Sunday, February 23, 2020

A Little Past Financial Independence

Before we dive in to this week's post, I wanted to mention that I was a guest on one of my favorite podcasts last week: Jamila Souffrant's Journey to Launch.

I've been listening to Jamila's podcast for while and it was such a cool, surreal experience to get to chat with her. (Though like everyone else, I hate the sound of my voice, so I had to listen to the episode in five minute chunks before hitting pause and berating myself for sounding the way I do, and for letting inane thoughts fall out of my piehole.)

Jamila and I talk about financial independence (what else?), specifically digging in to whether financial independence is possible for everyone and anyone, education, debt, and a lot more.

Here is the link to the episode. And if you're not listening to Jamila's show yet, go ahead and add it to your podcast rotation. You won't be sorry.

And now back to our regularly scheduled program.

Monday, February 17, 2020

Maybe We Won’t Retire Just Yet?

Mrs. Done by Forty and I have always been planners. Early on in our relationship, we created a New Year's Day tradition of going to The Olive Garden and planning out the upcoming year over salad and breadsticks.

The restaurant has changed but the routine is the same: we both bring our notebooks, we ask for a booth, we eat too much, and just talk about everything that we think would be cool to do with this one big life we’re making together. By the end of the meal, we have a few pages of things we both will try to make happen: travel, work goals, money goals, family goals, all of it.

Monday, February 3, 2020

Middle Class Wealth - 2020 Update

When I saw CBS's video on how America's wealth was divided between quintiles, the five groupings that each hold 20% of all households, I remembered that it had been over five years since I'd written a post outlining how much wealth each quintile had.

How had things changed?

Unfortunately, the Census Bureau stopped providing wealth data in a quintile format right after I'd written that post in 2015.

So without access to the raw data for future years (and let's be honest, I'm no data scientist so I'm not sure what good I could do even if I had those figures) I just was not going to be able to provide the same breakdown from the Census Bureau's data.