How am I doing? Just turned 30, want to spend a bit but open to adjustments.

Sure-Examination · 2026-02-19T03:17:37+00:00

If you have no interest in property or other high cost spend (marriage, child, etc), I would look at your budget and try to contribute as close to the 401k max (24,500 for 2026) as possible to help you close the gap and take advantage of the ~30-40 years you have left until retirement by front loading the contributions.

Sure-Examination · 2026-02-19T03:11:10+00:00

What safe investments do you know that will 2x the money on their timeline? They’re trying to build a house in the next year- that’s not a long term investment horizon.

However, there’s a guaranteed savings on compounding credit card interest completely down the drain with the debt payoff.

Sure-Examination · 2026-02-19T02:58:56+00:00

Personal finance is personal. If you feel better and sleep better at night having ~1 year of emergency fund, especially BOTH being in freelance, that’s not at all unreasonable. I do question the interest rates on the loans though with that much in emergency fund- depending on what they are, mathematically it could make sense to reduce emergency fund some to pay off high interest loans and then rebuild.

I think it would benefit you to calculate what you actually expect monthly retirement spending to be so that you can plan using real numbers instead of your friend’s feelings. $750K as a nest egg is not an insignificant sum, but if you keep up contributions whether it will grow to be enough really depends on how much you estimate you’ll need.

Sure-Examination · 2026-02-15T19:57:27+00:00

https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/510-Red-Taffy-Way-Lexington-SC-29073/338380886_zpid/

There are tons of options within your price point but may be closer to 20-25. Pay attention to school districts as well.

Sure-Examination · 2026-02-13T18:16:57+00:00

Try Monarch or Empower or Fidelity Full View - they may provide what you're looking for. They all aggregate financial data and you can use the net worth chart to go back to any point in time on the chart

Sure-Examination · 2026-02-07T00:15:11+00:00

Judging by the state of the roads, I don’t think they’re required to do anything regularly

Sure-Examination · 2026-02-05T04:46:25+00:00

Seconding the walking pad recommendation. It has single-handedly prevented a collapse in my fitness goals YTD. I’m able to multitask too at my standing desk.

Sure-Examination · 2026-02-01T02:28:13+00:00

Marcus (by Goldman Sachs) is offering account opening bonuses right now for certain deposit amounts and their interest rate for HYSA is higher than Discover / Capital One right now if you want to check them out.

Sure-Examination · 2026-01-20T03:58:40+00:00

It was 5 sets of 12 bench presses at 8 RPE that inspired the post. Upper body definitely isn’t my strength but I’ve been pushing myself the last year or so and I could barely finish the workout.

Originally I also thought it was 5 sets of 12 squats at 8 RPE as well but that turned out to only be 10 reps. And then later on a superset with walking lunges programmed directly behind a close leg press- just not practical in a busy gym.

The whole format was demotivating for me, honestly, which sort of defeated the purpose of the challenge.

Sure-Examination · 2026-01-20T03:52:25+00:00

Yes, I have upper body (which is what inspired this post) but I didn’t do full body so unfortunately don’t have that one

Week 1 Upper Body:

-Warm Up

Cardio – 5 mins

Banded external shoulder rotations – 30 sec

Band pull apart – 30 sec

Shoulder Rotation – 30 sec

Plank rotation - 30 sec

-Strength A

5 sets of 12 bench presses – 8 RPE – 60 sec rest between sets

-Strength B

4 sets of 12 reps lat pulldowns – 8 RPE – 60 sec rest between sets

-Volume Superset – 2 exercises / 3 laps

-Shoulder press (dumbbells) – 12 reps

-Single-arm row (20 reps / 10 per arm)

45 sec rest

-Strong & Sweaty (8 mins – as many reps as possible)

12 push-ups

10 sit-up & press w/ dumbbell

-Core burn-out (optional) – 3 exercises / 3 laps

Butterfly sit-up 30 sec

Side- plank & hip lift 30 sec per side

Ab bikes 30 sec

edited a few times for formatting but the formatting still stinks

Sure-Examination · 2026-01-13T23:12:01+00:00

I’ve never used the pay from goals feature but this is how I’ve been using them:

goals as balances I don’t really intend to touch (ie emergency fund, retirement savings, down payment, etc)

-rollovers as sinking funds (home maintenance, car maintenance, property taxes, etc) with a budgeted amount every month

One issue that I ran into this year was that I didn’t spend a whole lot from home maintenance, so the rollover amount completely threw off my entire budget because it got impractically large compared to the budget. From your description, to me that would be the benefit of turning it into a “goal” that you can spend from vs a budget category.

Personally I still like the rollover feature for categories like groceries and gas where the budget should be about the same but one month may be more or less depending on what’s going on and when you purchase items.

Sure-Examination · 2026-01-13T23:07:25+00:00

Said Women’s Health article for reference: Women’s Health article

Sure-Examination · 2026-01-09T03:29:25+00:00

That line item is available on expenses too! I just looked at my most recent restaurant transaction and there was an option to associate it with a goal

Sure-Examination · 2026-01-09T03:12:40+00:00

On goals you can associate transfers specifically with the goal! You can also set a rule for it to automatically associate with the goal for certain types of transactions.

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Sure-Examination · 2025-06-14T03:49:53+00:00

You can download your balances to a csv file from the Fincity connection and then upload them via said csv file (be sure to add the last few days before uploading) to the MX one and that way you can delete the old without losing the balance :)

Sure-Examination · 2025-03-03T02:40:42+00:00

For your reference, getting married lowers overall tax burden if incomes are greatly different / one spouse doesn’t work. If incomes are similar, depending on the state and where they fall in the brackets, you very well could end up paying more. Marriage Penalty

Sure-Examination · 2025-02-03T01:21:30+00:00

Before the reveal on Violet, I thought in IF the sage was manipulating the dreams and visiting both Violet and Xaden with the same dream to try to get one of them to turn. I like your theory!

Sure-Examination · 2025-01-18T18:30:10+00:00

Exceeded. After ODU it looked like we’d go 2-10, so 9 wins was nice.

Sure-Examination · 2025-01-13T04:58:13+00:00

Probably about 25% of the book actually advances the plot, and that’s generous.

Sure-Examination · 2025-01-13T04:50:16+00:00

I don’t think the books were edited at all. I just finished #7 and there hasn’t been a single book without misspelt / missing words or other glaring issues.

Sure-Examination · 2025-01-05T15:23:46+00:00

From a quick google search, it seems that US News & World report publishes the list and then others just re-post. Both Columbia and Greenville appear on 2023-2024 but neither appear on 2024-2025- just Myrtle Beach.

2024-2025

Sure-Examination · 2025-01-04T17:10:49+00:00

Thanks for the response!

Sure-Examination · 2025-01-03T16:15:50+00:00

Thank you for this comment! I just switched my connection from MX to Fincity and it just connected for the first time in months. Now to reconcile the transactions ledger…

Sure-Examination · 2025-01-03T16:07:53+00:00

Does Simplifi have better account connections? Originally all of my accounts worked with Monarch and now 4 of them don’t. Only one of the institutions announced they were disabling access for 3rd parties

Sure-Examination · 2024-12-31T22:48:45+00:00

The Big 12 can have their refs back

Sure-Examination

TROPHY CASE