February 2023

I'm writing this post in late March, so unfortunately I won't remember everything in here.

The major item that happened here is that my wife got on board with FIRE 100%. This is a shock, since while she was generally on board, her exposure to frugal living historically has been through penny-pinching and cost-cutting in all the wrong ways, wrong places, and for the wrong motivations.

The thing that did it, though, was Playing with Fire documentary by Scott Rieckens. She watched the film and saw the emotional arc that Scott's wife went through and it so validated her own emotions that she was completely won over.

I actually don't fully understand how that worked from a logical or psychological perspective, but I think it is super cool, and it is quite shocking (in a refreshing kind of way) to me to have her so own FIRE herself that she'll proudly announce to me that she did this or that thing.

Another major advancement this month is that I began hypermiling. This is essentially composed of a bunch of tricks and tactics geared toward getting superior gas mileage out of your vehicle without engine mods. It's defined as beating what the EPA says a vehicle should be able to get. Our 2011 Honda Odyssey should get be able to get 19 miles per gallon in town, and 26 miles per gallon on the highway. I've started with just a few tricks, and have been getting between 26 and 28 miles per gallon everywhere I go, from driving around town to driving to the beach six hours away. I peaked at one point with 28.5 mpg. Not bad! I want to challenge our family to get through the month of March with only one tank of gas.

I've also put a great deal of through into our power bill. Can I reduce this substantially from 50-70 kwh per day to 5-10 kwh per day? The biggest offenders as far as our energy consumption goes are our clothes dryer, hot water heater, oven, and stove. In times past, I enjoyed running a load of laundry per day (or every other day) because it was nice to close out the day with the sound of the washer running, cleaning the dirty clothes for the day. Somehow it just signaled to me that the day had come to a peaceful close. However, I've realized that it's super wasteful to do this. Now, I'm only putting stuff in the washer if it actually smells dirty or gross. I'd love to get down to running only one load of laundry per week (and air-drying that one load) but right now we are doing an average of two or three per week. I just have to figure out how to air dry it without it smelling awful. (When our clothes dryer was broken growing up, we would air-dried our laundry; the place we would hang it did not really have much of a breeze and was not in the direct sunlight. It smelled and felt awful.)

I also have put a lot of initial thought into our food costs - building out spreadsheets to chart certain foods and meals. I haven't yet put everything into an exhaustive list, but I'm starting to realize what foods are cheap vs what foods are expensive. Our bank (Monzo) just released joint bank accounts, so I've moved the grocery budget from my wife's card into our joint account. I've also broken it out into food and non-food, so I can track each of those. I'll be able to see what our actual expenditures are on these fronts.

One other nerdy item I've started doing: copying every blog post from MrMoneyMustache.com into big Word documents. Once I finish that, I'll get print-on-demand paperbacks and read through those. I want to read everything he's written, but don't want to have to use a device to do it with. I'll do this with EarlyRetirementExtreme.com too.

This month we also took a trip to the beach. It was a decent enough trip, but we had some stressful items from our extended family we were dealing with, and then she and I were also dealing with some Elderberry related items (remember, Elderberry is my wife's side hustle I'm helping with), so it wasn't actually as restful as it could have been. We did get some good sun and time at the beach for a couple of days, and one evening we cooked hot dogs over a fire. The kindling not super dry, though, so we burned through quite a few napkins or paper bags to cook our hot dogs. Not super efficient, but memorable. During this trip, I only averaged about 28 mpg while driving - I would've expected more since this was the first time I'd done any real distance driving while consciously hypermiling. I'll have to figure out why.

I hinted at it above, but I've been able to take on a more active role in Elderberry - particularly with the finances and project management. I'm sure I'll have some opportunities to bring Early Retirement Extreme energy to the discussion (even though I won't call it out as such), but we will see. Elderberry has a real potential to grow into a six or seven figure business and drastically hasten the rate of retirement.

I bought The Primal Blueprint by Mark Sisson. Mr. Money Mustache mentioned it favorably on his blog some years back, so I immediately picked up a copy. I disagree with the entire premise of the book - the idea that we should live the diet and lifestyle that we suppose our evolutionary ancestors lived - but I figure there's enough solid stuff in there that it's worth a read. That should arrive sometime in early March.

And last, but not least, our van is paid off entirely! We bought it from a friend a couple of years back for about $9,000 to be paid back in monthly installments. Late last year, it hit a deer and was also backed into by someone else. Because I had full coverage on the vehicle, we got about $3100 in insurance money for this damage, but I was never able to get it repaired due to holiday schedules, logistics, weather, lining up a backup vehicle, etc. I finally thought to ask, "Can I just use the insurance money for something else?" I checked with the internet and with a mentor, and sure enough, because from the insurance company's perspective I owned the vehicle outright (was not financed through a dealer, and the friend I was buying the van from did not have a lean on the vehicle), and the money was sent to me directly and not to a repair shop, I was in the clear to do with the funds what I wanted. I decided to use those funds to pay off the vehicle entirely. I reduced our debt by $3956.04! Now all that remains, in addition to the money we end up putting on our credit card (and paying off entirely on a regular basis), is $10,800 from an old work project that has a complicated/long story to it, and about $20,000 that my wife and I have incurred to help a friend in dire need (also a complicated story). Paid off about 11% of our debt this month!

