Welcome back to Root of Good, folks! After a very busy nine weeks of summer vacation in Poland, we are finally back home in Raleigh. We capped off our trip in Poland with nine days in Gdansk near the Baltic Sea before flying back to the United States.
After a summer of exploring castles and cathedrals, narrow alleys in old villages, and tree-lined valley trails leading to waterfalls on the mountainside, it’s great to finally be home where we can relax in comfort. We have a full month before we hit the road again for a two week Alaskan cruise in September.
Right now, we’re busy with the kids’ back to school activities. Two kids start college the day this post goes live, and the youngest kid will start seventh grade in about a week.
On to our financial progress. July was a stupendous month for our finances. Our net worth shot up by $129,000 to end the month at $3,249,000. Our income of $10,092 exceeded our spending of $3,735 for the month of July by a wide margin.
Let’s jump into the details from last month.
Income
Investment income totaled $7,732 in July. Our equity index funds and ETFs pay dividends quarterly at the end of March, June, September, and December. As a result, we had a larger than normal amount of investment income last month since the dividends spilled over from the end of June. Here’s more on our dividend investments.
Blog income totaled $1,108 for the month. This represents a slightly above average month of blog income.
My early retirement lifestyle consulting income (“consulting”) was $550 last month. That represents three hours of consulting work during the month. Summer always seems to be slow so maybe my consulting hours will increase heading into the fall. I can’t complain about the slowdown though. Nine weeks of vacation with hardly any work is great!
Tradeline sales income totaled $675 in July. Another great month. I ramped up my tradeline sales a few years ago and discussed it in a bit more detail in my October 2020 monthly post and in my July 2021 monthly post. Most years I make around $4,000 to $6,000 in exchange for lending out my stellar credit history from half a dozen credit cards.
For last month, my “deposit income” was $27. The deposit income came from cash back and incentive bonuses from the Rakuten.com and Mrrebates.com online shopping portals (some of which was earned from you readers signing up through these links).
If you sign up for Rakuten through this link and make a qualifying $25 purchase through Rakuten, you’ll get a $10 sign up bonus (or more!).
If you’re interested in tracking your income and expenses like I do, then check out Empower Personal Dashboard, formerly known as Personal Capital (it’s free!). All of our savings and spending accounts (including checking, money market, and more than half a dozen credit cards) are all linked and updated in real time through Empower Personal Dashboard. We have accounts all over the place, and Empower Personal Dashboard makes it really easy to check on everything at one time.
Empower Personal Dashboard is also a solid tool for investment management. Keeping track of our entire investment portfolio takes two clicks. If you haven’t signed up for the free Empower Personal Dashboard service, check it out today (review here).
Tracking spending was one of the critical steps I took that allowed me to retire at 33. And it’s now easier than ever with Empower Personal Dashboard.
Expenses
Now let’s take a look at July expenses:
In total, we spent $3,735 during the month of July which is about $400 more than our regularly budgeted $3,333 per month (or $40,000 per year). Travel and utilities were the two largest categories from last month.
Detailed breakdown of spending:
Travel – $3,078:
Our travel spending of $3,078 represents everything we spent in Poland for the whole month of July plus a $400 deposit for our October 2024 cruise. The total just for Poland vacation spending was only $2,678.
I didn’t track the travel spending in fine detail, but I have a rough estimate of where that $2,678 travel spending went:
- $1,000 – a seven night apartment rental plus 3 nights in hotels (2 rooms per night)
- $550 – rental car and gas
- $50 – parking
- $28 – Ubers/transit in Wroclaw when we didn’t have a car
- $300 – restaurants
- $500 – groceries
- $250 – tickets to attractions, national parks, museums, and castles
(edit 8/19/2024: a reader asked why we only had 10 nights of lodging expense. We paid for roughly 80% of our lodging several months before our trip started. These 10 nights required payment just before the stays started, so the payments posted in July)
Most things are cheaper in Poland than they are in the USA. Gas is about the only thing noticeably more expensive because of added taxes.
But on a per-mile basis, gas is slightly cheaper in Poland because the rental car was much more fuel efficient than our cars in Raleigh. The rental car was a hybrid and it was smaller than our own subcompact car in Raleigh. With our fuel economy running around 70 mpg, gas was very cheap. Basically free.
