My wife and I are frugal people but we can get spendy on certain things. We've been trying to motivate ourselves to spend less on crap and we've hit on it the last few months.
We figured out that if we saved 15k a year each and passively invested it at 5% a year (not guarunteed but a conservative assumption), we would be able to retire/semi retire at 55 for me and 51 for her.
We can achieve 15k a year right now making roughly 40k each. We don;t plan to have kids and we are in the land of freeish healthcare (Canada). So, we could ramp that up in years to come and hopefully shave some time off.
We basically have decided that we will only spend money on:
1) Savings 2) Travel (local and international)
Everything else that money is spent on, will be looked through that lens. It has to be really needed.
It has really helped our motivation. We are eating out a lot less. Learning to cook. Finding free things to do. Learning skills. It has been a blast.
It has also put something in perspective to me. A skill that I enjoy and am very good at.. if that made me 20k a year at 55, that would be extremely valuable to me. That could be an extra year, where I wouldn't have to work. That could be a community I grow old with. It could get us over an economic depression that hits everyone hard. It also could balance out my computer bound life if it was a physical skill. It really made me think.
Enough about me. What motivates you to be frugal?
January 18, 2017 at 04:30AM
