Friday, March 30, 2007

Amazon's Friday Sale

I just learned from Boston Gal that Amazon.com has a weekly Friday blowout sale with amazing discounts. While I am trying to curb my online spending, Amazon.com does remain one of my favorite retailers and would probably be my first stop regardless of what I needed to purchase. So if there is anything you absolutely need to purchase, you should wait until a Friday and head over to Amazon.com to see if you can get it on the cheap!

Roth IRA Contribution

I got my April paycheck from my college a couple of days early today, so I went ahead and made my contributions to my Roth IRA and my emergency fund this afternoon. It looked like I would be able to set aside $600.00 this time around, so I put $300.00 into my Roth IRA and $300.00 into my emergency fund (which is moonlighting as my summer savings fund since my summer income will be somewhat questionable this year). I decided to add a a dividend ETF to my Roth IRA portfolio, too, so I'll be excited for my automatic investment plan to go through in the next week or so. I may have to wait until the second week in April to invest the funds I just deposited, though, since I'm not sure if Sharebuilder will receive them before the set-up deadline for the first Tuesday in April. No big deal, as I'm happy to let my $300 sit in the money market fund for a few days collecting money market dividends before it gets invested into my ETFs.

Speaking of dividends, I decided to go with the Powershares High Yield Dividend Achievers ETF (PEY) rather than the iShares Dow Jones Select Dividend ETF (DVY) for my portfolio. I didn't have very deep reasons for this, other than that the stocks that make up the PEY fund have a longer track record of increased dividends than the stocks that make up the DVY fund. Plus, PEY pays a monthly dividend rather than a quarterly one. I like the faster compounding of the monthly dividends, and I like being able to watch that compounding in action monthly rather than having to wait three months between each dividend payment. It will curb my urge to tinker with my portfolio unnecessarily!

One last piece of good news: my wife had her telephone interview for the merchant-in-training job in Ohio this past Monday, and she got a phone call today inviting her out to Columbus in mid-April for the second-round interview. Take a look at the rental prices in the Columbus area and you will see why we are excited about the prospect: Columbus, Ohio apartments; not to mention the home prices in Columbus, Ohio! So keep your fingers crossed!

Wednesday, March 28, 2007

J.R. Ewing

"Bobby, the price of oil is never comin' down." - J.R. Ewing, Dallas 1979-80.








I don't think I will ever quite purge myself of the desire to be a big Texas oilman like J.R. Ewing! Seriously, though, my wife and I have been watching Dallas on DVD for the past year or so, so I officially know the answer to that age-old question: "Who shot J.R.?" (It was Kristin, by the way.) I'm not sure that Dallas had any real redeeming value as an investing guide, though, other than the somewhat tautologous claim above that the price of oil is always going up.

Investment Metaphor #2: Fractals

Second in my series on investment metaphors are fractals. According to Wikipedia, a fractal can be defined as "a rough or fragmented geometrical shape that can be subdivided in parts, each of which...is a reduced-size copy of the whole." It occured to me that this might very well be an excellent way of decribing the ups and downs of the stock market over various period of time. A quick Google search on the issue yielded the following site: Elliott Fractals. The site attempts to use the fractal paradigm as a benchmark for stock market analysis (see image below).

While this approach provides an interesting take on stock market analysis, I actually have a much simpler metaphor in mind for fractals' relation to investing: fractals are boring and repetative. Each notch down or up in scale yields a copy of the original figure. While fractals are endlessly complex, they are also amazingly uninteresting for this very reason. Stock market analysis can be similarly complex, as Elliott Fractals illustrates. But this has little to no impact on a solid long-term investment strategy, which can be equally as repetative and boring as a fractal. But that endless repitition of investing and compounding yields amazing results in the long-term. So while fractal stock analysis might be the latest craze in complex market analysis strategies, don't get lost in the details of the equations; embrace the repetitiveness of habitual investing and you won't be sorry.

IWM Dividend: Small Change....For Now

My Russell 2000 ETF (IWM) is paying a $0.15/share dividend tomorrow. I currently own 4.1689 shares of IWM, so I will receive approximately $0.63 in additional fractional shares of IWM as soon as Sharebuilder credits the dividend to my account. At an approximate price of $79.22/share, this would give me an additional 0.0079 shares of IWM, upping my total number of shares to 4.1768. While this certainly isn't a large sum (in fact I might describe it as small change), it is fun to think about how much return that $0.63 will yield over the next thirty years. Plus payday is coming up, so I am looking forward to making my Roth IRA contribution here in a couple of days. I'm still wrestling with the idea of adding one of the dividend ETFs into my portfolio in addition to my holdings in SPY, IWM, and EFA. If anyone has any thoughts on this question, please post them in the comments. I'd apppreciate the guidance here. Thanks.

