Welcome back to another monthly update from Root of Good! This is a bonus edition covering the last TWO months. Many readers reached out to me to find out where the May update went. The truth is I was way too busy with a series of back to back to back cruises around the world. I only had a few days in Raleigh between each cruise, so I had to focus on other things while in town.
In May we flew to the west coast and took an 11 night cruise to Alaska. After that, we flew home for a few days. At the very end of May we flew to London to start our two week cruise around the British Isles and Europe.
Once home in Raleigh again, we set out on a week-long cruise around the Caribbean with two of our children. One of our kids graduated college in May. She started her new full time job at the very end of June, so we squeezed in one last family vacation before the “fun” of a career starts for her.
Right now we’re enjoying almost a month at home in Raleigh before we head back to Europe for another two week cruise and a bit of London explorations.
On to our financial progress. May and June were excellent for our finances! I should travel and ignore my finances for two months at a time more often because it seems to be working well. Since April, our net worth increased by a whopping $246,000 to end the month of June at $3,597,000. Our combined May and June income of $17,628 was way more than enough to cover our spending of $8,193 for the two month period.
Let’s jump into the details from the last two months.
Income
Investment income totaled $13,199 in May and June. 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 specifically in June. Here’s more on our dividend investments.
Blog income totaled $980 for the past two months. This represents fairly average blog income.
My early retirement lifestyle consulting income (“consulting”) was $420 the last two months. As anticipated, my consulting slowed down significantly the last two months. I was out of the country for most of the time, so I didn’t have time to do many consulting sessions anyway.
Tradeline sales income totaled $1,750 during the last two months. These were two very good months. 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. During 2024 I made over $6,000 in exchange for lending out my stellar credit history from half a dozen credit cards.
For the last two months, my “deposit income” totaled $56. Of that total, $11 was due to 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!).
The other $45 in deposit income was a class action settlement check.
My bank and credit card bonuses totaled $1,222 the last two months. Of the total, $775 came from a new credit card sign up bonus. The other $447 was from the Pay Yourself Back feature on my Chase Sapphire Reserve card. I reimbursed myself for $447 of grocery purchases during May and June.
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 May and June expenses:
In total, we spent $8,193 during the months of May and June. That equates to an average spending of $4,097 per month which is about $700 more than our regularly budgeted $3,333 per month (or $40,000 per year). Insurance and healthcare/medical were the two largest categories from the last two months of spending.
Detailed breakdown of spending:
Insurance – $2,507:
Our annual homeowners insurance policy just renewed for $1,448 for the whole year. The premium is up some from last year but nowhere near the 29% increase we had a couple of years ago.
Our auto insurance policy renewal came due in June as well. The total premium for six months was $1,059 for two experienced adults and two inexperienced adults. The rates should drop quite a bit in the next year or two as our kids become experienced drivers (or switch to their own auto insurance policies).
Healthcare/Medical/Dental – $1,710:
Our 2025 health insurance is free thanks to very generous Affordable Care Act subsidies that we receive due to our low ~$51,000 per year Adjusted Gross Income.
Our 2025 dental insurance plan normally costs $32 in premiums per month. We picked a plan from Truassure through the healthcare.gov exchange. The dental insurance does a good job of covering most of our routine cleanings, exams, and x-rays plus most of the cost of basic procedures like fillings.
We paid $1,679 in May for a dental procedure. This is our last major dental expense for a while (we hope!). Dental expenses continue to be the majority of our healthcare/medical spending because our dental insurance is not as comprehensive as our ACA health insurance policy. But we planned for these expenses in our budgeting for early retirement so it’s not completely unexpected.
Groceries – $1,001:
We spent $1,001 on groceries in the past two months, or about $500 per month. Two of us were barely in town during May and June so we spent less as a result.
Gifts – $1,000:
Our daughter graduated college in May. We gave her a $1,000 cash gift to congratulate her on finishing college.
Travel – $825:
The May and June travel spending was a grab bag of a wide variety of different expenses.
