To Pepper

That's Pepper. Yesterday, I got up early to take her to the vet for dental work. Her breath had gotten bad lately and our regular teeth brushing didn't seem to be helping. On a prior visit, the clinic's doctor explained they might need to extract a tooth or two depending on the x-rays. We brought her in on Tuesday morning, and the vet would call us when it was time to pick her up. But when they called, they told us she passed away after they gave her anesthesia. The doctor gave her epinephrine and performed CPR for over half an hour, but none of that worked.

Are We on Track to Retire by Forty?

It's my birthday later this month, my thirty sixth. This month is my annual reminder to do a lot of things I usually don't care to think about, but still have to do. Note to self: remember to eat a bunch of cake while your friends and loved ones sing for you, pay for your life insurance policy, take a look at that beer belly and make some fitness goals, and check in on this plan to retire by the time you're forty.

Our early retirement goal is a scant four years from now, which on top of putting some real pressure on us to kick our savings into gear, is just plain old depressing since, you know, I'm going to be forty dang years old.

To the kids reading this, that whole YOLO thing has some legs. Get out there and live life while you're young and mistakes are encouraged.

What Happens When Humans Need Not Apply?

Last week we wrote about our trip to Africa which, given the state of affairs, was perhaps a little too upbeat and cheery. Life isn't all vacations and new experiences. Life is work, and disappointment, and setbacks, and sometimes dealing with hardship. Especially the kind of upcoming hardships that CGP Grey talks about in depressing-but-fast-paced-and-somehow-still-entertaining videos.

In case you hadn't heard, automation is coming for us...and probably not the kind of automation you're used to, either.

Our Trip to Africa

One of our not-so-secret goals is to visit six of seven continents before we start a family. I assume that as soon as we have babies, that our international travel will change dramatically, if not go on a multi-year hiatus altogether.

Stupid babies, they ruin everything.

So far we've been able to visit a lot of North America (layup!), South America a few times, a few trips to Europe, and, as of last month, Africa. Here's a little breakdown of where we went and what we did, with a couple travel hack tips, to boot.

Mortgages, Student Loans, and Good Debt

Like so many other personal finance nerds, I've spent the last week digging in to JL Collins' new book, The Simple Path to Wealth. I'll spare you another positive review trying to convince you of its merits, or why you should buy it. Not my job, pal.

If you're too cheap to spend eleven bucks on the one book that will finally make you rich and happy, then don't come crying to me in six months when you find yourself destitute, friendless, eating cold pork-n-beans out of a can at the public library, and creeping everyone out.

These are your choices, Bean Can McGee. You just have to live with the consequences.

Oops, We Have a Mortgage Again

That's the title of our terrible Brittany Spears spoof. But it's true, kind of. After aggressively paying off the mortgage on our primary residence a mere three years after buying our first home, mostly thanks to Dave Ramsey and his crazy baby step number six, we're now in the process of a cash-out refi and tapping that equity, so we can end up right back where we started with a one hundred thousand dollar mortgage.

No one ever said we knew what we were doing with money.

When a Million Ain't Enough

We're back home, readers. After three and a half glorious weeks on the circumference of Africa, and a few sweet hours on the edge of Europe in Lisbon, we are finally back with our lovable pups in our cute little house in the god-forsaken heat that is the Arizona summer. While we were away though, I finally got back into writing a bit, and reading your blogs, too. It's been a while.

I recently read something great on Garth Turner's "Greater Fool". Garth featured the young and annoyingly successful Millennial Revolution writers, who had the audacity to retire at 31 in true Mustachian fashion. Thirty freaking one. Nothing like seeing your younger compatriots do better than you to make your own goal of leaving the workforce by forty seem lame.

Did We Just Walk into a Child Labor Shop?

We were at the end of a too-long tour of Cairo, starting with the Giza Pyramids, then driving out of town to Memphis to see the original capital of Egypt, then off to Sakkara to see the very first pyramids on earth, that are somehow still standing after nearly five thousand years.

We were heading home when our guide mentioned we could go to a rug-making school, where children learn how to weave, a worthwhile skill in a place so stricken by poverty. And we could look at their handy-work and maybe buy a little something if we wanted.

Budget Porn: Our 2015 Spending

In the halcyon days of 2012, when this blog was bright eyed, and idealistic, we wrote net worth and budget posts every month. They were my favorite, as the posts basically wrote themselves. I just cut and pasted an image out of my budget spreadsheet, talked about the categories we did well in and where we did poorly, and poof, all of a sudden I had eight hundred words on truly personal finance: my personal finances. Eventually, when people we knew in real life started reading the blog, we took all those posts down, along with any others that crossed the line into the gauche. It felt weird that some friends and family knew our exact net worth or how much we spent on groceries and medical care.