Tuesday, March 27, 2007

Investment Metaphor #1: Cane Toads

I am beginning a new series on investment metaphors: non-economic examples of the power of compounding in action. First in this series is the population of Cane Toads in Australia. In June of 1935, a mere 102 non-native Cane Toads were introduced to Australia to control the destructive Cane Beetle. Today the number of poisonous Cane Toads is over 200 million, and the toads are having a serious environmental impact on many species native to Australia. The graphic above, representing the spread of Cane Toads from 1940 through 1980, is an excellent visual representation of the power of compounding. Of course, the impact of your investments, unlike that of the toads, will be mainly positive! It's easy to be too short-sighted in investing, just like those who introduced the Cane Toad to Australia. Keep an eye on the long term, folks, and trust your long-term strategy! Remember the toads!

New Domain: SeeMeGetRich.com

Yahoo! Small BusinessIt's official! "See Me Get Rich" now has its very own domain: www.seemegetrich.com. It was very easy to get the blog switched over to the new domain, which was purchased through Yahoo Small Business Domains very cheaply. No offense to Blogspot, but www.seemegetrich.com looks much more professional than seemegetrich.blogspot.com! If you are a Blogspot blogger, try giving Yahoo Domains a try by clicking on the link inside this post. The small monthly fee for the domain is money well spent to keep your blog looking professional!

Monday, March 26, 2007

My First Stock Purchase: Advantage Energy Income Fund

When I first decided to open up an investment account back in mid-January, I had no idea what I was doing (understatement). As I described in a previous post, I had decided to go with Sharebuilder.com due to their dividend reinvestment option and because of their relatively low fees (which are actually high compared to what I could get if I had a larger initial investment, but I had to start small). The only downside to Sharebuilder is that in order to achieve those low fees you must restrict yourself to making purchases through an automatic investment plan that allows you to place trade orders only on Tuesdays. If memory serves I opened my account on a Thursday, and I simply couldn't wait to make my first stock purchase until then. Now Sharebuilder also offers real-time trades for $15.95/trade, so I decided to give into temptation and place a real-time order for my first stock! Sixteen dollars is a huge chunk out of the $100 or so that I initially funded the account with, but I didn't care at the time. I was just so proud of myself for having the wherewithal to invest my money rather than blow it on junk food or DVDs. So that was my very first stock purchasing lesson: try to avoid outrageous fees. They can take a pretty big bite out of your investments if you are not careful.

So how about that first purchase? Like I said, I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. I hadn't learned about Exchange Traded Funds yet, so I was just looking at individual stocks. I did know that dividends were a good thing, though, so (foolishly) I figured I would buy the stock that paid the biggest dividend possible. Now this is a mistake because companies cannot usually sustain outrageously high dividends for long without seeing their share price come tumbling down also. But I didn't know that at the time; I was an excited investor! So I stumbled upon Advantage Energy Income Fund, which had been paying out a dividend of 14-17% annually or so (about the most that is sustainable is usually 4%). I purchased eight shares exactly for a total of $108.31, including the $15.95 real-time trading fee. Over the next month, the stock price dropped steadily from $10.80/share to $9.80/share, adding an additional $8.00 to my total losses!

There is a light at the end of the tunnel for this one, though. The stock price is nearly back up to its original amount, despite the outrageously huge dividends. Speaking of which, I recently received my first dividend payment for this holding, which was automatically reinvested into additional fractional shares of AAV. I now own exactly 8.088 shares of Advantage Energy Income Fund, which might seem like small change; but over time, even this lemon of a purchase might serve me well if I keep reinvesting the dividends.

