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The All Options Considered blog and our posts are shared for entertainment purposes only, with the intent to generate conversations. The views expressed on this website and during coaching sessions are personal opinions and should not be construed as financial advice for your situation. Please seek professional advice as appropriate to determine what may be best for your individual needs. All Options Considered does not assume any liability with regard to financial results based on the use of the information provided here. Furthermore, commenters and linked sites are solely responsible for their views and content, which do not necessarily represent the views of All Options Considered.

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Transparency

Our projects are focused on encouraging and supporting financial literacy especially for underserved communities including women, people of color, and LGBT+ people.

Regarding our backgrounds, Ali grew up with a single parent on welfare and food stamps and then she ended up with $43k in student loan debt after paying for college. Alison grew up with challenges in school and dropped out of college because she is profoundly dyslexic and didn’t have the resources needed to finish her degree. Over time we both found balance between our challenges and advantages, and learned the lessons we needed to manage our own finances and retire early. Financial independence is the concept that tied everything together for us.

Earning money through the blog

We use our blog as a personal hobby rather than a business. We aren’t personally using our blog as an income stream, but we applaud others who run successful businesses through their blogs. We are not interested in selling any products, displaying any ads, or hosting content from others on our site. However, we did occasionally include Amazon affiliate links in some of our posts for things we purchased and used in hopes of covering our blog expenses. For example, in 2021 we paid $82 for our domain name and website hosting, and we earned a total of $18.51 from Amazon affiliate links.

All Options Considered has also benefitted from including other affiliate links on our site, including TrustedHousesitters.com and Travelingmailbox.com on our site. For 2021 we paid TrustedHousesitters $189 for a Basic combined membership as sitters as well as hosts, and we earned four free months of membership from our affiliate link. We also paid $299 for our Traveling Mailbox account for 2021 (we are still using that account despite the fact that we stopped traveling full time) and earned $19.90 from our affiliate links.

That means our total combined income from our blog in 2021 was less than $40 plus four months of TH membership. These small commissions will seem inadequate to some people, but they’re just fine for us because we have no interest in turning this blog into a business.

Sharing our numbers

We each earned around $80k per year from our respective employers when we met in 2004. And we both stayed with one employer for most of the next 14 years until we retired, though Ali finally changed jobs for her last two years of employment. No job hopping left our salaries relatively flat and Alison’s salary was still under $100k when she retired. Ali’s salary went over $100k for the last two years in her career. We did our best to maximize our 401K’s and also save as much of our salaries as possible in various investment accounts (IRA’s, Roth’s, and a brokerage account).

We share a lot of information about our own personal path to financial independence, our spending during retirement, and our own experience and plans for the future. Our goal is to encourage and inspire others to talk about their own personal finances with people they trust (not the internet) and follow their own goals.

Inheritance

In 2007 we inherited a family home on a rural Canadian island from Alison’s aunt. We should have sold the house immediately but we decided to slowly improve it because the house came with some heavy emotional obligation. Over time we set aside money for a new roof, a big foundation repair, demolished an above ground pool, had a furnace and forced air system installed, replaced all of the appliances, finished the basement as a separate apartment for our use, and so on. It was a rural island property and it took around 5-6 hours for us to get there from our home in Seattle on a good day, plus ferry costs at around $168 per trip and gas for the drive. Keeping that home for our occasional use and summer use for the whole family was definitely not a wise financial decision.

After almost 10 years of trying to keep up with maintenance costs we realized we had to sell it to regain control of our finances, and we realized we would not be able to recoup our costs with the sale. This was probably our biggest lesson in lifestyle inflation since we knew by then that we had been keeping that house partly to try to keep up with some friends who had rental properties and vacation homes. In the end we learned what we needed to learn!

Living off of our investments

Yes, we are living off of our investments now that we have retired. We wanted a safe withdrawal rate that felt safe to us, and we know handling medical costs within the US health insurance system will be very expensive over our lifetime. So we retired with 33x our 2018 living expenses, a 3% withdrawal rate, and 5 years of living expenses in cash. We don’t have additional income streams, and we aren’t trying to win first place in a frugality contest. We are just sticking to our budget and being mindful about our money.

We have 5 investment accounts in our portfolio. More than half of our total portfolio was in our taxable brokerage account when we retired, thanks in large part to the condo we sold in 2018. Our goal was to only use our brokerage account for the early years of our retirement. Later we would also be accessing Alison’s IRA after she turned 59.5 years old, and ten years after that we would also have access to Ali’s IRA since she’s ten years younger than Alison. We estimated that our brokerage account could fund our living expenses for at least 15 years, knowing we can’t predict what the market will do. And we planned to continue with annual conversions from our IRA’s to our Roth’s to avoid RMD’s if possible while we were under age 59.5 years old, knowing that would be a challenge while we’re using the ACA marketplace health insurance system and staying under the 400% of poverty limit in order to qualify for premium tax credits.

As of January 2022, we own our own home in Arizona. We are enjoying the occasional trip and time with our family and friends. And planning for the future!