495 Days Until The Big Day

CJ and I wanted to start this blog to document our journey to losing weight and saving money for the big day. We have a lot of both that need to happen until then. We also wanted to work on ways to have fun together that are not super expensive. One of the things that we are working on is making sure that we are not wasting money, in the past we have wasted money in many different ways that we will not go into here but let us say mistakes were made. One thing I would like to point out the point of this is not to sacrifice having fun, this is not meant to be something to endure but rather creating good habits and making life style changes so that we can save money, for the wedding and then house/retirement. We also want to make sure we stay healthy so that after have a very very long retirement.

 Cj is not going to like this blog but I am going to post it here Mr Money Mustache this guy retired at 30! He did this through having a very good job and keeping his savings to a maximum. He was a software engineer and his wife was also employed and they spent as a household with a child $24,000 a year! They said the goal for him was $600,000 in investments and a home full paid for. He figured he could manage about 4% a year in investment yield and with the fully paid for house he shouldn't have to much to worry about. It is a very interesting take on how there are other options than saving up millions of dollars and retiring at 60.

 This will probably end up being a cooking blog because that is really what I like to do. For example today we made Split Pea and ham soup. It is a great recipe from America's Test Kitchen that uses bacon and ham steak.

So you basically cook an onion or two if they are small.

Add the following:
 two cloves of garlic
two carrots
a stalk of celery

Cook 5 more minutes and then add:

a chunk of ham steak (about a pound)
2 sprigs of thyme two bay leaves
1 lb bag of split peas
3 pieces of bacon (raw)
7 cups of water
bring to a boil and simmer for 45 minutes, pull out the ham steak and set aside, simmer the rest for 30 more minutes.

Pull out:
thyme
bay laves
the bacon

Blend up the soup or use a favorite of mine and hand blend the soup to make it more creamy and add the ham back in and you are done. It is a super simple recipe, the thing I like about this is it uses water instead of stock. After you blend this though you have an incredible hearty soup. CJ and I are going to start bringing out lunch to work and this is one of the recipes that I think is perfect to bring especially while it is so cold outside!