Today was the first day of home school. My first day, teaching our daughter. It wasn't meant to be, but Mrs Chaos pulled a sickie....

We have an ongoing debate in our family about whether our kids should follow in their father’s finance footsteps and enjoy a career of glamor and endless excitement... My wife is not a fan of the idea and is instead subtly (or not so) indoctrinating them as engineers!

So what do you do when your other half suggests you spend a lot of money to meet the founders of FI at a Chautauqua. Chatta-what? FI? What now?!!

Earlier this year I came across a totally new way of looking at life and finances – via the growing 'Financial Independence' (FI) movement. So what is it???

Let the tooth fairy pay for your dentures… For those of you that read the post about our tooth fairy failure, you’ll be pleased to hear that I’ve accepted full responsibility, have done a log of begging on my knees, and my gracious wife has now forgiven me for mis-assigning blame. But talking about the tooth fairy got me wondering about what the tooth fairy...

So, it turns out that our tooth fairy suffers from forgetfulness.  She’s 1 for 3 in our limited experience with her.  Leia was not overly surprised by the latest fairy failure last night.  I’d like to think she’s learning valuable lessons about how unfair and unreliable the world is ...But the truth is, the world already provides enough of those lessons.  If the tooth...

There’s nothing I love more than tracking the spend on my latest Death Star project on a spreadsheet. I love personal finance. And spreadsheets. My friends and family know about my personal finance fixation and occasionally ask about the first step to take when trying to improve their personal finance skills. (I do surprisingly have a few friends, and my family didn't have much choice...

You often hear that there are only two certainties in life: death and taxes.  If you are a parent, there’s a third. Poo. Lots of poo. Poo-based blockbusters with never-ending sequels (Lethal Poo, Poo-tanic, Poo Hard, Poo Harder, etc).  Four kids mean that we’ve seen our fair share of poo, including the latest 'release' last Saturday.  After a round of parental high-fiving, having gotten...