Many personal finance experts stress the importance of “paying yourself first.”

According to Investopedia, paying yourself first means automatically saving a portion of each paycheck. Money is routed from your paycheck directly into a savings or investment account. Before you begin paying monthly living expenses or making other purchases, you’ve already put some money into savings.

One of the simplest ways to pay yourself first is routing a portion of your paycheck into your employer’s 401(k) plan. I’ve done this ever since I started working. The savings I have built up in my 401(k) are a major reason we may have a chance to pursue early retirement! As an added benefit, many employers match a portion of your 401(k) contributions.

Over the past quarter century, I have bought and sold dozens of individual stocks in my brokerage account and through Dividend Reinvestment Plans.

Some of my trades have been big winners.

And some have been big losers.

But thinking back over a period of decades, even the biggest winners and the biggest losers tend to fade from my memory.

The trades I actually tend to remember the most are the ones I didn’t make.
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Last month the ROMT family made our first trip to Walt Disney World!

While both Mrs. ROMT and I had visited in the past, this trip was the first time our elementary school-aged children visited Florida and the House of the Mouse.

All in all, we had a great family vacation and made lots of memories with one another. We’ll share some of the highlights in this and future posts.

Along the way, we also made a number of smart – and dumb – financial decisions.

We’ll focus on the poor financial decisions associated with our vacation in today’s post, and save the good financial news for next time around!

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Earlier this year, I wrote about our Smart Financial Decision to pay off our mortgage.

Today I’m once again writing about our home, but this time, we’ll be revisiting a Dumb Financial Decision.

Quite simply, when we bought our home six years ago, we purchased a larger house than we really needed.

And the financial ramifications of that decision continue to negatively impact our personal finances every day. Continue Reading

Almost twenty years ago, when I was single and in my mid-twenties, I purchased my first home after several years of renting.

It was not fancy.

It was a simple two bedroom townhouse, with a one car garage, and a postage stamp of a backyard.

I got a great deal on the place, as I was able to purchase it as a foreclosure for well under $50,000. I dumped my life savings (outside of my retirement accounts) into the purchase, so I did not have a mortgage, which was a huge benefit as I tried to rebuild my financial safety net.

After living in my townhouse for over four years, I decided to return to school full time to pursue a master’s degree in an effort to change careers.

And then I made a financial decision I thought was prudent at the time.

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