July 2024 Early Retirement Update – Second Month in Poland Edition

Welcome back to Root of Good, folks! After a very busy nine weeks of summer vacation in Poland, we are finally back home in Raleigh. We capped off our trip in Poland with nine days in Gdansk near the Baltic Sea before flying back to the United States. 

After a summer of exploring castles and cathedrals, narrow alleys in old villages, and tree-lined valley trails leading to waterfalls on the mountainside, it’s great to finally be home where we can relax in comfort. We have a full month before we hit the road again for a two week Alaskan cruise in September. 

Right now, we’re busy with the kids’ back to school activities. Two kids start college the day this post goes live, and the youngest kid will start seventh grade in about a week.

On to our financial progress. July was a stupendous month for our finances. Our net worth shot up by $129,000 to end the month at $3,249,000. Our income of $10,092 exceeded our spending of $3,735 for the month of July by a wide margin.  

Let’s jump into the details from last month.

Income

Investment income totaled $7,732 in July. Our equity index funds and ETFs pay dividends quarterly at the end of March, June, September, and December. As a result, we had a larger than normal amount of investment income last month since the dividends spilled over from the end of June. Here’s more on our dividend investments.

Blog income totaled $1,108 for the month. This represents a slightly above average month of blog income. 

My early retirement lifestyle consulting income (“consulting”) was $550 last month. That represents three hours of consulting work during the month. Summer always seems to be slow so maybe my consulting hours will increase heading into the fall. I can’t complain about the slowdown though. Nine weeks of vacation with hardly any work is great! 

Tradeline sales income totaled $675 in July. Another great month. I ramped up my tradeline sales a few years ago and discussed it in a bit more detail in my October 2020 monthly post and in my July 2021 monthly post. Most years I make around $4,000 to $6,000 in exchange for lending out my stellar credit history from half a dozen credit cards. 

For last month, my “deposit income” was $27. The deposit income came from cash back and incentive bonuses from the Rakuten.com and Mrrebates.com online shopping portals (some of which was earned from you readers signing up through these links).

If you sign up for Rakuten through this link and make a qualifying $25 purchase through Rakuten, you’ll get a $10 sign up bonus (or more!). 

If you’re interested in tracking your income and expenses like I do, then check out Empower Personal Dashboard, formerly known as Personal Capital (it’s free!). All of our savings and spending accounts (including checking, money market, and more than half a dozen credit cards) are all linked and updated in real time through Empower Personal Dashboard. We have accounts all over the place, and Empower Personal Dashboard makes it really easy to check on everything at one time.

Empower Personal Dashboard is also a solid tool for investment management. Keeping track of our entire investment portfolio takes two clicks. If you haven’t signed up for the free Empower Personal Dashboard service, check it out today (review here).

Tracking spending was one of the critical steps I took that allowed me to retire at 33. And it’s now easier than ever with Empower Personal Dashboard.

Expenses

Now let’s take a look at July expenses:

In total, we spent $3,735 during the month of July which is about $400 more than our regularly budgeted $3,333 per month (or $40,000 per year). Travel and utilities were the two largest categories from last month. 

Detailed breakdown of spending:

Travel – $3,078:

Our travel spending of $3,078 represents everything we spent in Poland for the whole month of July plus a $400 deposit for our October 2024 cruise. The total just for Poland vacation spending was only $2,678.  

I didn’t track the travel spending in fine detail, but I have a rough estimate of where that $2,678 travel spending went:

• $1,000 – a seven night apartment rental plus 3 nights in hotels (2 rooms per night)
• $550 – rental car and gas
• $50 – parking
• $28 – Ubers/transit in Wroclaw when we didn’t have a car
• $300 – restaurants
• $500 – groceries
• $250 – tickets to attractions, national parks, museums, and castles

Most things are cheaper in Poland than they are in the USA. Gas is about the only thing noticeably more expensive because of added taxes.

