Tapping Into My Inner Frugalista

When I wrote the other day about financial independence and our retirement planning, I mentioned our plan to become more conscious of our spending and, thus, to hopefully make a transition to spending less and being happier with what we have.

To that end, we've been writing down what we've spent money on this week and...whew!...what an eye opener.

Financial books often tout this as a first step toward fiscal understanding.  Boy, can I see why now.

I'm currently reading a recently purchased book which has turned out to be something of a catalyst for me: Suddenly Frugal: How to Live Happier and Healthier for Less. We could not have picked this book up at a better time, honestly, and I'm enjoying the read if not deciding that some of the tips in it will work well for us and some will never, ever fly.

But that's all part of the learning curve, isn't it?  As is this spending log.

Just like with dieting and keeping a "food log" so that you can calculate calories, keeping a spending log works on the same principle and makes you infinitely more conscious of how you spend your dollars.  Or how you don't spend them.

For my spending log, I'm using an old mini-notebook that got bought years ago and never used, that I found in one of my desk drawers.

Lesson one?  I buy a lot of crap that I don't immediately need -- especially something that I find on sale and because it's a good price, I think of it as spending money to save money and then never find a use for whatever it is I've bought -- and I need to stop it.

The Quest For Financial Independence

Mr. ReddHedd and I have been talking a lot about financial independence lately.

As we age, contemplating what is needed for retirement comfort is a more and more prevalent topic of conversation at our house.  Which is probably a normal, albeit slightly morbid, consequence of getting a few more gray hairs.

There is a quote from Mr. Micawber in David Copperfield that sums things up nicely:

Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.

Part of our strategy is to sock away as much as we can afford in our 401(k), Roth IRAs and the like as well as paying down every bit of debt we can possibly pay down as quickly as we possibly can. (Those student loans take a while, don't they?)

But haven't we all learned the lesson that no matter how much you plan in terms of investment, the stock market doesn't always play along with what you want from it?