I enjoy travel hacking and playing the credit card bonus game more than I probably should – scheming ways to maximize the value from my monthly spend is one of my favorite hobbies. So, with all of the time, planning, and scheming that goes into this hobby, what’s the result? If done right, you get to do a lot of cheap traveling – last year we went to Costa Rica…

As I’ve written about before, I sometimes consider abandoning my career path and following the less intense route to FIRE. I daydream about leaving the stressful 40-hour workweek behind, and instead working part time or seasonally (as well as side hustling) to cover expenses. Of course, these are mostly *just* daydreams, but sometimes it’s fun to think of alternatives to the mainstream. Working a part-time job would remove some of…

For the past few years I’ve done an annual side hustle round up (2014 & 2015). In 2016 I backed off on some hustles, and started a pretty lucrative new one. Here’s the breakdown…

Over the summer we decided to take on our first woodworking project: building ourselves a bed frame. I love to try DIY projects, but I haven’t ever built my own furniture. We were vaguely planning an upgrade to a king size bed, and the cost when shopping bed frames was making my frugal brain twitch – so we decided to take the plunge and try to build one ourselves. Our…

I love mind mapping (nerd alert!). For whatever reason, the way I think syncs up perfectly with the spidery visualization that is a mind map. Creating one is the best way I’ve ever found to organize my thoughts on a subject, and the process of building one is a great first step before tackling more in-depth planning. They also help me defeat uncertainty, confusion, and procrastination. I’ve always loved the…

A few years ago when I started seriously planning my route to FIRE, I was fairly confident that I’d be content working the 8-12 years in my current industry until I had saved enough and earned the freedom to call it quits. Over the past few years, and more rapidly over the past 6 months, I’ve been considering the prospects of instead pursing a lifestyle of unjobbing and small-scale entrepreneurship a lot more seriously.

Sometimes I get caught up in the idea that I need to be productive all the time. I put pressure on myself to always be hustling, working to get more of an edge, and making progress toward reaching my goals. As you might expect, I often don’t live up to these lofty expectations of myself, and then I feel bad and my anxiety takes over. It’s a stupid cycle, and…