Test Your Retirement Plan: FI Numbers Don’t Lie, But … (Part 2)

Sister, I killed Colonel Grumpus in the Drawing Room with a lead pipe.

Grumpus The Confessor

I have a confession to make. I put off writing this post for a while. When I first started my blog, I had always intended to demonstrate how to test your retirement plan. I wanted to do this by using a high powered retirement calculator. Doing so would complement what I consider the biggest strength of my website: the series of practical “How To” retirement plan articles in the Planning section. However, I needed to tackle some other topics first. I wanted to walk financially novice readers up to a point where they could understand the subject matter of this article. Yet, I essentially hit that point weeks ago, and still, I delayed.

Part of that delay was due to the complexity of what I intended to describe. It’s hard to write effectively about the steps needed to test your retirement plan. A technically savvy blogger would simply post a video of how to do this, but that is beyond my capability at the moment. As a point of reference, I was happy enough when I figured out how to embed a spreadsheet into this post. Maybe someday I will circle back and create a video once I obtain the skills, and find the time. Continue reading →

Track Your Money (Part 2): YNAB

Posted on 25-June-17 by Grumpus

Remember how I said Grumpus Brotherus had used You Need A Budget (YNAB) for years? Well, when I asked him to write a paragraph for my Track Your Money post, he sent an entire post’s worth of information back. Instead of editing the material down to a paragraph to fit my article, I decided to give him his own post. I present you here the first guest author for the Grumpus Maximus blog! Now I must warn you that Grumpus Brotherus is a nerd … I mean N-E-R-D. Which is ok these days since the nerds will apparently inherit the Earth. But at points within the article, he does geeks out on software

I can’t believe Brother Grumpus does this since ..

interface and whatnot. It is hard to believe he flies in fighter jets for a living. Although I guess jets are more software than hardware these days, so maybe it makes sense. In any case, I edited a little to de-nerd it for us ‘laypeople’, but otherwise all the themes are his own; completely unprompted by me …. you will see what I mean. Enjoy. — Grumpus Maximus Continue reading →

Track Your Money (Part 1)

Posted on 25-June-17 by Grumpus

I’ve referred to building a retirement plan in several previous posts, and I will show you how I did it in future posts. But before we get to that I need to talk to you about an endemic problem afflicting most Americans…. the problem associated with tracking money. No, I am not talking about the need to track money that finances terrorism or organized crime. I am talking about the need to track your money.

In April 2014 Business Insider reported that 61% of US adults do not track their money. That was only six years after the financial meltdown of 2008! That is pretty damning, but not surprising … at least not to me. As someone who has tracked their money religiously for the past 18 years, I can attest it takes time and discipline. It is often undervalued and much maligned as a “man” activity in my family (just ask Mrs. Grumpus). However, long before I taught myself anything about the investing world, Financial Independence (FI), or early retirement options I used to lock myself away with piles of receipts in my man cave every two or three months– just so I would know how our money was being spent.

Continue reading →