But on a per-mile basis, gas is slightly cheaper in Poland because the rental car was much more fuel efficient than our cars in Raleigh. The rental car was a hybrid and it was smaller than our own subcompact car in Raleigh. With our fuel economy running around 70 mpg, gas was very cheap. Basically free. 

We drove about 2,000 miles around Poland during the summer. From Krakow in the south, west along the border with Slovakia and Czech Republic to the western border with Germany and then north and east through the central parts of Poland until we ended up in Gdansk (and eventually visited the northern coast of Poland and the Baltic Sea). We also took a lot of day trips with an hour or two of driving to explore the area or visit a castle or hiking trail. 

Cheap-ish gas and a $18/day rental car is a fantastic way to see a lot of the countryside without breaking the bank.

Get free travel like us

If you are interested in getting free travel from your credit card like I do, consider the Chase Ink Unlimited or Chase Ink Cash business cards (my referral link). Right now, the Chase Ink business cards offer an above average $750 to $1000 worth of Chase Ultimate Rewards points that can be redeemed instantly for $750 in cash. I just signed up for another new Ink card to snag one of these great bonus offers.

Chase is pretty liberal when it comes to “what is a business”. If you sell stuff on eBay or Craigslist or do some odd jobs occasionally then you have a business and could get a credit card as a “sole proprietor”. 

I use the 75,000 Chase Ultimate Rewards points by transferring them to my Chase Sapphire Reserve card (also offering a 60,000 point sign up bonus right now). With the Sapphire Reserve card, I can get 1.5x the points value by booking cruises, flights, hotels, or rental cars through their travel portal. Or 1.25x value by reimbursing myself for groceries. That turns the 75,000 points into $1,125 of free travel or $937.50 of free groceries. For example, I used 165,000 Chase Ultimate Reward points to pay for the $2,475 in taxes, fees, and gratuities on two of my fall cruises. Or I can transfer those Ultimate rewards points to over a dozen travel partners’ airline/hotel programs like United, Southwest, or Hyatt. 

Capital One VentureX card

Another favorite travel card in my wallet is the Capital One Venture X card. The Venture X card is a “keeper” for me. First off, it comes with a $750 sign up bonus after spending $4,000 in the first three months. The bonus is paid in the form of 75,000 bonus points that you can redeem against any travel purchases from anywhere. Then you earn a solid 2 points per dollar spent forever! The other big perk is airport lounge access. You can get yourself plus unlimited guests into Priority Pass lounges. And you plus two guests can get into Plaza Premium network lounges and Capital One Lounges. 

The Capital One Venture X card does have one catch – a $395 annual fee. But they reward you every year with an easy to use $300 travel discount plus $100 worth of points. Together, that makes $400 they give you annually which completely offsets the annual fee. Another benefit worth mentioning: you can add up to four authorized users for free, and they also get all the benefits of the Venture X card including the valuable airport lounge access. We used this perk to “gift” a pair of Venture X cards with airport lounge access to my brother in law and his wife to use on their family trip back home to Cambodia last April with their two young children. 

Since the annual fee is offset in full by travel credits each year, I personally plan on keeping the Venture X card forever since the card benefits are so great.

Utilities – $427:

We spent $33 on our water/sewer/trash bill last month. The water consumption is much lower when there is only one person at home. I also paid a part of the bill during June so the water bill is even lower than it typically would be during the summer months.

The natural gas bill was $18. 

The electricity bill was $376 for July and August. I paid for two months during July. These are the peak usage months where the AC runs a lot, and future bills will be lower throughout the cooler parts of the year.

Groceries – $169:

Our oldest daughter stayed in Raleigh this summer and we cover her grocery bills, so this $169 is what she spent during July. 

I include our overseas grocery spending in the “Travel” category of expenses. We aren’t as careful about shopping for sales and getting deals while we are buying groceries overseas. And we try a lot of new things. So I lump the groceries while traveling into our overall travel budget. 

Healthcare/Medical/Dental – $37:

Our current 2024 health insurance is free, thanks to very generous Affordable Care Act subsidies that we receive due to our low ~$48,000 per year Adjusted Gross Income. 