Why not just sell it off and start over? Well, Sharebuilder is designed for the long-term investor, so they purposefully make it expensive for you to sell off your holdings to encourage a buy-and-hold investing strategy rather than a day-trading strategy. Hence the fee to sell my 8.088 shares of AAV would be an additional $15.95. So it looks like I'm stuck holding my AAV until I can transfer my investments to a brokerage with lower fees once I have enough invested to meet a higher account minimum. I'm not sure I'm ready to give up on my AAV altogether, though. $9.80 was its lowest price in years, so maybe, just maybe, it will have a moderate upswing. In the meantime it is quite fun watching the monthly dividend payments (yes, AAV pays monthly dividends) get reinvested and watching the number of shares that I own increase. But now that I know better, I am sticking to my ETF portfolio I decribed below!

Great Library Sell-Off Update

Here is an update on my book selling progress on the Amazon.com Marketplace:

Items Sold: 41
Gross Revenue: $456.24
Net Revenue: approx. $330.00 after shipping costs

Used bookstore sales: approx. $300.00

Not too bad for a single month of online selling. Of course, I probably paid well over $1200.00 for those books originally. That aside, though, I am still rather proud of myself and my ability to overcome my pack rat urges for the sake of my finances. There are many more books I have here in my apartment to sell and even more in storage up in my hometown, so I'm looking forward to another strong month of book selling to jump start my summer savings (I'm calling this my "Summer Slush Fund") and my long-term investments.

Keeping Money In Perspective


Despite the optimistic tone of this blog and despite my lofty monetary goals, money will never be the main focus of my life. Money is a great tool; it can make many areas of life much easier and even allow you to pursue the things that really do matter in life. But money should never be thought of as an End-in-Itself, to borrow a phrase from Immanuel Kant. I can easily think of a dozen things that are more important to me than money alone, and money only has meaning insofar as it facilitates my pursuit of those things: my relationship with my wife, my relationship with God, my relationships with friends and family, finishing my Ph.D., growing in and learning about my various interests and hobbies, etc.

One thought on keeping money in perspective: for someone like me, who is a Christian trying to find the right balance between God, Others, and Self, this question is an important one to always keep in mind. Probably every single personal finance blog on the internet will contain some post about "paying yourself first" in order to retire wealthy. While this is a perfectly fine mantra for remembering to invest rather than spending 100% of your income, it doesn't really recognize the hierarchy of priorities that lead to a healthy lifestyle. As a Christian, my first responsibility is my relationship with God. I am certainly far from perfect in this respect, but it is my goal never to let money interfere with my humility and reverence in God's presence. Second in line, and first if you are not religious, should be others; friends, family, compassion for the needy, etc. Only when these concerns are met with do I believe that one is justified in considering himself of any import.

A final thought regarding how to support yourself with integrity and still place priority on others over self: If you take care of yourself adequately through sound personal finance, you will be in a much better position to take care of others. Whether it is supporting your elders when they cannot support themselves, supporting your own immediate family, or making charitable contributions that make a positive and significant impact on the world, if you have your own financial house in order then you will be better able to make a positive contribution to the lives of others. How to walk the line between supporting yourself financially and prioritizing others in day to day life will be up to each person and his/her own conscience. But I believe it to be possible to invest for your own future and to do so with integrity and with a healthy sense of one's priorities in life. Just remember that money is just an object and is never something to be loved or worshiped. Add in a proper sense of selflessness and you will go a long way towards having a healthy lifestyle that respects the proper ordering of your relationships and priorities and keeps money in its proper perspective.

Note: Thanks to a fellow blogger at Free Money Finance for similar reflections on this issue.

To Dividend Or Not To Dividend?

I have been considering adding one of the two major dividend ETFs (DVY or PEY) to my IRA portfolio. While the higher dividend yields usually result in lower appreciation of the price of the fund, the dividends can be reinvested automatically through my online brokerage, Sharebuilder.com. Dividend reinvesting is part of the magic of compounding and making your money multiply.

Suppose for example that you had 100 shares of a stock worth $10.00/share for a total of $1000.00. If the stock then paid out a $0.50/share dividend for a total of $50.00, your account would then be worth $1050.00 and you would own 105 shares. If the stock paid out another $0.50/share dividend you would then receive $52.50 and your balance would be worth $1102.50 and you would own 110.25 shares. Just for kicks, I thought I would go ahead and calculate the dividends over the next three years so you can get an idea of the power of dividends. Also keep in mind how this would grow exponentially over thirty years rather than three!

