How we Do It

We’ve been blogging now since just before we got married, so we’ve been able to experiment over time and learn what works. We’ve gone through the process of getting married, dealing with prenuptial agreements, and all that comes afterwards. You can check out our story to learn more about how we met. Here are some of the best of posts on how we handle finances.

Couples Finance. We created our site Dual Income No Kids finance to discuss our experience around couples and money and share with others what has worked and hasn’t. We believe in supporting each other to dream and think big. While we function as a couple financially, we also both have his and hers experiences around financial issues. While it has changed over time, you can check out how we divide up our household expenses (this is an ongoing process), negotiating our budgets, how we co-manage our finances, how we’ve balanced business and our relationship, and how we’ve managed compromise.

Goals. A big part of how we manage our finances is to define our goals and then to go after them with a vengeance. We believe it is important to work together and get buy-in from both partners. Most of the time we are able to achieve our goals successfully, but there are also instances when our goals change, or we have to adjust to the realities of the recent financial crises by weighing our investment options and paying off Miel’s student loans rather than buying real estate as we had hoped. We believe in visualizing your goals and recently set our own five year goals.

Lifestyle. An essential component for how we reach our financial and personal goals is through our relatively frugal lifestyle. While we live in the heart of DC, overall one of the more expensive places to live in the states, we still manage to live well below our means. Some of the ways that we do this is by living in a 600 sq ft apartment, not owning a car, not having a TV, and of course not having kids. We pretty save everything we can manage. Simple as that. What can we say, it works. Plus, don’t buy stuff you cannot afford! We are also big fans of negotiation. You can check out our frugal page for more tips and ideas on how we do it.

Priorities. While we certainly value what money can do you for, we also have strong values and prioritize our spending accordingly. Miel particularly loves to travel, James likes to donate to charities he believes in, and we both recognize the value of working out regularly. We also appreciate the abundance that we have in our lives and try to keep things simple.

Finance Management. We have an emergency fund that helps keep us secure in times of difficulty. Keep in mind that this is less than what others might have, but we have a fair bit of semi-liquid assets and didn’t even have to dip into our reserve funds when Miel was between jobs for two months last year. We are fans of Mint.com, a personal finance site where you can keep track of your spending and savings.

Debt Management. You can also check out how we’ve paid off credit cards and then worked away at our eliminating our second mortgage and then Miel’s student loans.

Careers. A big part of what makes us both unique are our very individual career aspirations. James is a full time Ph.D. student and looks forward to a long career of producing meaningful science. He really values the impact that he can make to the field of criminology and enjoys business pursuits as well. Miel works in the international humanitarian field and has enjoyed climbing the career ladder and negotiating higher salaries along the way, to now manage regional programs in Africa with approximately 400 employees under her and a portfolio around $30 million annually. We recognize what a big difference raises make over the long term as well.

Business Ideas. We also often play around with different business ideas. Some of these come to fruition, and others are left by the wayside. Some of those that we’ve passed on by have been buying cheap land in Texas, or James’ dream of owning his own oil well. Miel is still open to the idea of buying a windmill if that is possible. While we might not go after all of our business ideas, we think it helps to keep our creative juices flowing and looking for new opportunities.

Investments. We tend to diversify our investments as much as possible, though we aren’t afraid to take chances from time to time. Here is the short story on how we’ve made our money. We have experience in buying and selling stocks and share our strategies on how we pick stocks, we are also big on income producing stocks. We’ve also weighed the pros and cons of investing in stocks versus pursuing business ideas. James is very into buying precious metals.

Personal Finance Advisers. While many people might find value in having a financial adviser, our personal approach has been to do it ourselves. If we had a fabulously wealthy financial mentor that we could work with we would probably pay up for that resource, but in our case most financial advisers don’t really seem to know a lot about building wealth. There are likely many good advisers out there, but our only experience in looking for one resulted in couple of salesman trying to get us to buy insurance, and we seem to be doing okay on our own so we have been looking for the help.

Cheers,

Miel&James