10-19-2013, 07:06 PM
I haven’t done much sharing yet, so here’s a little bit about me. I’ll turn 44 before the end of the year, so I still have a ways to go to retirement. My wife and I live in Massachusetts with our 6 year old daughter. I have a good and interesting job in the electricity industry and I work with a lot of nice people. Unfortunately, conflict issues with my job prohibit me from investing directly in a lot of excellent dividend growth companies.
If things were normal for us, I don’t think I’d be too worried about saving for retirement. We have plenty of time left and live modestly and don’t have a lot of expensive tastes or hobbies. So we live below our means and we’ve been saving and investing for years (though the dividend growth focus only started about five years ago). The wrinkle we face is that our daughter has a serious medical condition. Relative to her diagnosis, she is doing well – she is full of joy and mischief and laughter. But our whole lives are bent around managing her condition, which consumes pretty much all of our “extra” time, energy, and money. We pay between $1000 and $2000 each month out of pocket on various medications, therapies, and the such. As you can imagine, that really crimps the amount of saving and investing we can do. (Most of my DG purchases are from transitioning old savings from cash and index funds into DG stocks.)
I used to be a real outdoorsman – lots of hiking and camping, but that has fallen by the wayside. Personal finance and investing are real passions of mine, and I have several friends who use me as an unofficial (and free) financial planner. (I’ll bet that’s true of many of you guys as well.) And I’ve really been enjoying working on getting this site up and running.
Those are all the highlights that I can think of at the moment!
If things were normal for us, I don’t think I’d be too worried about saving for retirement. We have plenty of time left and live modestly and don’t have a lot of expensive tastes or hobbies. So we live below our means and we’ve been saving and investing for years (though the dividend growth focus only started about five years ago). The wrinkle we face is that our daughter has a serious medical condition. Relative to her diagnosis, she is doing well – she is full of joy and mischief and laughter. But our whole lives are bent around managing her condition, which consumes pretty much all of our “extra” time, energy, and money. We pay between $1000 and $2000 each month out of pocket on various medications, therapies, and the such. As you can imagine, that really crimps the amount of saving and investing we can do. (Most of my DG purchases are from transitioning old savings from cash and index funds into DG stocks.)
I used to be a real outdoorsman – lots of hiking and camping, but that has fallen by the wayside. Personal finance and investing are real passions of mine, and I have several friends who use me as an unofficial (and free) financial planner. (I’ll bet that’s true of many of you guys as well.) And I’ve really been enjoying working on getting this site up and running.
Those are all the highlights that I can think of at the moment!