We drove about 2,000 miles around Poland during the summer. From Krakow in the south, west along the border with Slovakia and Czech Republic to the western border with Germany and then north and east through the central parts of Poland until we ended up in Gdansk (and eventually visited the northern coast of Poland and the Baltic Sea). We also took a lot of day trips with an hour or two of driving to explore the area or visit a castle or hiking trail.
Cheap-ish gas and a $18/day rental car is a fantastic way to see a lot of the countryside without breaking the bank.
Get free travel like us
If you are interested in getting free travel from your credit card like I do, consider the Chase Ink Unlimited or Chase Ink Cash business cards (my referral link). Right now, the Chase Ink business cards offer an above average $750 to $1000 worth of Chase Ultimate Rewards points that can be redeemed instantly for $750 in cash. I just signed up for another new Ink card to snag one of these great bonus offers.
Chase is pretty liberal when it comes to “what is a business”. If you sell stuff on eBay or Craigslist or do some odd jobs occasionally then you have a business and could get a credit card as a “sole proprietor”.
I use the 75,000 Chase Ultimate Rewards points by transferring them to my Chase Sapphire Reserve card (also offering a 60,000 point sign up bonus right now). With the Sapphire Reserve card, I can get 1.5x the points value by booking cruises, flights, hotels, or rental cars through their travel portal. Or 1.25x value by reimbursing myself for groceries. That turns the 75,000 points into $1,125 of free travel or $937.50 of free groceries. For example, I used 165,000 Chase Ultimate Reward points to pay for the $2,475 in taxes, fees, and gratuities on two of my fall cruises. Or I can transfer those Ultimate rewards points to over a dozen travel partners’ airline/hotel programs like United, Southwest, or Hyatt.
Capital One VentureX card
Another favorite travel card in my wallet is the Capital One Venture X card. The Venture X card is a “keeper” for me. First off, it comes with a $750 sign up bonus after spending $4,000 in the first three months. The bonus is paid in the form of 75,000 bonus points that you can redeem against any travel purchases from anywhere. Then you earn a solid 2 points per dollar spent forever! The other big perk is airport lounge access. You can get yourself plus unlimited guests into Priority Pass lounges. And you plus two guests can get into Plaza Premium network lounges and Capital One Lounges.
The Capital One Venture X card does have one catch – a $395 annual fee. But they reward you every year with an easy to use $300 travel discount plus $100 worth of points. Together, that makes $400 they give you annually which completely offsets the annual fee. Another benefit worth mentioning: you can add up to four authorized users for free, and they also get all the benefits of the Venture X card including the valuable airport lounge access. We used this perk to “gift” a pair of Venture X cards with airport lounge access to my brother in law and his wife to use on their family trip back home to Cambodia last April with their two young children.
Since the annual fee is offset in full by travel credits each year, I personally plan on keeping the Venture X card forever since the card benefits are so great.
Utilities – $427:
We spent $33 on our water/sewer/trash bill last month. The water consumption is much lower when there is only one person at home. I also paid a part of the bill during June so the water bill is even lower than it typically would be during the summer months.
The natural gas bill was $18.
The electricity bill was $376 for July and August. I paid for two months during July. These are the peak usage months where the AC runs a lot, and future bills will be lower throughout the cooler parts of the year.
Groceries – $169:
Our oldest daughter stayed in Raleigh this summer and we cover her grocery bills, so this $169 is what she spent during July.
I include our overseas grocery spending in the “Travel” category of expenses. We aren’t as careful about shopping for sales and getting deals while we are buying groceries overseas. And we try a lot of new things. So I lump the groceries while traveling into our overall travel budget.
Healthcare/Medical/Dental – $37:
Our current 2024 health insurance is free, thanks to very generous Affordable Care Act subsidies that we receive due to our low ~$48,000 per year Adjusted Gross Income.
Our 2024 dental insurance plan costs $37 in premiums per month. We picked a plan from Truassure through the healthcare.gov exchange. The dental insurance does a good job of covering routine cleanings, exams, and x-rays plus most of the cost of basic procedures like fillings.
Cable/Satellite/Internet – $25:
We pay $25 per month for a local reduced rate package due to having a lower income and having kids. 50 mbit/s download, 10 mbit/s upload.
Gas – $0:
No normal gas spending for the month of July. I include gas for our Poland rental car in the “travel” budget category.
