Long Time no See

Hello friends, its been awhile!  It's time to stop hiding and return to the world of financial freedom blogging.  While I have a few ideas bumbling around in the back of my head for blog posts I will keep this one short and sweet and fill you all in on a few major life events that have happened this year. 

1. I was seriously injured in February while exercising.  I dislocated my right shoulder and suffered significant internal damage requiring surgical repair.  While out of commission and recovering from surgery, inactivity led to depression and I found it difficult to stay motivated. I am glad to say I finished up physical therapy in August and am now slowly working my way back into the gym.  While the process was tough it was a good reminder to not take health for granted.  Oh, and a good reminder about how essential health insurance is!
2. During these recovery months I am sad to say I fell a little bit off the savings bandwagon.  I allowed myself to splurge on things that I thought would increase my happiness.  In the end this was a failed exercise and it reaffirmed that it is not money that makes me happy.
3. I am excited to say I am back to budgeting/saving money and will be using this blog as a way to document our journey to financial freedom.
4. I received a promotion in July to an Engineering Management position.  I can honestly say that I miss my old position and getting to solve technical problems/manage my own projects.  On the flip side managing people is a new and challenging puzzle.  I also genuinely like all of the people that work for me, and seeing them succeed brings me great personal pleasure.  My base salary increased from $85,000 to $95,000 per year and I am required to work significantly less overtime.  I did however lose time and a half pay for overtime which will decrease my total earnings slightly this year.
5. Mortgage debt has decreased from $126,000 to $118,000 since the injury in February.  
6. Ms. DebtFree has been crushing her student loans, I will let her fill you in on this exciting story in a future blog post.

I am excited to be back on the right track and looking forward to sharing our path to freedom from debt with you.  Thank you for stopping by!

Mr. DebtFree out.

   

It's Not a NEED Just Because It Makes You Feel Good

Ms. DebtFree here with an individual spending update.  We try to keep our focus on generating positive vibes to our readers and social media followers, but we also like to toss in some harder truths now and then.

January 2018 Spending and Passive Income Update

Hi everyone!  Mr. DebtFree here with the January 2018 edition of our spending and passive income update.  While we did not quite hit our spending goals (we just love food too much) they are still in line with spending from previous months.  Here are our numbers for January 2018!

Why it's not OUR debt

Today we both want to share another part of our story with you: why we don't share Ms. DebtFree's student loan debt.

A Crypto Christmas, Passive Income Increase!

Quick, everyone grab your pickax, there's gold in them thar hills!  Part of the purpose of this blog is to track our efforts to increase our passive income.  Every month I release a passive income update that covers how we are working to grow income streams to surpass our monthly spending.  One stream of passive income that we have been playing with is Cryptocurrency mining.  I have mined Bitcoin and other alternative coins at a small scale off and on since 2011.  With the recent surge in Bitcoin, I have used some of the profits to build myself a slightly more high tech mining rig, so far the results have been excellent!

Passive income from Cryptocurrency mining was $40.25 per month in November 2017.  After tweaking the settings of my new dedicated mining rig our income from mining is now averaging over $24.21 per day and rising.  This is a monthly income of ~ $736. The rig itself is currently operating at 3/4 capacity and should be complete early January 2018 when the special power supply adapters I need come in the mail.  I am hoping when all is said and done that daily profit will sit above $30.00.  I will make a future post detailing the hardware and software needed to make this happen once my build is finalized.

Disclaimer:  I consider Bitcoin and other Cryptocurrency to be a high risk investment.  While I strongly believe in these investments in the long term, we will continue to see significant volatility in the near term.  Friends and family have been interested in my mining operation/history with Cryptocurrency due to the recent spike in prices.  While I love the technology I can not in good faith tell them to invest unless they are already in a very good financial situation.  I have lived through more crashes in Crypto value than I can remember and it has only been a 6 year relationship.  My own friends and family have talked to me about investing on margin or using leverage.  To me this is like playing Russian Roulette where 5 of the six chambers of your revolver are loaded with bullets. When you put that gun to your head and pull the trigger, if you survive you make many thousands of dollars. 

TLDR - At this time only invest what you can afford to lose and if you are using debt to fund this venture you are absolutely bonkers.  

Dumbest Ways I've Spent Money

Ms. DebtFree here with some honest confessions.  We have individual Mint accounts to track our spending and tonight I decided to use this fun feature to trend my spending for the last 12 months by merchant.  Yeah, it's bad enough that I had to look at my per-store spending!

November 2017 Spending Report

The numbers are in for our November spending update!  I am hoping these posts provide transparency on how we are approaching spending, which will set up our strategy for attacking debt.  Monthly updates force us to constantly audit and review our financial situation, and from this information we can target areas where we want to improve our performance and meet our goals.  When confronted with the reality of spending and debt it can be easy to take the ostrich approach and just bury your head in the sand.  Monthly accountability and honesty forces us to come up for air, and face our problems head on.  So without further ado, here are our November 2017 spending numbers in fun graphical format!