We spent $245 on the annual fees for two travel credit cards. In exchange, we’ll get enough airline miles for about 3 or 4 free roundtrip flights almost anywhere in the world thanks to generous sign up bonuses.
Another $263 went toward the airline taxes and fees for two roundtrip frequent flyer award tickets to Europe for the fall.
Our rental car home from Orlando in June was $25 plus another $40 in gas. We decided to drive the nine hours instead of waiting all day in Orlando to catch the (expensive) flight that would get us home just before midnight. A very good choice in hindsight since we got home at 7 pm without really hurrying.
The remaining $252 of travel spending falls into the “miscellaneous” catch-all that includes a bunch of uber rides, transit fares throughout the United Kingdom and Ireland, admission fees, souvenirs, and other travel related expenses from the past two months.
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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 90,000 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. 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 cruises. Or I can transfer those Ultimate rewards points to over a dozen travel partners’ airline/hotel programs like United, Southwest, or Hyatt.
Or consider the revamped Chase Sapphire Reserve card with the highest sign up bonus ever of 100,000 Ultimate Reward points plus $500 in travel credit. The higher annual fee of $795 comes with some added travel benefits that can more than offset the annual fee if you travel a decent amount. Plus the sign up bonus is worth $1500-2000 depending on how you use the bonus!
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 and two of your 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. 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 – $570:
We spent $217 on our water/sewer/trash bill for the last two months.
The electric bill was $284 combined for May and June. We’re starting to hit peak summertime air conditioning usage which means $200+/month bills for a few months going forward.
The natural gas bill for May and June totaled $69. That includes some heating in April plus our normal water heater usage.
Taxes – $400:
I paid our North Carolina quarterly estimated tax bill of $400 during June.
Restaurants – $105:
We got takeout three times during May and June, totaling $105.
Cable/Satellite/Internet – $50:
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 – $25:
A tank of gas for our Hyundai Accent. The $40 for gas for the 600 mile trip home from Orlando in the rental car was included elsewhere in the “travel” spending category.
Home Maintenance – $3:
A gallon of gas for our lawnmower.
Spending for 2025 – Year to Date
We spent $22,141 during the first six months of 2025. This annual spending is about $2,000 over our budgeted $20,000 for the first six months of the year 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.
As of right now, I think our major expenses for the summer are all paid. For the next few months it’ll just be routine monthly bills like groceries and utilities plus some low level travel spending. We might get back on track for our $40,000 per year budget. We’ll see how the latter half of 2025 goes.
Monthly Expense Summary for 2025:
- January – $5,091
- February – $2,462
- March – $2,136
- April – $4,261
- May – $4,097 (average of May and June)
- June – $4,097 (average of May and June)
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 – $40,286
- 2025 – $22,141 (through 6/30/2025)
Net Worth: $3,597,000 (+$246,000)
Our net worth increased by $246,000 during the last two months to end June at $3,597,000.
That’s almost a quarter of a million dollar gain in two months’ time. I was genuinely surprised when I logged into my Empower dashboard to check on our finances after being on the road for almost two months. I didn’t really pay attention to our investments for those two months, so it came as a shock when I saw the quarter of a million dollar increase. In fact, I assumed there was an error such as one investment account being double counted or updating incorrectly.
I double checked and everything appears to be in order. Good news! I’ll have to go take another couple months off and ignore my investments and see if I can hit the $4 million milestone by the end of the year!
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.
Closing thoughts
A lot happened during May and June since my last update. Our oldest daughter graduated from college. While we were in Scotland on our cruise, she got a job offer from a large business with a local presence in the Raleigh metro area. At the end of June she started her full time career the day after we got home from our celebratory cruise!
She’s still living at home so not much has changed day to day other than she goes to work every day instead of working on school work.
Our middle child finishes her bachelors degree in three weeks and will hopefully land a job soon. Let me know if you’re interested in hiring a clever summa cum laude business graduate focusing on IT/data analytics/technology that knows how to code a little.
With the kids getting jobs our tax filing status will probably change for 2025, so this will impact our ACA subsidies, taxes, and our finances more generally. We haven’t worked out exactly who’s paying for what yet once the full time job paychecks start flowing. That will be a discussion that happens soon.