Spending for 2024 – Year to Date
We spent $20,315 for the first seven months of 2024. This annual spending is about $3,000 less than the budgeted $23,333 for six months per our $40,000 annual early retirement budget. I haven’t increased our annual budget for inflation in a decade, so at some point I need to revisit the budget numbers. So far, so good! No need to give ourselves a raise if we’re managing just fine within the current budget.
As I mentioned in April, our kids’ college costs are completely paid for by their financial aid so far. So college spending should remain rather modest throughout the rest of 2024 into 2025. And it appears that both of our older children are on track to finish their bachelors degrees in 2025
The wildcard spending for 2024 will be some upcoming dental work for Mrs. Root of Good. We still don’t know what this will look like but we’ll find out more in the fall once we return home from our summer trip. At least we’re running $3,000 below our budget, so any large dental expenses won’t make our total annual spending completely out of line for the year.
We have about six weeks of cruises coming up during September, October, and November. They are all paid for and all flights and pre-cruise hotels are booked. So vacation expenses should be modest for the rest of 2024, unless we start booking parts of our big summer 2025 trip. We have no clue where we’re headed in 2025 so we have to figure that out first!
Monthly Expense Summary for 2024:
- January – $1,828
- February – $1,746
- March – $3,525
- April – $1,719
- May – $1,875
- June – $5,889
- July – $3,735
Summary of annual spending from more than a decade of my early retirement:
- 2014 – $34,352
- 2015 – $23,802
- 2016 – $38,991
- 2017 – $31,708
- 2018 – $29,058
- 2019 – $25,630
- 2020 – $28,466
- 2021 – $31,740
- 2022 – $29,449
- 2023 – $37,865
- 2024 – $20,315 (through 7/31/2024)
Net Worth: $3,249,000 (+$129,000)
Our net worth shot up by $129,000 to end the month at $3,249,000. That’s a new all time high!
We are not too far from watching our net worth triple since retiring early almost 11 years ago. Who would have thought that possible when we quit working?!
For the curious, our net worth reported above includes our home value (which is fully paid off). I value the house at $300,000, which is probably what we would net after sales expenses. However, please note that I don’t consider my home value as part of my portfolio for “4% rule” calculation purposes. I realize folks ask me about that every month so I just wanted to state that here for clarity.
Life update
Another grand summer adventure is in the books. We’re back home and settling in to our routine in Raleigh. The kids are back in school, the weather is starting to cool off, and everything is returning to normal.
Even though I get a ton of enjoyment and enrichment from our travels overseas, it’s always great to get back home. Our house in Raleigh is so comfortable and has everything we want.
I jokingly refer to vacationing in Europe as “camping” because we often miss the creature comforts we enjoy at home such as air conditioning, window screens, shower curtains, clothes dryers, and large properly functioning refrigerators. I’m okay with “roughing it” to a certain extent while traveling because I enjoy seeing all the places we visit. Creature comfort sometimes has to come second to “exploring off the beaten path”.
A period away from home where you have to cope with the occasional bit of adversity serves to highlight just how nice you have it at home. I think we grow accustomed to all the niceties in our lives and forget just how good we have it until those nice things are temporarily taken away.
So we saw a lot of cool things in Poland and also got a reminder of just how fortunate we are to have the amenities we enjoy at our home in Raleigh.
Well folks, that’s it for me this month. See you next month!
What do you think of the pics from Poland? A place you might want to visit? Or give it a pass?
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Where did you stay other than the 7 night apartment and 3 hotel nights? Why no other lodging expenses?
We paid for about 80% of the lodging several months before the trip. These 10 nights were bookings that only required payment just before the stay commenced (mostly through booking dot com instead of Airbnb like we normally do). I’ll update the post to make this more clear!
Blog keeps timing out and disappearing when I read on my phone. Ad program narrows screen and then the blog disappears.
Might be a faulty ad (that will probably get eliminated soon if so!). Otherwise, I’d suggest clearing cookies and reloading the page. Blog works fine on my phone (Chrome browser on Android). Thanks for letting me know though – I’ll keep an eye on it.
The photos are stunning! Thanks for sharing.
I have often wondered to myself why Europeans hate shower curtains as I watch the bathroom shower floor fill with water. I’m impressed your pizza was actually sliced, most pizzas I’ve ordered in Europe aren’t cut. Good job, Poland!
