It’s that time of year again. Time for everyone to go bananas about getting good deals on stuff they don’t need, just in time for Christmas! I hate the overall focus on buying, buying, buying, this time of year. While we’ve picked up a few things that we NEEDED during previous Black Fridays, overall we try to avoid the whole thing each year.
This year we’ve decided to try to put more of a focus on experiences. Instead of spending hundreds of dollars on items that will get used initially and then cast aside, we are hoping to create lifelong experiences instead. I’m going to take my wife to a concert and am planning on taking my daughter to a sporting event. This approach also fits nicely with one of our other desires to have less of an impact on the planet. Yes, I know that sounded awfully “tree huggish” but we do really want to lessen our overall impact on the natural resources of our planet. Of course, we will buy a few things to have under the tree, because, while I know my daughter will be excited for the experience, I also know she’s 10 years old and would like a few toys as well.
On a completely separate note, we are continuing to do well with our retirement planning and focusing on accumulating assets. It’s amazing to see how money makes more money. Now that we’ve amassed a pretty healthy investment portfolio, it’s cool to see the gains on those investments starting to rival our contributions. I think we’ve finally hit the point where we could pretty much stop contributing to our investments and still end up with a reasonably healthy retirement income. Of course we won’t stop contributing, but it’s nice to know that all that early work of contributing as much as we could, will make things easier for our last 15 years of working. If we can continue with our same jobs until we hit retirement age, we should have no trouble maintaining our lifestyle. Even if we get experience an unexpected job loss, I think we should still be in pretty good shape during our retirement years. If I could go back and thank my wife and I in our 20’s, I definitely would.