Our 2024 dental insurance plan costs $37 in premiums per month. We picked a plan from Truassure through the healthcare.gov exchange. The dental insurance does a good job of covering routine cleanings, exams, and x-rays plus most of the cost of basic procedures like fillings. 

Cable/Satellite/Internet – $25:

We pay $25 per month for a local reduced rate package due to having a lower income and having kids. 50 mbit/s download, 10 mbit/s upload. 

Gas – $0:

No normal gas spending for the month of July. I include gas for our Poland rental car in the “travel” budget category. 

Spending for 2024 – Year to Date

 
We spent $20,315 for the first seven months of 2024. This annual spending is about $3,000 less than the budgeted $23,333 for six months per our $40,000 annual early retirement budget. I haven’t increased our annual budget for inflation in a decade, so at some point I need to revisit the budget numbers. So far, so good! No need to give ourselves a raise if we’re managing just fine within the current budget. 

As I mentioned in April, our kids’ college costs are completely paid for by their financial aid so far. So college spending should remain rather modest throughout the rest of 2024 into 2025. And it appears that both of our older children are on track to finish their bachelors degrees in 2025

The wildcard spending for 2024 will be some upcoming dental work for Mrs. Root of Good. We still don’t know what this will look like but we’ll find out more in the fall once we return home from our summer trip. At least we’re running $3,000 below our budget, so any large dental expenses won’t make our total annual spending completely out of line for the year.

We have about six weeks of cruises coming up during September, October, and November. They are all paid for and all flights and pre-cruise hotels are booked. So vacation expenses should be modest for the rest of 2024, unless we start booking parts of our big summer 2025 trip. We have no clue where we’re headed in 2025 so we have to figure that out first! 

Monthly Expense Summary for 2024:

Summary of annual spending from more than a decade of my early retirement:

• 2014 – $34,352
• 2015 – $23,802
• 2016 – $38,991
• 2017 – $31,708
• 2018 – $29,058
• 2019 – $25,630
• 2020 – $28,466
• 2021 – $31,740
• 2022 – $29,449
• 2023 – $37,865
• 2024 – $20,315 (through 7/31/2024)

Net Worth: $3,249,000 (+$129,000)

Our net worth shot up by $129,000 to end the month at $3,249,000. That’s a new all time high! 

We are not too far from watching our net worth triple since retiring early almost 11 years ago. Who would have thought that possible when we quit working?! 

For the curious, our net worth reported above includes our home value (which is fully paid off). I value the house at $300,000, which is probably what we would net after sales expenses. However, please note that I don’t consider my home value as part of my portfolio for “4% rule” calculation purposes. I realize folks ask me about that every month so I just wanted to state that here for clarity.

Life update

Another grand summer adventure is in the books. We’re back home and settling in to our routine in Raleigh. The kids are back in school, the weather is starting to cool off, and everything is returning to normal. 

Even though I get a ton of enjoyment and enrichment from our travels overseas, it’s always great to get back home. Our house in Raleigh is so comfortable and has everything we want.

I jokingly refer to vacationing in Europe as “camping” because we often miss the creature comforts we enjoy at home such as air conditioning, window screens, shower curtains, clothes dryers, and large properly functioning refrigerators. I’m okay with “roughing it” to a certain extent while traveling because I enjoy seeing all the places we visit. Creature comfort sometimes has to come second to “exploring off the beaten path”. 

A period away from home where you have to cope with the occasional bit of adversity serves to highlight just how nice you have it at home. I think we grow accustomed to all the niceties in our lives and forget just how good we have it until those nice things are temporarily taken away. 

So we saw a lot of cool things in Poland and also got a reminder of just how fortunate we are to have the amenities we enjoy at our home in Raleigh. 

Well folks, that’s it for me this month. See you next month! 

What do you think of the pics from Poland? A place you might want to visit? Or give it a pass? 

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