About us
We’re Ali and Alison Walker. We met in 2004, became active investors in 2005, married in 2006, reached financial independence in 2017, and retired in 2018. We love spreadsheets and crunching numbers, and we love talking about all things money with other people. READ MORE…
Blog Posts
Here’s what this blog will not do: Tell you what to do! Lots of personal finance bloggers are in the business of telling people what to do, but that’s not us. We share our stories in order to explain what we’ve learned about money and how we reached financial independence together. We want to support others in reaching their own unique personal finance goals and we also want to encourage people to share their own personal money stories. READ MORE…
New Year, New Planning Opportunity!
Hello 2024! We’re both feeling energized and excited by the new year and the chance to reboot our human computers for a fresh start. A lot of that enthusiasm came from finishing our routine of annual personal life planning, which we call our Seabrook Summit. The name comes from the location we chose for the…
Life After FI – 5 Years in Retirement
Since I quit my last job in September of 2018 and Alison quit her last job a few months before that, we always feel introspective when October rolls around. The other day we each re-read this post about life after FI and 4 years of retirement, and we were fascinated by how much things have…
Talking Money with Financial Mechanic
We’re convinced that when people share their money stories and dive into the emotional side of personal finance that’s a good thing. And that’s why we started our Talking Money series, to make room for others to share their stories. We’re all unique but we can always learn something new about money and life from others! Everyone,…
Where are you AOC? It’s time for an update!
“We haven’t seen a post from you in a while and are hoping all is well.” Willie’s Great Adventure We’ve gotten a lot of messages like this one above from our personal finance friends recently so it’s time for a quick update. Luckily (for the blog), we’re both sick on the couch today so we’ve…
Posts We Love
Allocation Strategies (Part 5: Allocation and Rebalancing)
Wow, time really does fly by! It’s been a minute since I finished Part 4 in this allocation strategies series, focused on efficient fund placement. But I have a surprise for you! Since we’ve reached Part 5 of this series it’s time for me to give you all a new tool to use on your…
Allocation Strategies (Part 1: Money Jobs and Budgeting)
Every year in May we review our portfolio and take care of any major rebalancing that’s needed including changing, adding, or dropping funds. During our first full calendar year in retirement as May rolled around and it was time to rebalance we couldn’t find tools that worked the way we wanted without buying a subscription.…
News From the AOC Compound
Somewhere back in our ancient history (around 2014?) we started dreaming with a close friend about building a queer compound. For this post we’ll try to protect our friend’s anonymity and call him Markus. We’ve probably had the “queer compound conversation” with all of our closest friends over the years, but with this one friend…
What’s Your Why for FI?
In the FIRE community one question that gets asked all the time is, what’s your why for FI? We each have our own motivation to change our approach to life and money and stop following the pack. Shortly after Ali and I made that decision in June of 2017 I asked Ali this question, “Why…
Avoiding the RMD Cliff
While we were still working our W-2 jobs I asked the experts questions like “Should I invest more in my 401k, or my Traditional IRA, or my Roth? Should I focus more on one account over another?” And the response was always “Well it depends on what your tax bracket will be in the future…
Outline Your Goals in a Personal Money Statement
Ask Yourself – Can We Go It Alone? We have been managing our own investments and money for a while now. It has definitely taken us some time (years) to build the confidence we needed to go it alone. The process became much easier for us once we found all the amazing information online from…
All Options Considered 