January 2023

Picking up from the last blog post, 2022 was a year of rest. It didn't actually end up that restful in terms of things done, but it was restful for me. No intentional wall-to-wall hustling or new projects that I didn't want to do.

The end of December rolled around, and I knew that 2023 was coming up - my year of focus on FIRE. So, knowing that I'd have a business trip in the first week of January and hence plenty of time to read, I picked up several books on FIRE from Amazon:

• Financial Freedom: A Proven Path to All the Money You Will Ever Need, by Grant Sabatier
  
• Playing with FIRE: How Far Would You Go for Financial Freedom?, by Scott Rieckens
• The Simple Path to Wealth: Your Road Map to Financial Independence and a Rich, Free Life, by JL Collins
• Early Retirement Extreme: A Philosophical and Practical Guide to Financial Independence, by Jacob Lund Fisker  

I'd read Your Money or Your Life: 9 Steps to Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Achieving Financial Independence by Vicki Robin and Joe Dominguez in 2021, and acquired Set for Life: An All-Out Approach to Early Financial Freedom by Scott Trench in Summer 2022, so I had a nice stack of books lined up for my business trip.

All my books didn't arrive time, but within moments of arriving at the airport, I'd started in on Set for Life.

Over the course of the trip, I consumed content like a machine. When I wasn't working, I was either driving and listening to a podcast, or else reading. I finished reading through Playing with FIRE by Scott Rieckens as well as Financial Freedom by Grant Sabatier before I pulled into the driveway (in fact, my wife drove me home from the airport so I could continue to read).

The Simple Path to Wealth and Early Retirement Extreme hadn't arrived yet, but I was so through-and-through convinced of FIRE being the path forward, so much more than I was when I first arrived at the airport a few days prior, and I was on board with FIRE even then!

One of the evenings in January, I plotted out on a Google Doc the next iteration of our five-year plan. This time, building in information I'd been reading about having to do with index funds and so forth. With new eyes, I took a hard look at our finances - I remember sitting in a Walmart parking lot in my rental car going through each of our finances with my wife on the phone, talking through how much we could reduce our expenses if we cut this bill or got rid of that line item. I couldn't believe it - we could go from about $4100 of expenses down to about $3100 or so if we wanted. That was annual expenses of right at about $50,000 to about $37,000 per year. (Actually, less, because we send ten percent of our paycheck to Christian ministry work, so our actual living expenses went from more like $45,000 to a little over $33,000.)

My company offered a paycheck deferral program, where I have the option of deferring so much of my paycheck. That amount is paid, plus a premium, every quarter. I spent a lot of time over the next few days calculating and re-calculating things, looking at our budget, seeing how much I could hike my deferral amount - and thus my total annual paycheck.

Thanks to reducing our expenses about 25%, this meant that we were able to funnel this additional amount into my company's deferral program - meaning we'd have more money to pay off our debt faster, and more money after paying off debt to put into index funds.

Reduce spending, increase income, save the difference.

I told my wife that the evening I really crunched numbers for the first time was probably one of the top 2-3 most influential days of my life.

Within a day or two of arriving home, the books by JL Collins and Jacob Lund Fisker arrived. I worked my way through both of them within days. I want to do writeups (not necessarily full book reviews) of all these books at some point, but lest I never get around to it, I want to say that Jacob Lund Fisker's book is staggering. He does not limit his discussion of simply finances, but rather presents an astonishing picture, a manifesto really, of what it meand to steward resources - both economic and other - giving careful thought to how we impact the environment while also developing ourselves to fullest potential. Fisker is not a Christian, but his "Renaissance man" concept is so much in line with a Christian "Dominion man" that it's jaw-dropping. I need to read his book a couple more times.

Once I arrived home, I opened the discussion with my wife about some purchases that - shortsightedly - I'd shied away from before due to cost, but was now completely willing to consider due to my newfound ability to think long-term. In short order, we purchased a brand-new Singer sewing machine to cut down on the clothes budget for our two kids, always growing. We also researched and purchased some bento boxes (for the kids, for my wife and me) to cut down our eating out costs. (The bento boxes have paid for themselves many times over by the time of this writing, in March.)

Additionally, I re-negotiated the payment plan with the friend we'd bought our 2011 Honda Odyssey from, and he agreed to let me make payments on a quarterly basis instead of a monthly basis - which was great! Because the quarterly cadence matched my bonus/deferral payment cadence at the company, the re-negotiation meant I could take that $142 per month out of our monthly expenses, move that money into deferral and let it grow thanks to the premium my company pays on deferral funds, and I'd still be able to make car payments while that money was making me more money. (Side note, it also looked like a result of all this manglin' and wranglin' of finances that I'd be able to pay off the van entirely in the next quarter, anyway, thus saving money from additional months of interest.)

The end of January rolled around and I knew the first real month of our FIRE journey was coming. I made my elections for deferral, locking in a monthly paycheck of right at about $3000 (everything beyond this would be in deferral). I canceled services and made plans to cancel others. No turning back now!