I'd like to thank you for reading and participating in makingourway.
It's been a great adventure and would have been a much more difficult one without your support, advice and feedback.
Here are some thoughts for the coming year and makingourway:
- Consistent posting - we're pretty good at this, but I'd like to make sure we do it daily
- Updated format - I'd love to rework the blog's look - maybe the new version of blogger will help
- Better bookmarking, etc... I'll try to put delicious and digg links in - need to learn about these - I'm so 1990s
- Integrate a Q&A / question box process into the blog
- Discussion of immense life changes and other things to come:
- move to IL
- wife's new job, our bigger family
- buying a new house in IL
- selling our old house in NC
- keeping my job at Big Company
- life as an employee (vs. business owner)
- experience with investment advisor
- creation of a formal financial plan with a financial planner
- detailed budgets and family economic analysis
- discussions on reducing spending
- new investment strategy and allocation plan (and how it works)
- investment discussions and thoughts
- tax planning
- efforts to make blog self-sustaining (integrate unobtrusive advertising)
- estate planning issues
- more prosper thoughts
- discussion of personal finance blogging ethics
- personal technology discussions
Please let me know if there are any additional topics you would like to hear me discuss.
As always, everything makingourway talks about comes from the perspective of a father in his late 30s trying to lay a foundation for his children's future and one day an early retirement.
Our voice -- makingourway is fairly unique in the personal finance Blog world:
- We are in our late 30s - think of us as the over-the-horizon-radar for most personal finance bloggers, who are usually younger
- We are advanced in our careers
- We have owned, bought and sold businesses - not just been employees
- We have a high family income, which introduces a very different perspective and many new issues on investing, tax and estate planning
- We have a full family, but at a later age than most
- Grandma and Grandpa live with us
- We have over $500k in investible assets - which opens up a broader world of investment options -- and closes some off
- We have aggressive goals - in general aggressive networth and savings growth of over $100k each year
I hope these differences come through in our writing and topic selection -- also we hope they are interesting to you!
Have a wonderful New Year, makingourway
4 comments:
A topic suggestion, How we can get to your position from a position of debt, not making over $50k a year and still live within our means, make investments, etc.
I think most books miss the point on these issues, because the foundation is skewed.
I love reading peoples net worth goals.
I believe it to be true that you will generally accomplish what you set out to accomplish.
I recently read someone's goal of increasing networth by $10,000. This made me sad, as I knew this person has such GRAND dreams of financial freedom, then sets such a low goal. The overall dream will take YEARS to accomplish with such thinking.
Congradulations on obtaining your goal of $100,000 increase. That is great!
We set a goal in 2006 to double our net worth. That goal was reached. We have the same goal for 2007. It feels a little more daunting this year, but even if we fall short by more than half, we have done quite well for ourselves!
What great comments - thanks Terry and around!
Around first, yes I do want to increase our networth by $100k - actually I think I can increase it to $105k. My stretch goal would be to increase it by $200k, but in order to do that I'd have to make immense personal family sacrifices that I'm not ready to make (with young children). We'll see how far I can get, though. Good luck doubling your networth - that is truely exciting and challenging!
terry, I should write about how i took my networth from - $20,000 to over $600k, but I don't think anyone would like the answers. The simple fact is it took time. Actually - not always. I was worth over $2.5M, but had a bad real estate deal collapse on me - virtualy wiped me out. I've never really mentioned it, but the last few years have been very much a starting over.
But that's another story.
I'll consider going into the above at another date and time - painful memories.
Regards,
makingourway
My advice as you go forward...
Pay for a good estate planning attorney... get a bullet proof reasonably priced CPA. Do perhaps pay for a little asset allocation advice (one time only as you are pretty advanced) and finally ditch the Quicken static advisor format it is by far the worst, weakest, and most unhelpful tool available. Try one of the many Monte Carlo Simulation Financial Software programs. They are superior and should be required as an entry point should you go searching for advisors. Other than that, and I say this in the best of sense, I have nothing to teach. Go forth and prosper. Good luck with the whole grandparents thing....
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