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8 Financial Tips I Wish I Knew When I Was in My 20’s

My nephew recently started reading this blog and it got me thinking. What would be valuable information for him as a reader? What do I wish I knew when I was younger? He’s almost 20 years old and he just started a career in construction probably close to a couple of years ago. At his age, I know I wasn’t very smart financially. Don’t get me wrong – I thought I was, but looking back, I made some stupid decisions. So, like any old man, I almost feel obligated to pass along some of the knowledge I wish I knew back then to help him out. And yeah, 43’s not that old, but I’m not getting any younger! Do you

The Importance of Balance – Frugality vs. Overspending

Saving every penny and pushing frugality to its limit or spending every penny to live for today. How does the Route to Retire family handle their spending? Good news! After a lot of prodding, I think I might have been able to convince Mrs. R2R to do some occasional guest posting. Hopefully, you’ll see some more of these in the mix. She told me she’s hoping to write a post on the process she’s gone through in figuring out homeschooling for our move to Panama. Wrapping your arms around everything involved and choosing the right curriculum has provided her with some “fun” over the past few months. In today’s post though, you’ll get an idea of her take on some

After 20 Years on Quicken, I’m All-In on Personal Capital

I’ve been using the Personal Capital financial software now for the past few years. However, I’ve only been dipping my toes in with it… until now. Quicken’s been my go-to software for just over 20 years. I stumbled on it back in 1999 when I first started at the career I just retired from. I was hired in as an engineer to fight the scary Y2K bug and Intuit was giving away their Quicken 98 software for free as a fix to anyone running older versions. I decided to install the software just to toy with it. I entered in all my accounts and ended up being appalled at what I saw. I owed about $30k in credit card debt and just

The Breakdown of Our Net Worth Savings & Investments

I’ve been considering providing a breakdown of our net worth for a while now. I’ve held off for a couple reasons though: For some reason, this isn’t very common for many bloggers to do. We seem to consider this to be sacred territory and almost taboo. I’ve been making a lot of changes and wanted to let the dust settle a little before talking about this. Well, I love breaking taboo – if you’d ask my friends, they’d tell you how I tend to say things that seem inappropriate, but are usually what everyone is thinking. It might be some stirring the pot but it gets some good conversation going! When our net worth hit the $1 million mark back

The 4 Worst Words for Your Financial Future

I’m about to share something important with you. Four words that might be the worst in the English language and can crush your financial future. We’re all at different points in our financial lives and we all have different goals. However, I think it’s safe to say that we’re all here for the same reason – we want to be sure that our future is financially stable. In my own life, I started to recognize a common theme that has bitten me quite a number of times over the years. It’s a mindset that I have and didn’t even realize it until recently. I also think that the majority of people tend to think the same way. So what are

Why Less Is More and Bigger Isn’t Better

I’ll leave the “bigger is better” jokes up to you guys. But, if you’ve been around the personal finance blogosphere long enough, you’re bound to hear things like that or “less is more” or some other variations of the phrase. To me that just seemed obvious – sure, if you want to cut your costs, eliminate your cable or drive a used car and **poof** you’ve saved a few bucks. Frugality at its best. However, I’ve learned that spending less can actually lead to much bigger savings that I wasn’t even thinking about. Sometimes when you spend less in one area, it has a domino effect in other areas that make the costs even less overall. And in some cases,

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