On a personal level, it’s nice to have them around to housesit and babysit their (teenage) brother for us while we’re traveling for extended periods. I think this will mostly continue into the fall depending on their exact work schedules but we’ll see how it goes.
Right now we are enjoying the peace and quiet at home for a few weeks before our next big trip. We’ve been busy with holiday gatherings for the 4th of July and have some family birthdays coming up soon too. And we’ll be heading back to Europe in just over two weeks for our next trip so we can’t get too cozy at home!
The pace of travel the past two months was pretty hectic. It would have been nice to have a few extra days at home between our Alaska cruise and Europe cruise. While flying home in late May, we had a major travel delay in Denver and had to unexpectedly spend the night there. Our break of four days in Raleigh turned into three days in Raleigh.
Throughout the rest of the summer and fall, our travel schedule isn’t quite as packed. We have a two week trip overseas then about a month at home before the next two week trip overseas (rinse and repeat a few times). That’s a better pace because it gives us time to catch up on things at home and relax before we head out again.
A quick note on the photos in this article. I’m sharing the pics from our May cruise to Alaska and our June cruise to the Caribbean. I’ll present our May-June Scotland, Ireland, and Europe cruise pics in a separate (shorter) article in a week or two.
Okay folks, that’s it for me for this update!
How is your summer going so far? Big plans?
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Nice photos! I’m also thinking of going on that Alaska cruise. Will pick Disney though because I made the mistake of picking ncl on a transatlantic and they had no services for kids under 3. Felt very trapped and a waste of money. The parents with older kids (5+) had a great time.
Congrats to your oldest daughter for already finding a job! Wow. She’s incredible. How do you get your kids to keep trying if they don’t see you working? That’s what I’m trying to figure out with my son. Do you have to hide your net worth and finances from them? Or is FIRE a motivation for them?
I have this same question. Worthy of an article in itself. When my son (7) asks “how much money do we have?” the best I have come up with so far is something like “it’s impossible to give you an exact answer because the amounts change daily with whatever happens in the country and the world.”
There are advertising and cultural forces at work that, potentially, no amount of money can satiate.
On a related note was his teacher’s comment on his second grade report card: “[He] follows the genre requirements and consistently produces work with good volume.” Other than a desire to please others, I have no idea what would motivate a small child to produce a “good volume” of work – to me it sounded like a large bowel movement smoothly released.
Ha ha – sounds like the kiddo’s “performance review” is saying “meets expectations in good quantities”. Better than a really bad report card I guess!
As far as how much you disclose to your children about your net worth/wealth, I guess it depends on the kids and your willingness to tell them about money. I guess when we were saving for FIRE our kids were your kid’s age or younger for most of the time so we didn’t really discuss our wealth in specifics other than “we’re saving” “we’re comfortable” “we could afford nicer houses/cars but we choose to use our money for other things”. Eventually we quit working and told more of the story, that we have more than enough to live comfortably indefinitely and if not we can always get another job. There will be food on the table, gas in the cars, and a roof over our head forever.
Beyond that I don’t know if kids really appreciate the difference between $300k and $3M for example, because both are A LOT of money to every kid.
We did NCL with little kids in 2008, and I imagine the policies are different now vs then. However we had my mom and grandma with us, so they took care of the youngest kid at the time who was 2. I recall their policy was “no kids unattended that are still in diapers” but there wasn’t a specific age cutoff. I guess our kiddo was still in diapers at just over 2 yrs old because we couldn’t leave her at the kids club. However mom and grandma would watch her play at the kids club so we had some time away from kids. Yeah otherwise you’re just there inventing things to do 🙂 A transatlantic is nice and relaxing when you don’t have to worry about kids. Plenty of time to watch movies or read a book. Otherwise I can imagine. I recall a 5 day cruise that felt veeeery long when we had a rambunctious ~3 year old with us that would literally run laps around us. I am sure other passengers got annoyed but I’d nap while he did laps lol.
