s look at my overall financial picture and see what the future holds!
Continue reading “2025 Financial Review: Investment Withdrawals, Dividends And The Future”
Somehow it’s been 11 years since I first typed words for this blog. That means that writing this blog has officially become my longest running hobby ever 🙂 . It’s the longest I’ve done anything actually – longer than my working career (9 years), longer than college (4 years) and way longer than my previous NaNoWriMo winning streak (2 years) before I boycotted them. Continue reading “Lessons Learned After 11 Years Of Blog Writing”
Throughout the year, I like to jot down new things I’ve learned, read, watched and experienced to try and remember what each year entailed. I then summarize all of that in my annual goals and accomplishments posts.
The goal of these posts is not just to curate what I’ve been up to, but also to document how I’ve changed from one year to the next and how I’ve grown as a person. I also like to give each year a theme in retrospect.
I wasn’t sure what this year’s theme would be but upon reflection, it became clear 🙂 . I’ve decided that 2025 has been The Year Of Settling Down(ish).
Continue reading “The Year Of Settling Down(ish): 2025 Goals & Accomplishments”
Something weird happened the other day that I want to talk about. As you probably know, from mid-2020 to mid-2025 I was a full-time traveler.
I didn’t have a homebase and moved across the US and the world every month. It was a lovely lifestyle that I really enjoyed because I was able to both settle into a location, and feel like a local with “my” coffee shop where people know me and my local chippy or grocery store.
Oops 🙂 . My spending goal for 2025 was $24,000 and I spent $35,950.70. As you can see – I went over budget. Way over budget, but that’s for a very good reason. So let’s get into it!
For years I’ve paid for Spotify Premium and used their service for hours every day. I’ve mentioned in my Annual Accomplishments posts how part of my weekly routine was to listen to the 1.5 hours of personalized music Spotify put out for me every Monday in Discover Weekly, and the 1.5 hour Release Radar they released every Friday. No longer 🙂 – and I’m better for it.
I left Spotify Premium this year and am now a happy customer of TIDAL. So let’s get into why I felt the need to change my music service and how it’s going. Continue reading “Review: TIDAL – A Better Spotify Alternative”
Let’s talk about something wild: the surprising amount of money I made in retirement this year. It’s surprising because I expected this amount to be $0 after I quit my job in October 2020, but like a lot of things in life, I was wrong 🙂 . So let’s get into it! Continue reading “How I Made $7,553 While Retired In 2025”