I feel kind of bad that it might ruin their bathrooms with all that water everywhere but I guess they are okay with that. Just puzzling to have a nice bathroom ruined by lack of something to keep the water inside the bath/shower enclosure. We were actually very fortunate this summer in Poland because most of the bathrooms had pretty decent shower enclosures or a curtain or 1/2 or 3/4 width glass that mostly prevented bathroom flooding. Part of that is because we know to book those places.
As for pizza – ours have always been pre-cut for us when we order the large pizzas. We don’t normally order personal size pizzas bc they cost way more per person typically. But you’re saying you get the large pizzas and they aren’t cut? That would be weird – can’t imagine folding up a 24″ pizza and eating it whole lol. Do they at least give you a knife or something to cut it with?
It’s been the personal pizzas. Yes, they do give you a knife, but who eats pizza with a knife and fork?
Europeans I guess! 🙂
Italian here. We usually get one pizza per person, not sliced. We cut it with fork and knife and then someone eats it with their hands and someone eats it with fork and knife. A single person pizza usually has around 30 cm (12 inches) diameter. A big sliced pizza for us equals “tourist” pizza. If we ever share pizzas, it means we each order one (12″) and then we cut it and each person gets one piece of each pizza, so that in the end you eat one complete pizza. This is mainly done when you would like to try two different toppings, so you ask who else wants the same 2 toppings and then get half of each one 🙂
Personally I find it hard to finish a whole pizza by myself, but my husband is very happy to eat my leftovers after finishing his own pizza! 😛
Also, I usually find shower courtains whenever I travel around Europe. It’s very strange to have an “open” shower. Be assured anyways that Europeans at home have shower courtains or some other way of avoiding filling the bathroom with water. Our showers at home have a glass door.
I keep hearing about all these shower curtains in Europe but I never seem to find them when we travel to dozens of airbnbs throughout the continent. 😉
Reflecting back to our 2 airbnbs we stayed at in Italy 7 years ago, we had one with a shower with a curtain and the other had an open bathtub with about a 2.5′ glass partition that kept some shower water from splashing out. But it’s not fully effective. And this reflects what we’ve seen in a few dozen other airbnbs across the continent. Sometimes we have enclosed showers or shower curtains or a partial glass wall. But lots of times the water splashes out the bottom of the door, or around the half-width glass wall, or otherwise splashes/leaks out of the bathtub or shower enclosure. And this seems to be a common theme among Americans I know that have traveled extensively in Europe. It’s just a very stark contrast to bathroom design in the USA where the goal is to have zero water coming out of the shower area ever.
Euro hotels seem to get it right – I don’t know if that’s because they are more sensitive to cleaning up the mess or just building to an international standard.
I’m curious to hear more about how you schedule accommodations. It seems you’re able to cover quite a bit of ground. This makes me assume you’re not doing extended monthly Airbnb stays. Though even the monthly stays are pretty expensive nowadays. Would you mind sharing how you keep the budget reasonable with hotel and Airbnb bookings? I’m currently trying to plan a trip to Europe for a family of five. We would like to stay for approximately 2 months as well, but between hotels and Airbnb my costs seem to be quite a bit higher than what you show.
Monthly bookings do come with a big discount many times. We’ve done that and taken advantage of some cost savings. A month in Buenos Aires and a month in Bahamas. Basically 50% discount vs weekly or nightly rates.
That said, we wanted to see a lot of the country in one visit so we had 1 or 1.5 week stays in most places in Poland. Plus a several shorter stays along the way to break up the long drives between our longer term accommodations.
Weekly stays often come with a small discount, roughly 1-2 free nights (like 15-30% discount).
If you were going to try to save $ on long term rentals, I’d suggest finding 2 of the most interesting cities with a lot to do nearby and just book those. You’d probably have a lot of relaxing days and maybe run out of stuff to see, but enjoying wandering around the city is a reward in itself. Berlin, Paris, Madrid, Barcelona, etc all come to mind as places that might be good for a month-long visit depending on what you want to see.
Alternatively, book a month in a nice scenic rural area with beaches or mountain views. A rental car is probably required for anywhere outside the city, and might be useful even inside the city for some driving day trips.
