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!