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  • Step 1: List the Condo

    Happy 420 FIRE Flowers! Quick but potent update for you all: As of 2 days ago, our condo listing is officially LIVE and on the market!! We called a realtor that specializes in downtown condos on April 1st, and spent the last two weeks socking away clutter to get ready for the listing pictures. Below are some of the results! Moe took it upon himself to offer his creative stylings to the floor plan lol We really do love this place – it’s just that it isn’t located in Baltimore. So, I think I am saving these pictures so that…

  • Coast is Clear: A Shift in our FIRE Plan

    I wrote my previous tax planning post in December to summarize all of the deep thinking I had been doing on which tax buckets we would be drawing money from in retirement. The thing is…I kept thinking. Long after I optimized our FIRE plan, I kept running scenarios. What if we didn’t get a mortgage? Rent vs mortgage? Moving to Baltimore now vs at FIRE? My degree is in math, and my skill set in my career revolves around math modeling. Naturally, I’ve built some masterful models for our financial plan. And then one day in January, I was having…

  • Buckets of Money: Tax Planning

    Let me say this in a way so that I come off precisely nerdy: I love taxes. It’s my equivalent of studying game tape. This past fall, I spent an enormous amount of time thinking about and mulling over the concept of bucketing our money according to tax treatment. I wanted to narrow in on how money can go in to our portfolio for the lowest tax rate, and how money will come out of our portfolio at the lower tax rate. First, let’s review the three types of tax-treatments for money (per the tax man): Pre-tax: this bucket includes…

  • 2023 Year End Wrap Up

    Welcome to 2024 🙂 I’m excited to be starting my year by writing out another post with my FIRE Flowers! These year-end wrap ups are so cathartic to write. Hopefully they are just as fun to read! Ha! The topics to wrap up 2023 include: Travel Updates Annual Expense, Income, and Net Worth Review 2023 Goal Results Travel Updates This year the has a heavy travel year. I took my PTO balance down to low double digits, which is a first for me, and well worth it! My travels included: Cancun, Chicago (IL), Lake Okoboji (IA), Baltimore (MD), Greensboro (NC),…

  • 100 Reasons to FIRE

    Hola FIRE flowers! Happy October:) My spouse and I love October. Admittedly, I startle easily from horror movies, so we add  horror movies and series to our Netflix list throughout the year, and then come October 1st, let the frights begin! And we move from light spooky in the beginning of the month to deeply mentally destabilizing creeps for the final Halloween weekend. That’s what I’ll be getting up to this month, starting tonight! Our topics for today are: 100 Reasons to FIRE Travel Updates! Q3 2023 Update & Goals 100 Reasons to FIRE It’s all about the MOTIVATIONS babes!…