Overall, we didn’t try to squeeze every last dollar of value out of our vacation by staying in 1 place for a month. Just wanted to hit a lot of different places and the 1-1.5 week stays felt like a nice compromise of relaxation, cost, and seeing all the things.
I really enjoy this blog. It has the perfect balance for me in terms of financial talk and travel talk and common sense. It’s aspirational and practical. I love to read it every month!
Glad to hear it!
Poland looks like a lovely place to visit. Loved the photos. Curious if you have changed your asset allocation since your net worth has increased dramatically since your retirement. Are you still mostly equities? Last post I saw on that subject was from 2013? Did I miss an update?
Still 90% equities since 2017 or so. In 2013 I was 100% equities. No changes to the equity portion of the asset allocation since 2013 however.
Depending on which index you look at, the stock market is about flat (at best) over the period from July 1-July 31.
I wonder how did your portfolio (“net worth”) manage to go up by 4+% . Can you give us some insights on that? What is your allocation?
Not sure – I have a lot of small cap, value, and international in my portfolio. I know small caps were doing well at one point recently so that could be it. Just index funds though.
Great pictures of an amazing trip. A beautiful country that has certainly seen its highs and lows over the centuries; fortunately they are doing very well now in most respects. Do the Poles emphasize the occupation and battles of WWII much? Curious if they are like other countries that still push that horrible conflict and what it did to their nation. And congrats on the NW front; it is nice to see an increasing bottom line when one is not even working!
Hard to say how much it’s emphasized in daily life because I didn’t interact with a ton of locals. From a tourist point of view, a lot of the stuff you see is related to WW2 and the communist era post-WW2 up to the 1980’s. I’m personally interested in WW2 so a lot of the stuff we visited was related to ww2 (the fortified Miedrizcy region and Westerplatte in Gdansk for example). Oh and Auschwitz of course, it’s probably one of the top tourist destinations in Poland.
But then we’d go to the countryside to some more rural areas and there wouldn’t be much at all about WW2
I am constantly amazed at how frugal you are able to travel, especially on big ticket items like lodging. It would be great to see lodging pictures, like the apartment and hotel you stayed at. That would greatly help me understand what value for the buck you are getting in different places.
I’ll try to put a couple pics of our lodging up on the next post for August.
Our places were pretty nice overall this year. We abandoned the super frugal budget travel accommodations a couple years ago since we have seen our net worth grow so much.
These places in Poland were all about $100/nt or sometimes cheaper for 2+ bedroom apartments. All 4.9 star or higher Airbnb ratings. Generally incredibly clean and comfy but there are always quirky things about places in Europe that we don’t like. We also stayed in several $50/nt hotels. 2 were old historic castle/palace stays and they were interesting but too old fashioned/rustic for us. Fun experience for the novelty but probably wouldn’t do it again. 3 other hotels were modern and ranged from okay to very nice (but small bc it’s Europe).
Hi! Just wondering if you would give us some info/hints as to how you find the best deals on cruises. Since you take so many of them, you must be an expert by now.
I like the cruiseplum.com site for searching. Lets you sort by total price or price per night and it includes all taxes fees and gratuities (which are pretty much mandatory). And you can filter on dozens of different criteria.
Beautiful pictures! The sky is so blue I wondered if the weather was dry or humid there this time of year. I’m a homebody so definitely living vicariously through your family travels. Where We Be is another favorite FIRE travel site of mine.
Kudos on your networth very inspirational as I am two months away from my first mini retirement. I always find frugal motivation through your spending reviews.
It was mostly dry. Maybe a few days it was slightly humid but we didn’t really notice it much compared to North Carolina, where it’s a swamp for most of the summer. We did have about 7 days where it was really hot (over 85F) and we didn’t have AC very often, so it was a bit unpleasant at times. Hence my “camping” comments ha ha ha.
I’m impressed by how much ground you covered in Poland. The bobsled looks fun!
Were you able to rent 1 car for the whole 9 weeks? I feel like last time I needed a car long term, the most they would give me was 30 days and then I needed to do a new contract for more days.