Initial Investment: 100 shares @ $10.00/share = $1000.00
Quarter 1: 105 shares @ $10.00/share = $1050.00
Quarter 2: 110.25 shares @ $10.00/share = $1102.50
Quarter 3: 115.76 shares @ $10.00/share = $1157.63
Quarter 4: 121.16 shares @ $10.00/share = $1215.51
Quarter 5: 127.61 shares @ $10.00/share = $1276.09
Quarter 6: 134.00 shares @ $10.00/share = $1339.90
Quarter 7: 140.70 shares @ $10.00/share = $1406.90
Quarter 8: 147.73 shares @ $10.00/share = $1477.25
Quarter 9: 155.11 shares @ $10.00/share = $1551.12
Quarter 10: 162.87 shares @ $10.00/share = $1628.68
Quarter 11: 171.01 shares @ $10.00/share = $1710.12
Quarter 12: 179.56 shares @ $10.00/share = $1795.63

Pretty impressive for a three year period, I'd say! Now of course, this is a purely hypothetical exercise (with some admittedly exaggerated percentages); but the point should be clear: good dividends plus dividend reinvestment equals exponential gains! Now this example also assumes that the share price remains constant. In actuality, in the long run a dividend ETF's share price should actually increase, thereby yielding even greater returns yet. The returns might not be as great as relying on funds that make use of capital appreciation alone, but there is something appealing about relying on good old fashioned compounding to grow your money. Like I said, imagine this over thirty years and also with additional shares being purchased from every paycheck! Powerful stuff!

Have I just convinced myself to add a dividend fund to my ETF portfolio in addition to the trifecta of ETFs I already own? We'll see how inspired I am next week when I set up my next automatic investment.

Sunday, March 25, 2007

Roth IRA: My ETF Portfolio

One of the biggest barriers to the beginning investor is the mistaken impression that investing is complicated. One glance at CNBC at midday is enough to make your head spin. It would be very easy to give up on the idea of investing in the stock market altogether and run to a more conservative and less risky place to store your pennies. It was partly this and partly sheer laziness that kept me from investing in the market until recently. But now that I have taken the proverbial plunge, I see that many of the fears and misconceptions I had about investing were just that: misconceptions. I have found investing in the market to be quite easy after a very modest amount of research into what investments would suit my situation as a twenty-something investor with 30+ years for the investments to grow.

One of the first lessons I learned was that if you have this many years until your retirement, you want your investments to be mainly in stocks rather than bonds. Although bonds are less risky than stocks, the average return on stocks is much greater than that of bonds in the long term. Over thirty years, you have enough time to ride out the ebbs and flows of normal market swings. Even a major recession can be successfully dealt with as long as you are persistent enough to ride out the rough periods in the market. So the first decision I made was to have a portfolio that consisted entirely of stocks, given that I would not likely be retiring this side of the year 2040.

The next lesson I learned was that I needed to pay attention to how my portfolio was diversified. I had in mind a complicated process of wading through stock reports and prospectuses, trying to find the perfect mix that would assure me decent returns while at the same time minimizing risk. Enter the ETF (Exchange Traded Fund). An ETF is a fund that consists of holdings of various stocks, which is then broken into shares and traded on the stock exchange. Usually ETFs are tied to stock indices such as the S&P 500 Index, which means that most ETFs are already diversified due to the variety in stocks that make up the fund. The long and short of this is that by buying shares of an ETF, you are buying securities that are inherently diversified without all that complicated research I was initially worried about. So I decided upon a portfolio that would be comprised mainly or entirely of ETFs. The only question remaining was: which ETFs do I choose to buy and in what proportions?

Rather than quibble over which ratios would be best for my new Roth IRA, I decided that it was most important for me to get into the habit of saving and investing regularly so I could finally end this paycheck-to-paycheck nightmare in which I have been living for a decade. With that in mind, I wanted a simple and easy portfolio that may not be what my fellow Blogger Ramit would call "Sexy," but would do the job of building our nest egg for retirement. What I discovered was that a very basic portfolio would have decent exposure to at least three areas: a broad market large cap index such as the S&P 500 Index (larger more reliable companies with steady growth), a small cap index such as the Russell 2000 Index (smaller companies with more room for growth), and some foreign stock exposure (due to the increasing globalization of the economy and the resulting higher chance for growth). While doing my research, I found many, many sample portfolios consisting mainly of these three areas, with the only differences being how to properly allocate between them.