Disney is $$$$ and never felt like a great value unless you really valued the Disney entertainment/IP. Maybe that’s the case (I feel like Bryce likes Star Wars more than the average nerd 😉 ). A bunch of other folks sail to Alaska now, Princess, HAL, RCL, and MSC (starting 2026), plus others I am sure. Maybe they have more permissive kids club rules? Alaska would probably be more fun for them when they’re up and walking and able to hike a little if you want to get out into nature (though they do have tiny kid-friendly activities like train rides or tour buses available too).
As far as motivating kids, I remind them that they are not rich (yet), and that their parents are rich. Expectation is that they make their own $. It’s okay to lack ambition but the consequence is being perpetually broke or barely scraping by. Just another life choice among many.
Remember the Bill Cosby show and money discussion with his daughter?
Vanessa: But Dad we’re rich!
Dad: Listen carefully. Your mother and I are rich, you have nothing.
Ha ha, yep. Maybe that’s where I got the saying from. I’ve seen that comment over the years from other FIRE folks and it resonates with me. “Kids, you are not rich – yet”
You must be having too much fun to skip a month…
What’s your daughter’s major? What are the job prospects for recent graduates these days?
Congrats to her and you on this great achievement
Both of our daughters majored in Business. The oldest that just got a job had a general concentration (no focus on finance, IT, marketing etc). The 2nd oldest focused on Information Technology (which include coursework on databases, data analytics, etc to some extent).
Job prospects – feels like it’s fairly neutral to be honest. Not an overheated job market where anyone can name their price like a few years ago during stimmy-times. Not bleak like 2008-09. Somewhere in the middle. Lots of jobs posted but every job has 100 or 500 applicants. And hardly any are purely entry level, mostly 1-3 years experience. So the smart thing seems to be just get a job **somewhere** that’s generally degree-related and get that 1 year of experience then move up to something more interesting and better compensated.
Excellent! Congrats again!
Congrats to all the traveling as well as the success your daughter is seeing. Good for her; should be a role model for all the younger people saying it can’t be done, or it’s too hard.
Big changes on our cruising front as well. Not sure if you saw the blowup about Carnival, the only cruise line we have ever sailed, but they are nuking their loyalty program that people loved and replacing it with a program strictly based upon how much you spend, starting in June 2026. We would have hit the highest level with them in 2027 under the old program but that is now off the table since the amount Deb and I would need to spend under their new system is ridiculous. and it resets every two years! So we had seven cruises booked with Carnival from Nov 2025 thru Dec 2026. Today I cancelled the two out in Dec 2026 and rebooked with Celebrity, which based upon all our research will now likely become our preferred cruise line. The food and drinks are heads above anything Carnival has, they go out of our favorite port (Port Canaveral) with one of their newer ships, and even if they cost us on average $100-200 more per sailing in total, they look to be well worth the money. Carnival made a huge mistake by turning their backs on those who were loyal to them for years, and will be paying the price for their greed.
Wishing you safe travels and continued fun, my friend. Enjoy the life that you guys fought hard for. And continued success to your children as well. Looking forward to hearing more on all those fronts.
Thanks for the well wishes and kind words 🙂 One kid graduated and employed, 2 to go ha ha
I saw the news about Carnival. We had mostly abandoned them already for various reasons (just enjoyed other cruise lines better overall all things considered). I figured they would lose some long term loyal customers but I guess their focus is rewarding the highest spenders instead of the most loyal customers. At least they grandfathered the Diamond level folks for 6 years (if that’s the right tier name, cannot recall). But long term, it would be hard to stay loyal when other cruise lines offer better benefits based on number of days sailed.
We really liked Celebrity the one time we sailed with them. It did seem a notch or 2 above our average Carnival experience so hopefully you’ll enjoy them.
Love your article and work – congratulations and thank you for sharing. In your most recent email you stated:
During 2024 I made over $6,000 in exchange for lending out my stellar credit history from half a dozen credit cards.
How do I, can I do that?
Keep posting and I’ll keep learning – you are making a difference and it is appreciated.
Thank you!
I don’t have a full article about the tradeline sales but the linked articles I posted in that section you mention have some more info on how I did it.
