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First, the Establishment of Some Costco Cred Our family lives at Costco. To prove it, I downloaded some statistics on our Costco usage over the past 6 months. The first chart is a histogram of days between Costco visits over the past 6 months. The mode is 1. The average is 1.98, meaning that we’re … Read more

Frugal Wife, Please reread upon me getting hit by a bus. I’ll keep the sentimental stuff out of this letter. Here’s what you need to know about how our finances work and how to not run out of money.   Overview of How our Money Works All of our recurring bills (i.e. utilities, ymca, etc) … Read more

A few months ago during the Equifax hack, I read that it was smart to freeze your credit (duh), but also to secure your Social Security Identity online. What do I mean by that? I mean create an online account at the SSA with a strong password and two step authentication so that nobody can … Read more

*** If you care to learn deeply about the tax code, I have begun writing a book which contains everything I know on the topic. The book discusses wealth accumulation strategies, of which tax minimization is a key component. The (imperfect and incomplete) draft can be downloaded here.***     Today I noticed that Turbotax … Read more

I’m filing my taxes this year through a little-known company called FreeTaxUSA that I found out about through Bogleheads. It’s free to do federal filing (including itemized transactions, investments, and self employed income). Their business model is to give free federal returns and charge $13 for state. FreeTaxUSA properly handles backdoor Roth contributions (remember to enter … Read more

Some of my favorite bloggers have written about groceries in the past: Mr Money Mustache (link) Justin at Root of Good (link) Mr Money Mustache concludes that Costco is great. Justin at Root of Good concludes that Costco is for chumps and that WalMart prevails as low cost leader (with Aldi to supplement). Justin is … Read more