Blog Posts
I automatically think, “Of course, a cash-out refinance is a bad idea!” And with our aggressive goal to pay off the house as soon as possible, this is something that would never cross my mind. However, I was pushed this idea in recent e-mail from my mortgage lender.
Recently, I stumbled on a new podcast (during my paternity leave). This one podcast gave me so much motivation. The name of the podcast: Choose FI. In this instance FI stands for Financial Independence. There is a whole community out there that has placed their focus on building up their wealth in 10 or 20 years of work and then plan to retire early. The idea with reaching financial independence is to find as many life hacks that can save you money and keep your expenses low. It’s about keeping expenses low and saving boat loads of money for approximately 10 years. Some spend 20 years on this journey, but it is completely attainable in 10 years.
As many of you may know, my wife and I have two children. Our oldest daughter is almost 23 months old and our youngest is 3 months old. It is a lot of fun interacting with our children on a daily basis. I detailed the joys of spending time with my family in my post: We are on a Mini-Retirement Trial. Being a teacher, I get a lot of time off in the summer. It just so happens that the birth of our second child happened while I was already off of work. This allowed me to be home for four weeks, before heading back to work. In August, I dove back into teaching and my wife stayed home with the kids.
September came in with a bang for the Summit of Coin family. We spent the first weekend of September in Nebraska. We celebrated my nieces fourth birthday, attempted to go to a football game and spent the rest of weekend reconnecting with family. It was a really fun weekend, even if the Husker game was cancelled due to a thunderstorm that just stalled over Lincoln.
Later in the month, my wife went back to work. This meant that I was able to come home for a couple weeks. This is the second time I have taken paternity leave. The first time I had a six weeks off with my daughter and this time I have two and a half weeks off. I will detail my thoughts and experiences from staying home with the girls, while my wife was at work.
September was a low income month, due to my wife’s maternity leave. By default, low income equals low expenses. So, let’s take a look at the numbers.
Growing up and still today, I am intrigued by the civil war era. I have books upon books on the civil war and 5 or 6 on Abraham Lincoln alone. Because of my love of this time period, Abraham Lincoln has always been my favorite President. There is something amazing about a guy who never gave up on his bid for public office, despite so much failure early in his career. There is something amazing about a President whose plan was to still unify the country after the war had ended. Most people wanted him to punish the south.