If I have an account with your tradeline company, can I sell spots on my spouses cards or do I need to have my spouse sign up for a separate account? How would the TL company know its one of their cards and not mine?
I have a couple of Mrs. RoG’s cards on my account and they didn’t seem to care. I did ask ahead of time however.
They will send a 1099 to you that includes earnings on her card. So maybe that factors into the decision. Not sure.
Awesome update. ROG! Congrats on all that great news.
One thing I find interesting is that you include every expense in your monthly expense tracking, no matter how irregular or lumpy.
A person can always think about how they want to do it, eg. track just regular living expenses and have another “bucket” that they think of as being from the lumpy/ irregular stuff.
But even after tracking all these lumpy irregular expenses you had in the last 2 months, your monthly expenses were still really good! (Approx 4 k /Mo for a family of five doing a lot of stuff)
I wonder how you are able to sign up for multiple credit card offers at the same time and hit the spend amounts needed in order to get the bonuses since your monthly expenses are so low? Only my husband signed up for the chase sapphire preferred bonus of 100,000 points in May and we need to spend $5,000 in 3 months to get the points and we are struggling to get the $5,000 spend requirement even though our monthly expenses are way higher for home and car insurance, electricity, etc. than yours are.
Gift cards are one way people do it, I think even RoG has done that to meet spend. For example Air BnB for these epic trips he takes.
Yes, have done gift cards and still do occasionally.
You have to get creative. I’ve paid 12 months of utilities, I’ve paid the entire insurance premiums rather than one month at a time, and I’ve paid estimated taxes. I’ve also funded bank accounts with cards that code as purchases (Chase does…or at least did.)
I’m pretty sure when I did my last Chase card, i hit most of my spend by opening three different $1.5k CD’s at the same local-ish credit union.
I’ve done the bank account thing a few times too. US Bank accounts allowed $2000 or $2500 funding with a credit card, just have to make sure your credit card won’t charge cash advance fees (most don’t but do your due diligence of course)
I do everything I can to hit the spending requirements 🙂
Some other replies covered it well. Buying gift cards ahead of time, prepaying utilities, insurance, etc. I’ll also buy stuff for my family sometimes and get reimbursed (they usually ask me to do it just bc I have the credit available and they don’t care about points anyway). For example I just bought a $700 garden tiller and paid for a $4500 septic tank repair/replacement for family this year (fully reimbursed). So that’s 1 credit card sign up bonus just from 2 large purchases for family.
Taxes are another one – I have to pay estimated taxes so I always pay the ~2% fee to use a credit card to pay those. Also pay my parents’ property tax bill and pay the 2% fee on that too. Another 1-3 credit card sign up bonuses there every year.
And we are spending $4k/month in recent months so that’s almost a whole sign up bonus on the lower cards that require $3-5k spending. 2 months for the higher $8k requirement on Chase Ink Preferred for example.
I have always wondered the exact same thing. Any specifics Justin on how you do this?
Thanks!
Lots of replies to Swati if you want to read further. In summary, just focused on spending anything I possibly can anywhere I can on my credit cards. And sometimes spending ahead by prepaying utilities, buying gift cards, etc. And not biting off more I can chew. For example I forego some of these big $15-20k sign up bonuses because I would struggle to hit that level of spending in 3 months without really juggling a lot of different things.
What are the deductibles on your homeowners and auto insurance policies?
Do you have flood insurance on your home?
Have you had a chance to look at the Big, Ugly Bill (BUB) that just passed and see how exactly it would affect your family’s health insurance costs?
What are the deductibles on your homeowners and auto insurance policies? Home = $2500 deductible and auto there is no deductible bc I don’t have comprehensive and collision.