Of course, there were more complicated portfolios out there; but I wanted to keep things simple and boring rather than complicated and sexy. So I decided to take the simplest route I could think of, which was to weight each of these three areas equally in my portfolio. That way whenever I wanted to make a contribution to my IRA, all I had to do was divide the contribution into thirds and buy the three funds accordingly. So here is the portfolio I ended up with (along with my current holdings):

SPY (S&P 500 Index ETF): 2.3042 shares @ $143.39/share = $330.40
IWM (Russell 2000 Index ETF): 4.1689 shares @ $80.24/share = $334.51
EFA (International Stock Index): 4.4271 shares @ $76.50/share = $338.67

Not bad considering I have only been at this about two months! This portfolio should return somewhere between 7 and 10 percent annually, which makes for significant growth over 30 years! I have made a commitment to myself to contribute at least 10% of my income to this retirement account, so I will be keeping this blog updated with monthly or semi monthly progress reports so I can track my progress. After playing around with a compound interest calculator, I calculated that I could end up with $1.3 million by the time I retire if I continue to invest at the present rate and assuming an average return of 10% annually (which should be no problem given the stock market's historical performance). If you haven't already done so, try playing around with the compound interest calculator. Most people have a vague idea about compounding and the power it has to grow your money, but it is another thing altogether to play with the numbers and visualize yourself with a huge amount of capital that is entirely within your grasp if you start early and invest consistently for the long term. Go ahead and play with the link above; it completely changed the way I think about money and hopefully will for you as well.

Your Credit Report


Get Equifax Score Power
If you haven't done so recently, you should get a copy of your credit report to make sure that you know exactly how much you owe and to whom. The issue of identity theft aside, you should check to make sure the report is complete and accurate. I recently got a copy of my free annual credit report, only to discover that the Radio Shack credit card that I thought was paid off was in fact charged off as bad debt. I am afraid to know how this has impacted my credit score, but at least now I know whom to track down to get it taken care of. There are two ways to go about getting your credit report. You can click over to Annualcreditreport.com to get your free annual credit report. Or for the more cautious-minded readers out there who are worried about identity theft, you can click on the banner inside this post above to sign up for Equifax's premium credit report monitoring service. Whichever way you go, it's your credit score so don't lose track of it!

I Trade (i.e. Invest), Therefore I Am

No offense to Rene Descartes, but this is a much better mantra for surviving in today's world and actually having some hope of a decent retirement. No one is a bigger fan of abstract thought than I am, but Aristotle may have been right in his quest for practical wisdom over mere abstractions.

Now if it only said "I invest, therefore I am." rather than "I trade, therefore I am." it would be just about right. Or didn't you know that trading and investing are not the same thing? My goal is to get rich in the long term, buying securities and holding them for many years at a time. On this time frame, minor fluctuations in the stock market such as the drop a couple weeks ago are meaningless other than a chance to buy your favorite investments on the cheap. Day trading is a chance to lose one's shirt (hopefully not the spiffy one above), and in this I am simply not interested.

Bay Area, CA to Columbus, OH

On Monday my wife is having a first round telephone interview for a Merchant-In-Training position at her company's corporate office in Columbus, OH. While the idea of leaving California again is a little scary to me, since everyone I know and love is basically in California, Ohio does hold one significant carrot out in front of me: the cost of living. Just for kicks I decided to do a cost of living comparison using CNN's Cost of Living Calculator. Here are the results:

Salary in San Francisco CA: $84,000
Comparable salary in Columbus OH: $50,687.94

If you move from San Francisco CA to Columbus OH...

Groceries will cost: 31.663% less
Housing will cost: 63.584% less
Utilities will cost: 31.186% more
Transportation will cost: 14.965% less
Healthcare will cost: 15.863% less

Our rent in the bay area is astronomical. We are paying $1,450 per month for a small two bedroom apartment. Sure, we're close to the beach, but we are still barely scraping by a good deal of the time. So while Ohio sounds a good deal more lonely than California, perhaps it's time to suck it up, bite the bullet, and make a sound financial decision that will significantly help us get our feet back on the ground. If anyone has any thoughts on Ohio in general or Columbus in particular, please fire away in the comments! And keep your fingers crossed for my wife's interview tomorrow; this is a job she really wants.

