Purchases Archives - Ms. Financial Literacy

The Then and Now

In several of the early articles of this blog (such as here, here and here), I mentioned that my husband loves numbers, analytics and investing. And he’s very good at all three. He started educating himself on personal finances, the stock markets and investing while in his mid 20s, and he continues to do so each day. Even though he’s not a day trader, he follows the markets (and major headlines) daily and analyzes our investment portfolio performance against several market indices. We use Personal Capital to track our finances and net worth. You can read my comprehensive review of this free online financial tool here.

From the start of our relationship, he’s always been the one that spends more time taking care of our equities (stocks) and fixed income (bonds) investments. This is still true even after I had my transformative moment (you can read about my story here). Despite my accelerated learning of the stock markets and investing in the past year, he’s still the more knowledgeable one.

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One thing that has been different in our relationship since that transformative moment is that nowadays I take a much more active role making investing decisions with my husband. I have a desire to learn from him (and many others) and continue to build my financial knowledge. Whereas before, I was glad to let him take care of all investments-related matters. Even when he tried to get me involved, I quickly dismissed his efforts.

Two People in a Relationship

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Our Frugal Ways

When I published the article on our savings rate over the past seven years, some of your reactions were that my husband and I have been living a very frugal life. And I can understand how you might’ve jumped to such conclusion. Even our closest family (including our parents) and friends asserted that we live a frugal lifestyle. My husband and I can spend hours trying to prove them wrong (btw, we are super proud of our frugal ways; frugal does not equal cheap), but most people believe what they want/choose to believe.

We’re willing to share our strategies with those who are willing to take the time to read (the articles published on this blog) and/or listen. We have no room for doubters and skeptics. We’re not trying to convince anyone that our way of life is better. Our goal is to show you another way of life and what can be financially possible for you. The choice is yours.

New Series

With all that being said, I’ve decided to start a series where every month I share five things/experiences that we splurged on and five things we’ve decided to wait (which will wait for a later post). Each article will include our thought and decision-making processes, too. My hope is that this series will give you another peek into how my husband and I structure our financial life. Our lifestyle is conventional in some ways, but not so much so in other ways (I shared a little bit about this in an older article).