How much do you know about financial independence?

when he goes to put the pee in his car and it doesn't start and also smells funny..

If someone was sneaking into your place while you aren't around, stealing your gasoline and replacing it with pee, how would you know?

I have clever tin foil and bear spray based boobie traps protecting my precious mason jars.

Couch surfer have tried mint.com? It'll save hours.

Basically a cloud version of quicken - yes?
I went the quicken route for a while and found that it didn't suit my desired workflows. And I actually didn't like the auto-categorization… for me, the process of looking over each item and placing it somewhere gives me a real feel for how much we are spending. But I am curious about their ability to suggest areas for saving, would be interesting to see what it tells me.

And nbr takes down another…

Mint is an Intuit product, so same company that sells Quicken.

I've used Quicken for about 12 years or more, it's worked fine for me. Not sure what your auto-categorizing issue is, you can always assign a category to an expense, and you can create new categories as you want/need.

Every once in a while, the software asks me to upgrade - I don't bother, I've only upgraded once since I started with Quicken. For the most part, upgrades just include new tax year stuff, and I don't use Quicken for tax planning anyway.

I checked back and in 2008 (my older docs are on another computer), my wife and I had a savings rate of about 23%. A couple of years ago I was doing a lot of thinking about working/retirement etc… someone here had linked off to MMM and I found it very interesting reading.

I ran an experiment that year (2012) for our annual budgeting discussion and built an excel sheet that tied our mortgage paydown back to our budget. Concept was simple, as we would allocate money to a budget item, the amount of money we could use to pay off our mortgage early would be removed. As we'd be planning how we'd spend money we'd literally watch months added to the tail end of the mortgage. We moved to a 45% savings rate that year because of that conversation.

Are the savings you are talking about being used to pay down the mortgage sooner, or are you socking it away for an early retirement?

I'm guessing that depends on your end goal?

Paying off your mortgage ASAP, or retiring ASAP and still having a mortgage payment?

Are the savings you are talking about being used to pay down the mortgage sooner, or are you socking it away for an early retirement?

I'm guessing that depends on your end goal?

Paying off your mortgage ASAP, or retiring ASAP and still having a mortgage payment?

3 places: RRSP, additional mortgage prepayments (I'm not counting the normal mortgage), R.E. for passive income outside of RRSP.

With mortgage rates where they are at I should probably be piling it all into investments, but I hate debt, so we ran a few scenarios and came up with a blend of those threed that we liked. Will likely run those scenarios every year with updated numbers and tweak.

I’ve done well following one simple rule: do the exact opposite of what everyone else is doing. Buy when people are selling, sell when people are buying, and hold up when you don’t know what the fuck is going on. I also have a couple of shoeshine boys. If I hear it from them, it’s likely played out. In fact, NBR seems like it could be a pretty good shoeshine boy.

With our mortgage fixed at 2.79% I have no compulsion to make extra payments for now. Renewal this April may change my view. Investments pay out way better!

If we renew today, it may go up to as much as 3.19% for a 5-year.

Mints recommendations for savings is to get a lower interest rate credit card. But hey it's pretty good free software, I can't blame them for advertising.

Right now my mint is "all good with no recommendations" because I don't carry a credit balance.

Mint views all your accounts (bank, investments, credit) and downloads automatically and categorizes it with adjustable rules.

I do like mints alert emails.

"Unusual high spending- this month you've spent 200 on investments. Usually you spent 100"

"Unusual high spending - your bank took out mortgage twice as many times as usual"

(Examples only)

A good way to track your expenses is to use your credit card (and pay off the complete balance every month and get some cash back rewards). Download all your bills into a spreadsheet for a year or however long and sort by description. You can then block the expenses into categories. You'll have a pretty good idea pretty fast of where your money is going.

^What spreadsheet do you recommend?

I sort of want to do this, and also don't as I know a ton of my money goes to stupid shit.

^What spreadsheet do you recommend?

I sort of want to do this, and also don't as I know a ton of my money goes to stupid shit.

:lol: I started using Mint.com and I didn't need to know how much the liquor store takes, but now I do. :/

If you generally use either your debit card or your credit card for day to day expenses, Mint takes almost no effort and it's free.