Zachary's-Great-Library-Sell-Off

Those who know me know that I have a passion for books. In fact, part of the reason I have a multi-thousand dollar credit card balance with Citibank is that I discovered credit cards and Amazon.com at approximately the same time. Needless to say, for me this was a dangerous combination!

So in order to generate some more cash to get me through the financial autumn of the summer, I have decided to purge my library of anything that I haven't looked at in a few years and don't plan on returning to anytime soon. I have already made over $400 using Amazon Marketplace. It is painful to sell some of the books that have gotten me where I am; particularly the philosophy books that I had while in college at Sonoma State. But most of those books I never use as a college instructor. I find myself worried more about which introductory textbook to use than about pouring through original texts these days. But since we are thinking of moving out of state in the not-too-distant future for the cheaper cost of living, this seemed like a good time to begin Zachary's-Great-Library-Sell-Off.

On a more general note, it is amazing how much stuff you can collect through ordinary, everyday foolish spending. I have always been a sort of pack rat, but I was looking through my checking account statement a few months back and realizing just how large a percentage of my paycheck I devoted to buying mere stuff. So I have decided to curb my spending and try to pare my belongings down to a still hefty but more essential list of items. If you, too, are feeling overwhelmed both by the financial hardship of being a pack rat and by the practical problem of where to store all your junk, try doing a similar sell-off to raise some extra cash and work towards a simpler existence. Here are a couple of places that I have had good luck with so far in terms of selling off my belongings and making a decent chunk of change:

www.ebay.com

Amazon.com Marketplace

Baseline Net Worth

As promised, here is my baseline net worth and all of my current debt/investments:

Debt:

Nelnet Student Loans: $14,700
Direct SVC Student Loans: $20,110
Sears Credit Card: $356
Radio Shack Credit Card: $645
Citibank Credit Card (interest waived payment plan): $3,500

Total: $39,311


Investments:

University DCP Savings Plan: 782.46
Sharebuilder Roth IRA: $1,115.63
Sharebuilder Taxable Account: $687.97

Total: $2586.06


Not a bad start, but you can see that I have a long ways to go!

Saturday, March 24, 2007

Welcome

Welcome to my new blog. I have never really been much of a blogger before, but I was inspired by a couple now-fellow bloggers, such as Ramit at www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com, to join the blogging ranks. Having recently begun investing and trying to get my finances in order, I decided to start this blog to help keep myself accountable as I begin the long process of working towards financial freedom.

My name is Zachary and I am a community college philosophy instructor and graduate student, desperately trying to finish my Ph.D. I have lived on California's central coast for five years now, and have faced many a financial challenge since moving here. On top of living in one of the most expensive counties in California (one of the most expensive states in the nation), within the past five years I have gotten married, moved twice, taken out moderate student loans, and been a foolish spender. After realizing that my wife and I would be considered upper-middle class according to our annual income, but that we had nothing left over at the end of the year to show for it, I decided to get our finances in order and to start saving and investing for the future.

I spent my winter break from grad school and from my college researching how to get started in investing, something which I have been intending to do for simply years. My inspiration for investing comes mainly from my uncle, who worked for over 25 years at Anheuser-Busch and recently retired very well due to his company's 401k. He had been urging me to get started investing while I was still young (actually it was more like, "Zachary, don't be stupid; start a retirement account NOW!"), but I was some combination of too lazy and too foolish to get started until now. So after researching online brokers, I decided to open up a Roth IRA through Sharebuilder.com because of their easy system of automatic investing via automatic checking account withdrawals.

As I was saying, I spent my winter break researching investment strategies and finally settled upon a portfolio comprised of ETF's (Exchange Traded Funds, which are similar to mutual funds but are bought and sold as shares on the stock market and which track major stock indices). I am putting away at least 10% of my income into this account in addition to the 10% of my income that is automatically deducted from my paycheck at the university into a 403b retirement account. This places my savings at approximately 20% of my income, which should do very nicely in building our nest egg for the future. I have had a hard time finding enough teaching work, though, to support myself through the summer and next fall; so I am working fast to build a summer savings fund to pay the rent and bills through the summer. I will probably have to take a part-time job during the summer to get us through.

This blog will be very helpful in recording and tracking my progress. I will be posting some of my specific goals and a baseline status report of my current debt and investments. I am looking forward to watching the debt decrease and the investments multiply, despite the financial challenges of living in such an expensive state.

Thanks for stopping by! Much more to come very soon!