Affluent but Frugal

I was recently fortunate enough to be in Germany for work and able to hop over to the Netherlands to visit an old friend of mine and meet her new baby! I promise, my life is normally not this glamorous. Since I live in the US, I hadn’t yet had the opportunity to try out EasyJet, a low-cost, no frills European carrier. No-frills is perfectly fine on a flight less than two-hours. It seems like they hardly finish serving beverages and we’re landing, did I need that ½ a soda for an extra 50 bucks added to my fare? Not really, no. Of course, I comparison shopped my one-way ticket from Berlin to Amsterdam which was surprisingly difficult. The lowest price “legacy” carrier was KLM (the Dutch national carrier) at around $160. EasyJet was offering fares for $85 from Berlin Schoenefeld to Amsterdam. Berlin Schoenefeld is the smaller Berlin airport but I didn’t really care about this, though it was a little further from my hotel. What really made my decision challenging was determi...

Over the 1 year planning period for our wedding we spent almost double what we normally would during that period. Our savings took a big hit. Ouch. We had money saved to pay for the wedding but we still put everything we could on a credit card in order to get our points. If we're going to spend a ton we might as well get some points from it that we could use for a honeymoon or gift cards or something. This would be level 1 - just making sure to use your normal cards. We went a step further and chased sign up bonuses to maximize our value and in doing so gave ourselves about a $4,000 wedding gift! Let me add,  I do not recommend going into debt to pay for a wedding. Have the wedding you can afford - this strategy is intended only to maximize the rewards from what you would spend anyway. We were originally planning to use the points from the wedding spending to pay for our honeymoon to Thailand but unfortunately some personal events have forced us to delay taking that...