Pocketmint

Tag: budgeting

1. To give great gifts, think like a behavioral economist

   13 December 2012

   For Jak’s last birthday, I gave him peace of mind. Also, sushi. Our mutual favorite restaurant in the area is Mashiko Sushi, way down in West Seattle. These days we eat out very rarely — a bit less than once per month — but we spend more time at Mashiko than anywhere else, in no […]

2. Converting to Mexico’s cash economy

   21 April 2012

   Pocketmint is documenting a month of personal finance in Mexico. For the backstory, see this post. Where Cash is King At home in Seattle, I almost never use cash. I carry five to ten dollars around in my wallet ‘just in case’ … and it’s the same five or ten dollars for months at a […]

3. What to do — and not do — with your former mortgage dollars

   21 March 2012

   With the decision to stop paying our mortgage, our immediate expenses dropped by nearly $3000 per month. That saved us over $32k in 2011 alone. So what did we do with all that ‘extra’ money? Well, first of all, about $6000 went to pay additional income tax, now that we no longer qualified for the […]

4. The Conflict-Free Family Budget: Your Turn

   8 February 2012

   In creating the Conflict-Free Family Budget, I was striving to accomplish two separate but interlinked goals: reduce spending and reduce conflicts. I think these work best in tandem, but that’s not to say that you wouldn’t derive some benefit by implementing just one or the other. I’ll try to tease them apart here for that […]

5. The Conflict-Free Family Budget: Our Results

   27 January 2012

   Our new budget system accomplished everything I hoped for, and then some. Still, I’ve been surprised by a thing or two about my own reactions, and even more so by Jak’s. (This is Part Two in a series. See the Introduction and Part One if you missed them.) I fully expected that for at least […]

6. The Conflict-Free Family Budget: Our Plan

   19 January 2012

   Here’s the complete rundown of the new budget agreement I worked out and proposed to Jak last June. This post is part of a series. See the Introduction if you missed it. First, I started with by calculating our net income from a single day job. (At the time it was me working and Jak […]

7. The Conflict-Free Family Budget: Introduction

   17 January 2012

   My partner Jak and I have been together for eleven years now. We blended our money fairly early in our relationship — sometime late in the second year. Ever since then we’ve had a single pool, into which all income goes, and from which all outflows are jointly approved. Our financial outlooks and spending priorities […]