No Flood insurance (22 years and going so far). Just ran a little calculator and assuming we would have invested the premiums we skipped, we are about $100k ahead vs paying for flood insurance annually. That covers a lot of repairs should flooding hit us. We’re probably at risk from a 500 yr flood but will probably be fine in a 100 yr rain event. I’ll keep rolling the dice since we can cover an out of pocket $100k expense or whatever if need be (aka “self insuring”)
Haven’t looked at BUB (lol @ “ugly”) but looks like medicaid for adults and medicaid expansion took a hit? ACA reverts to the old pre covid subsidy structure? I will have to take a closer look but I think we’ll be mostly okay other than maybe paying $100-200/mo more (but had kind of assumed the better subsidies during covid times would eventually disappear).
Are your deductibles really $1M on home and $500K on auto? Don’t you mean that is the total amount they are insured for? If not, how did you get such high deductibles?
Ha ha – yep those are the total coverage amounts and not deductibles. Good catch. I’ll edit my original comment to reflect the accurate numbers: Home = $2500 deductible and auto there is no deductible bc I don’t have comprehensive and collision.
Very nice photos of Alaska.
We went on a family vacation there about 20 years ago.
It was one of our favorite family vacations .
It’s pretty amazing. After our 2nd trip there in under 12 months I was thinking “I’m good on Alaska for a while”. Then as I’m reviewing the photos for this article, I’m thinking “man it was really amazing I kinda want to go back soon!” ha ha. Too many fun beautiful places in the world to visit and so little time 🙂
Hi Justin,
Curious on your thoughts about the upcoming Capital One Venture X changes to lounge access? I got the Venture X especially so that guests traveling with me could make use of Priority Pass lounges for free. It’s been very well utilized by my adult kids when they have joined us on trips, but starting Jan 2026 that all changes.
https://www.capitalone.com/credit-cards/disclosures/airport-lounge-terms/
My thoughts are “it sucks!”.
I am debating between cancelling or downgrading the card to avoid the hassle of spending the $300 travel credit. Or getting a new card! Then Mrs Root of Good and myself would each have Cap1 lounge access when we travel (along with the hassle of 2 sets of $300 travel credits to try to use up!).
Losing the ability to gift 4 sets of priority pass and Cap1 lounge access to other family for free is a big hit. I don’t know why they didn’t leave the primary cardholder with guest access at a minimum.
So my thoughts are “it’s still a good premium card since the cost to hold the card is close to zero but the 2026 version of this card is way worse than the earlier versions of this card”. I’d still recommend it especially if it’s just you or you and a spouse (each get a card). For family travel, another premium card would work better. Chase Sapphire Reserve is the answer for me but it still doesn’t get free authorized users into lounges (they charge for AU cards).
Congratulations on your daughters graduating college—what a milestone!
I remember listening to your interviews on the Mad Fientist and ChooseFI podcasts years ago, back when your kids were much younger. Those conversations really stuck with me, especially your framework around making college affordable in retirement—possibly even more affordable than during your W-2 years.
Our oldest is only 11, but many of our FIRE strategies have been shaped by those early insights.
Now that two of your kids have finished school, I’d love to see a post reflecting on your original college planning strategy—what worked, what didn’t, and how things evolved along the way. I know you’ve touched on it in past posts, but a full-circle summary would be incredibly helpful for those of us following a similar path.
Thanks again for all you’ve shared over the years!
That’s a good idea for a post! An After Action Battle Report. The summary is it turned out a little differently that I expected but probably on the less expensive side.
Hi,
We did an Alaskan cruise last fall and really enjoyed the land portion up to Denali. Being out and exploring the National Park was amazing! And the trail ride up to Denali was really a highlight. They narrated the entire trip so we learned a lot about the local culture.
Also, I’m curious if you could share what was the largest contribution to your net worth increase?
“Since April, our net worth increased by a whopping $246,000 to end the month of June at $3,597,000”
Thanks for sharing!
All of the net worth gains came from the stock market going up quite a bit. I think international investments and US investments both went up nicely so it’s a combo of those investment returns.
Hey, thank you for sharing what you are up to and encouraging everyone to keep going.
Any tips on how you got such a cheap rental car? That’s awesome!
Just kept rechecking the prices and rebooking the refundable rental car rates as it dropped. Oddly enough it was $120 for a 1 way rental from the port to the Orlando airport 40 mins away and only $25 from the port to Raleigh (9 hours away).