Category: Building the Stake (Finance)

Finance, frugality, and our life with money

9 Truths of Remote Work

9 Truths We Have Learned in Our 12 Years of Remote Work

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For many people, remote work is the dream. Wouldn’t you love to end the commute, drop the wardrobe expense, and leave the land of fluorescent lighting behind? How great would it be to work on your own time? To see all of your child’s track meets without worrying about the boss? Wouldn’t it be lovely to travel as a digital nomad, tethered only to a laptop and strong wi-fi signal?

Paul and I work remotely, and have for over 12 years. We love the freedom of working from home. We love the fact that we get to walk downstairs in the morning and fire up the laptops. Neither one of us has spent money on “professional clothes” in over five years. Paul has coached all of his daughter’s community basketball teams. And I have the freedom to help my son with homework whenever he needs it. Remote work also gives us the freedom to pick up side hustles to make extra income along with our main hustle.

In a few years, when we embark on our poker pilgrimage, we hope to transition from home remote workers to digital nomads. We look forward to travelling the country without worrying we will run out of money along the way.  We can continue to work part-time as we travel, continually replenishing our travel budget.

But working from home is not a great fit for everyone. Yes, there are many benefits, but there are potential pitfalls as well. If you are considering working remotely,  you should be aware of the pros and cons that come with the lifestyle.

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The Frugal Poker Player Reduces Costs

The Frugal Poker Player: 6 Tricks to Reduce Costs while Playing Poker

Heather Leave a comment

Poker is a lot of fun (thus our grand plan to spend a year traveling the country playing poker). Poker can also be very expensive. Most players understand the importance of paying attention to your poker budget or bankroll to ensure that they are playing in games they can afford. However, many players overlook the importance of accounting for all of the other spending that goes along with playing poker. In order to maximize your poker opportunities, you need to reduce costs associated with playing, and travelling to play, poker. This is an area that you can not ignore. If you play your way to break even (or better) poker and do not account for these costs, you will quickly find yourself in the red.

So how do you reduce costs when playing poker? Here are 6 tricks to help you out:

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Best Side Hustles for Making Extra Money on the Side

Best Side Hustles: Our Secret to Micro-Hustle Profits

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Disclosure: Some of the links on this page are affiliate links. However, we only include affiliate links for products and services that we use and love. For more information, see our Disclosure page.

We spend a lot of time looking for the best side hustles to help us move toward our grand plan to travel the country for a year. We have also put a lot of energy into thinking about how we will save for the trip. Our overarching plan is something of a three-legged stool.

The first leg would be our ongoing income stream. We are very fortunate that our main hustle is location independent. We currently both work from home as data scientists and could do so as easily from Malibu as from Massachusetts. While we hope to reduce our data analytic hours during our journey, they will remain a significant source of income. We also have a primary side hustle writing and working for a poker training site that we hope to continue as we travel.

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DIY Project Debate

Throwdown Thursday: DIY Projects or Call a Professional?

Heather Leave a comment

Paul and I try our hardest to be frugal. We do everything we can to save money on groceries, we bought a smaller car to save on gas, and we even created our dream wedding on a tight budget. One area in which we have some difficulty, however, is agreeing whether to take on DIY projects around the home or to call in an expert. Paul always votes for DIY. Whether it’s fixing the toilet or trying to replace the alternator on his car. He wants to do it himself. I am a bit more cautious. I remember the time he tried to glue his car mirror back on the car after it got knocked off. And the time when we tried to replace a light socket and ended up calling the electrician anyway. Paul remembers only the wins. He has blissful amnesia about the DIY project fails.

Paul: What’s the opposite of “blissful amnesia”? Because you’ve got it in spades. Not every fix is going to work, sure. But there have been plenty of successful shower and toilet repairs, and some car tweaks that have worked out just fine.  Each DIY project success leads to money saved. As long as we do no harm, we’ve lost nothing but time. Ok, maybe an occasional part or two. But the professionals can always come in and mop up the fails.

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Dream Wedding on a Budget in New Orleans

Our Dream Wedding on a Budget in New Orleans

Heather 18 Comments

Paul and I are coming up on the first anniversary of our wedding this month (yep, we’re newlyweds). Did you know that the average wedding cost in the United States last year was over $25,000? Paul and I agreed that we had no interest in spending that kind of money on our wedding. We are working to side hustle and save money wherever we can in order to achieve our dream of a year traveling the country. Rather than drop $25k, we planned an amazing wedding in our favorite city, New Orleans, on almost no budget at all. How did we do it? A lot of careful planning and research enabled us to have a wedding on a budget that was also the wedding of our dreams.

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