About five minutes after I hit publish on my last post, my husband walked in the door with a 4-pk of Founders Breakfast Stout. I took note of it because it is not his usual choice.

“Are we celebrating something?”

A long and lovely story later, he announces: “I got a raise!”

So yeah, expensive beer. ❤

Approximately three and a half seconds later I was punching the new numbers into Quicken for all the glory it could bring.

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I’m joining in on this month’s Frugalwoods Uber Frugal Group Challenge to try to get a grip on the outflows. Honestly? I have my doubts about the whole thing. I feel like we are fairly frugal already (expensive beer aside). I’m think most normal people assume we are just lazy and/or poor because we generally don’t care about the Joneses. But it can’t help to take a look at things and ask some challenging questions.

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…and I’m still looking to narrow down a focus for our first FIRE efforts. For the moment we are looking to manage some car trouble I’ve been experiencing for a few weeks. Can we fix it ourselves, or do we need to call in the pros? My vehicle is a 2002, so 18-years old now. It’s low mileage, but it seems like it’s starting to nickle-and-dime us. So we’ll be sorting that out over the long holiday weekend.

I’m still in the process of working out the focus of our first FIRE effort, but it occurred to me that if we want to save money, we had best have something to save. I’ve been spending a lot of time with my nose in Quicken (old school, I know), examining our spending, figuring out some kind of model for our cash flow. I used to be so diligent about tracking every penny, but it fell by the wayside when my dad got really sick a number of years ago. I just never got back into that groove. Until now.

I have known for quite some time that food was one of our biggest problem areas. We spend a completely unreasonable amount of money on food every month, so this week we zeroed in with laser focus. I even got Mr. and The Teen on board, working with me to stay within our weekly budget.

Along the same vein, I signed up for The Frugalwoods Uber Frugal Month. I haven’t told my family. I’m sure they’re going to love it… 😉

…and I had hoped to have heard back by today about a job interview I had last week. It’s a part-time gig that would go along way toward moving us in the right direction.

I suppose my task for the weekend is making sure we nail that food budget. I can take another look at things on Monday.

The Summer Solstice found me nose-deep in ERE and MMM, my two go-to personal finance blogs. I was looking for inspiration and encouragement, as well as some tips to help us stretch our dollars while I was home with our child for the summer. But ERE and MMM….they are SO much more than that.

Along the way, as I clicked my way around the online FIRE community, I ran across the 1500 Days blog. Later that evening, as I thought about my impending “milestone” birthday, an idea started to form. Could we do it? …maybe by my 45th? …just a smidge over five years from now?

…and so I was bitten by the FIRE bug.

GOAL: Achieve FIRE by Autumn Equinox, 2024

(not actually my birthday…just a nice nearby generic holiday)

Honestly, I’m not really sure what that is going to look like, and will be sure to share more as I begin to work out the steps and mini-goals that will get us there.

Cheers!