It was a lot of driving but we had a lot of time. I think the straight “backbone” drive from Krakow to Gdansk was “only” 18 hours roughly so most days was like 30 minutes to 2-3 hrs of driving between cities. Not too bad 🙂
We rented a car for about 3 weeks as we left Krakow. Then dropped it off for a week while in Wroclaw in the city (cars are a hindrance in most bigger cities between traffic and parking). Then picked up a new car as we left Wroclaw for 4 more weeks. This way I got the insurance coverage from CSR for 2x <30 day rentals. Cost was about the same as renting straight for 8.5 weeks at their monthly rate once all the charges were factored in. And we ended up getting the exact same car for the 2nd rental period as the first! License plate KK-94220, Toyota Yaris. Was a bit sad dropping it off after a fun ~2 months zipping around Poland.
I was curious about how you handled rental car insurance as your American car insurance would be no help. I assume CSR is Chase Sapphire Reserve. That works for primary international auto coverage? Cool. A good way to justify the annual fee.
I’ve enjoyed the walkable urbanism of European cities, but I have recognized that in particular Eastern Europe has a lot to see beyond what you can access via bus (we loved Krakow but only got to Auschwitz and a salt mine). In the US, we are a road tripping family (my 5 year old has been to 39 states and 20 National Parks), but haven’t translated that to Europe yet.
Thanks for more family-oriented budget travel, college-hacking, and more content. I regularly link to your example on forums when people insist on needed $500k in 529s. It would be interesting to see an update to your 2016 post with your kids’ real experiences.
Yeah, gotta get out of the cities to enjoy Europe. There are no crowds and not many foreign tourists in 98% of countryside in Europe. It’s great. I just hate driving in the larger Euro cities. They are bad on par with NYC/LA I think. Just a lot of traffic, crazy roads, have to dodge pedestrians everywhere (they get it right, imho, to give pedestrians the actual right of way). So we ditch the car while in the city typically. Or like we did in Poznan, just park it somewhere for the 5 nights and grab it on the last day to get out of there. Great fun taking euro road trips and you see so much that isn’t on the normal tourist trail.
Re: college costs – so far they have received net refunds every semester. And going from community college to 4 year school meant the same refund or even larger refund (I guess the higher tier state U’s have more financial aid to give out).
Always love these. I just started connecting my accounts to Empower! Love the visual sooooo much. I am so impressed with the technology to do that! We are shortly approaching the next stage and these posts are such good nudges to keep going! Thank you!
I like the account consolidation feature. Very helpful to get a quick summary!
Glad to see that your travel spending is now firmly your largest budget category by far. That always impressed me.
Yes – I like to see the travel spending as the highest category of spending as well 🙂 More fun than most of the other expense categories!
Poland looks awesome. I’d love to visit that region some day. Maybe after our son goes off to college. I’ll sell the house and travel for a year or two.
Your spending looks really good. Our annual expenses have been creeping up relentlessly over the last few years.
I enjoyed it. Nice and laid back and cooler summertime weather!
Poland seems to be a very scenic country.
I noticed you did not get too close to the Ukraine border.
I had heard the border region near Ukraine had more Ukrainians right now, which interfered with the housing/airbnb market. And it was busier there. And yeah, missiles overshooting their targets is a possibility. So we saved some Ukrainian-adjacent parts of Poland for a later trip when it’s more peaceful.
1K a month in blog income…I post on mine pretty much every week and I make $50 tops a month. It sucks not writing to English-speaking audience ! I guess I’ll have to learn mandarin
English speaking with an American audience helps immensely, that is for sure.
I dare you to go to Russia now!
Ha ha ha – nope! Maybe some day but it is unlikely I would ever visit any time soon.
What is the annual cost of homeownership for your? Things like insurance, taxes, landscaping, repairs.
How do you think about large future major house maintenance needs, such as AC replacement, new roof, house paining, etc.? Do you maintain a separate fund or these just become part of your annual budget when needed?
Insurance for the house – $1200
Taxes – It was $2200 now I think it just went up to $3000 for 2024 (haven’t paid yet)
Landscaping – it’s all DIY except sometimes $100-200/yr if we need to hire a lawn guy for the summertime months while we’re gone. Eventually we’ll hire this out, probably $600-800/yr I would guess.
Repairs – highly variable; <$500/yr if nothing much goes wrong. Typical year might be $1000-2000 which is a new appliance or 1-2 small jobs. New roof, new HVAC, new siding, etc are all probably $10,000 jobs in 2024 dollars. I treat all of these as averages. Just plan on an average year and sometimes it's cheaper and sometimes it's more expensive. If I need more money I can just sell some shares of an index fund and pay for whatever we need.