I wanted to provide an update on upcoming changes at Root of Good. Don’t worry – a lot will stay the same, but there will be a few changes. I’ll elaborate more below, but in a nutshell, I plan to take a one year hiatus from posting highly detailed income, spending, and net worth reports. 

What stays the same? I hope to continue posting monthly updates of some sort. We go on a lot of trips which produce a constant stream of interesting pics from around the world. This blog is a good home for sharing those photos with the world at large. I don’t think I will pivot to a full time travel blogger but we’ll see where this year takes us! 

Another goal is to publish several more posts on some topics I’ve been wanting to write about for a while that involve my reflections on FIRE finances, higher education, and future plans. 

An Experiment

I started this blog 13 (!!) years ago in 2013 as an experiment. I spent a few days watching youtube videos and reading blogs on “how to blog” and figuring out the technical aspects, the creative aspects, and the basic organizational techniques to succeed in the blogosphere. Root of Good turned out pretty well given I was a complete novice at the time! 

A lot has changed in the last 13 years in the online self-publishing space and larger social media realm. Web forums declined in relevancy. Tiktok, Substack, and Discord came into existence. Twitter became X. Facebook matured into a place I mostly use for selling stuff locally and connecting with a dozen different groups centered on various hobbies and interests. 

I suppose my little blog isn’t immune to change either. I’m approaching this change of no longer publishing all my personal finance details as a one year break to see how it goes. Maybe it becomes permanent or maybe I reboot the detailed monthly reports. Only time will tell. 

My monthly early retirement updates will still touch on some spending, good deals I find, travel hacking, and other finance topics I encounter each month. But there won’t be a comprehensive accounting like in the past. 

It just takes too much time to compile all of my spending/income stats each month. So I’m taking a step back. 

Abandoning Expense Tracking

After tracking all my spending down to the dollar for the last 2 decades, I’ve decided to relax a bit. I’ve won the game, and all I’m doing now is running up the score. “The Score” in this case is a number that’s been trending upward from $1 million, to $2 million, to $3 million and now over $4 million. 

Our spending has been trending up over the last 13 years as well but it hasn’t increased by 200% since retiring like our net worth has. The increase is closer to the rate of inflation (a few percent a year most years). 

As a result, we’re spending a record low percentage of our net worth annually. Our annual spending of approximately $40,000 from a $4 million portfolio is a one percent “withdrawal rate“. Somewhere around 3-4% is considered a safe withdrawal rate for a 30 to 50 year long retirement. So we can afford to spend three or four times as much as we are currently spending without putting our investments at risk of depletion long term. Like I said, we’re just running up the score. 

I’m giving up on expense and income tracking mainly to cut down on several hours per month of reviewing credit card statements, dealing with data sync issues, reconciling accounts, updating incorrectly categorized expenses, and reviewing and compiling all this data for the blog so that it makes sense. 

In the future I may resume expense tracking if there is a clear need for the data. But for now, it just seems like data that gets logged but doesn’t provide much actionable information to make meaningful improvements in my financial life. 

Should other people track their spending? 

Yes, I think tracking spending is a valid exercise for the majority of people. It makes the big spending areas more obvious to you and harder to ignore. You’ll feel the cognitive dissonance of the big ugly numbers in the areas you want to ignore, and maybe improve your finances as a result. 

No matter whether you’re saving for FIRE or recently retired, you want to make sure you’re not spending too much overall, or in specific categories. It’s a useful tool. Once you have way way more money than you need to support your routine spending, then it might be time to stop tracking spending. There is beauty in data but not without effort.

Anecdotally, most of my FIRE friends don’t track spending in great detail. They just spend what they want and their net worth continues to grow over time. This might be a function of the stock market mostly going up up and up during the last decade. But at some point, your spending is easily covered since your investments tend to grow at a much faster rate (about 9-10% per year on average) compared to your spending (about 3% per year if you’re just increasing spending to match inflation). 

Summary

Monthly updates at Root of Good will look a little different going forward. Less quantitative and more qualitative in nature. No more detailed spending and income reports that shows where every dollar goes. No more net worth updates (we’re a bit over $4 million as of February 2026). 

I’m economizing how I spend my time and hope to use the time savings for other fun pursuits and to get back to publishing other thoughts here on the blog. 

I will continue monthly updates but they’ll be different in nature. There will be photo dumps galore from daily life and trips around the world, for sure. 

That’s all for now from me. I plan on having a combined January-February early retirement update published in the next week or so. We just got back from a 16 night cruise to Hawaii, and I’d love to share some pics and thoughts from that trip. 

Do you track your own spending in great detail? Is it a useful metric that helps you save and invest better? 

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