Our FI Nest

All my life I've lived in a scarcity mindset. I've lived with a feast or famine mentality when I have a goal in mind. I've gotten better as I've become more financially secure, but I still remember. I remember times where I'd go hungry rather than buy a chocolate bar from a vending machine because that cost wasn't budgeted. I remember being so frustrated at life's unexpected events if they derailed our savings, even worse if it was Papa Bird incurring it.  In the last few years though, I've felt a shift happening. I've been moving more into an abundance mindset. I've been able to appreciate spending on little treats for us, not caring that my grocery budget has doubled as I've struggled living through a pandemic. Heck I've even stopped tracking our expenses in this last year. I still update our net worth monthly (hello date night for us!), but that helps move me further into abundance mindset. It's easy as we've now hit our LeanFI...

My current limbo has been dragging me down a bit. I'm trying to stay positive and keep myself productive so I can feel like I'm accomplishing something with my days and not wasting my time checking and rechecking various social media. Bonus most of these things are some frugal wins... Planted my garden this weekend. Hoping that these tiny plants will provide lots of fresh produce over the summer. Less frugal was having to buy some fencing to go around them as the bunnies have been eating all my plants. Spent $80 on the netting and stakes but should be able to use it again over the next couple years.  Planted lots of tomatoes, cucumbers, zucchini, lettuce, green beans, carrots and beets. I did go out and buy a few few seedlings ($30) after the plants I grew were looking pretty sad and wind battered. Getting creative with our leftovers instead of succumbing to the desire to get take out. Had some leftover spaghetti sauce and pulled chicken I'd made earlier in t...

I've always been frugal and saving and delayed gratification has come naturally. My Dad always told me that if I saved 10% of my income and invested it I'd be a millionaire by the time I hit 40. Likely one of my biggest financial mistakes was just believing that blindly without doing the math. The reality is you need to save much more than 10 % or perhaps have the 10-15% interest rates of the 1980s when he told me that. So based on that, I set up automatic withdrawals to my RRSPs of roughly 10% and figured I was set. If I want to dwell on the missed opportunity part we could have easily saved more in various investment accounts and made massive returns during the 2008 downturn. I started working in 2003 and as long as I'd been able to stay steadfast and not panic, while focusing on investments we could potentially have been much farther ahead. Being debt adverse our main strategy was paying down the mortgage and a little bit of real estate. So definitely not terrible ov...

Recently it was my daughter's 5th birthday. As with most things in life I try to keep the costs in mind without scrimping on the overall experience. This year I've been trying to move towards more experience gifts rather than more stuff. We royally failed on that account at Christmas but her birthday gave us the chance to make up for it. We did discuss coming up to her birthday that we would give her less gifts but do a fun experience instead and she was excited about that. I did still want her to have a gift to open so we got her a new story book collection to expand bed time reading, which I picked up at Winners for $10. I also made her a dress that matches the Minnie mouse one I'd previously made her  using the free Love Notions   Doll dress . I'm really pleased with how it turned out, however she has yet to put on her and the doll's version. Hopefully that will come. The pattern is very cute and easy to sew together. I did change it a bit as I was usin...

Last fall I started baking my own bread and realized it was actually pretty easy. I worked my way slowly into it, beginning by just dumping the ingredients into the bread machine. The bread was ok, but if this was going to become our main source of bread, I'd need to get a bit better at it. Then I started just using the dough function and baking the loaves in the oven. That improved the density of the bread (most of the time), but I was needing to bake twice a week to get the roughly 4 loaves my family goes through. Around the same time my bread machine broke, my stand mixer (a lower end model) did too, so I took advantage of a Costco sale on the KitchenAid Stand mixers and decided if I was going to spend $300 on an appliance I better use it for more than just cupcakes! I bought 2 more loaf pans and increased my recipe a bit so I could get away with making bread just once a week. Since then I've challenged myself to not buy bread and have been curious how much it saves on...

Starting a new blog always seems to beg the question, start with an introduction when you know no one is really reading, or just dive right into content? For organizational sake I feel I should provide a little background and blog goals. For the moment this blog will serve as a journal of my family's journey to FIRE (Financial Independence Retire Early). Not sure how early the retirement part will come so we are focused on the Financial Independence part and the freedom that gives us to find our best life.  Who are we and what's our best life? Well, really it's just me who will be journaling our journey. PapaBird has come around to FI but does not get the RE idea. However we've always been good savers throughout our relationship and now I'm focused on accelerating that journey as I'm losing the motivation to keep advancing in my career and would rather more free time. I'm a 38 year old woman, wife, mother, maker and well not sure what else to add....