Category: Finance

Money in the PiN household isn’t holding my interest this week. We paid our bills, and saw our investments drop by 1x our annual spending. Nothing that I feel like dwelling on at length.

I thought instead I would write about someone else’s money instead. My brother is hoping to sell his first house, which has been a rental for a few years.

In this post, I review some reasons why becoming a landlord isn’t the family dream, and what to do when one comes into a large sum of money.

A number of personal finance bloggers write about making a plan–an Investing Personal Statement (IPS)–to keep you from doing dumb things with your money.

With a plan in place, you have guardrails for when your finances aren’t doing their normal thing. The stock market is falling and you aren’t sure what to do with your investments? Your IPS should address this. Your bonus was much bigger than expected, and you aren’t sure what to do with it? Your IPS should address this too.

I don’t have an IPS myself, at least not nearly as detailed as the ones other bloggers have published, but I have had a road map for years. Every year, at the beginning of the year, I look at my financial goals for the last year, and update them for the year to come. I decide what my goals are and decide how to send the money I (will) have to achieve them: save up a house down payment, pay off the mortgage, pay off the car, always max out retirement accounts, put aside money for travel and house repairs, etc.

Lately, however, I have been distracted by the changes in my household finances, and I realize I should probably check my map. I am still pretty sure I know where I am going, but my eyes keep straying to some of the road side billboards.

I have been thinking about early retirement for a while now. Eight years, in fact, ever since one of my partners retired early and put the idea in my head.

The closer I get to financial independence, the more I am thinking about what I would like to do. My planning is complicated by the nature of my work: being a primary care physician isn’t solely shift-work. If I am gone for 2 weeks out of the month, or for 3 months at a time, someone still needs to take care of the patients when they call in with problems.

Shift-work (hospital medicine) is a little easier if I want more days off, but comes with other challenges, like the expectation to put in long hours for many days in a row.

I decided to walk through some of the different flavors of FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) and see how they might work out for me, as an Internal Medicine PCP.

Last week I read a post, which I now can’t find, basically daring people who write about donor advised funds to put their money where their mouth is.

I seriously doubt that person was writing about me, but I took the sentiment to heart, anyway.

My father in law is definitely getting older.

He was never particularly organized, but in the past few years, he has gotten much worse.

In particular, paying his bills has become more of an issue. He has the money (he made sure we knew), he just doesn’t take care of his obligations.

Every year, for almost 20 years, I have completed the same financial tasks: reviewing the spending for the year that has just ended, updating my (our) new worth, and reviewing my (our) spending goals for the coming year.

I reviewed the net worth and spending goals 2 weeks ago in my yearly financial check-up. Today I go through our yearly spending.

Inquiring minds may wonder: why in the world have been you going through your yearly spending for 2 decades? What you can you possibly get out of this exercise by this point?

Every year, around January 1, I do two exercises related to my finances: calculate my net worth, and review the prior year’s spending. I have been doing this for years–long before I met Mr. PiN–so I talk about my finances, though it has really been our finances for some time.

While it is certainly pleasant to see totals moving in the right direction, I find the most helpful aspect of the exercise is to reflect on where we are as a household, and consider next steps (not resolutions!).

This year, going through the finances is taking a bit longer than usual. I finished the net worth calculation early, but the spending review is taking much longer.

Instead of going through both topics at once, I will be splitting them up: this week, the net worth discussion; soon (hopefully next week) a review of our spending in 2021.

I won’t be giving exact numbers, per Mr. PiN’s request, but I hope that going through this exercise with me may be informative for you.