This month we had lots going on. Wife and I sat down early on in the month one Saturday for about 8 hours for me to really understand the marketing and long-term product development plan for Elderberry as a result of the business building coaching that wife is taking. We had the kids watched and broke out the whiteboards, and from about 4:30pm to a little after midnight, I just took the time to completely understand everything I could and learn the language. Wife and I mapped out a path to reach 7 figures with the business in 17 months, and that includes hitting 6 figures by the end of this year. It's really exciting because we actually understand each component involved and what's required - the marketing plans and numbers are actually doable because they're based off of knowledge, not based off of ignorant excitement. (This is how I've done marketing before, and it has sucked.) Then a few days later, we met with the rest of the team to pitch the plan, and they are bought in completely.
In bad news, the IRS hit me up for $5500. I was very ticked at this, since I generally hate being stolen from. I try to plan for being robbed, but I apparently didn't plan well enough this past year and now have to redirect money that was going to paying off debt, to paying off the mobsters. This is largely because I did not have what they in the FIRE community call "FU" money stashed away. So, our budgeting software shows that in the month of April we are behind in every single envelope, because I had to yank from those or else. This has caused me to make a change in my plans for this year's finances. Instead of using our next quarterly paycheck (which will be very large, because I leverage the deferred payment plan my company offers to defer a huge portion of my income) to pay down debt, I am going to use it to create this FU fund. I will probably put it in index funds - open my Vanguard account and stick it all in VTSAX. I have on interest in getting caught in this kind of situation again.
As I mentioned in my March post, my wife was planning on taking a trip out to Texas for three days. Originally my mother-in-law was going to watch the kids; I ended up offering to watch them for these days instead so she would watch them for an unexpected Elderberry meeting (the one where we pitched the team on our big plan). It went really well. During the Thursday, Friday, and Saturday that she was gone, I purposed to see how little energy we could use. All in all, we used about 9, 9, and 8kwh per day. We also cooked exclusively with the crock pot - I made split pea soup and lentil soup for dinners and the kids loved it. I also made Zuppa Toscana for church Sunday. (I did not turn on the stove, oven, or toaster oven one time. I also did not run the washer because we didn't generate enough dirty clothes to do that.) I've also noticed that eating massive salads during lunch (approximately 6 cups of greens, and an additional 3 cups of either more veggies or fruits) plus a good lentil or pea soup dinner leaves me not even getting truly hungry until lunchtime the next day. This is great and I love that it's lining up with the experience of Mark Sisson, the author of the Primal Blueprint book (I'm not following his ideas religiously, but am gleaning quite a lot). I even got in nearly a full week of my day job work - which I hadn't expected to be able to do while watching the kids for three days.
I'm really enjoying my time in the kitchen. I had zealously taken over menu planning a month or so back, but then it kind of fell by the wayside because of other things I was putting my mind into. Wife did not appreciate me tossing her nice menu plan and not replacing it, and so since one of my goals is for my optimization to result in as few friction points as possible for her, we agreed that we can go back to her food menu system so she has something to plan around as I don't have time this month to revamp the food menu completely. I love the food menu system she has - it's a fairly fixed menu that rotates with some variety, but same basic 5-7 meals - but I do not love the fact that it is stove/oven heavy and thus very expensive from an energy perspective. (It also relies heavily on meat, which is one of the more expensive items in our food budget for sure.) But we have agreed that I can work to transition one meal at a time over - my goal is to transition everything to crock pot meals.
I also finally got a clothesline set up. We'll see if it holds up - I'm not totally sure if the poles are far enough in the ground to withstand the weight of wet laundry, but I was trying to build it completely for free and I couldn't figure out a more guaranteed sturdier solution that didn't involve either buying concrete or buying t-posts.
At the end of the month, I took a trip for work. This trip was really terrible - I came down very ill in the middle of the trip and ended up having to take an entire day off work due to illness. I got a cute Airbnb tiny house 30 minutes away from the office in somebody's back yard; next time I'm going to pick an Airbnb that's walking distance from food and not in somebody's back yard, because the food I bought from the grocery store was great but required preparation . . . preparation I did not have energy for when I was sick, and I couldn't get delivery of decent food since I was in someone's back yard and didn't know if I could or not.
(But one highlight: my mother took me to the airport and we talked about hypermiling, FIRE, index funds, personal finance, and so forth - she's beginning to see the light and I'm so excited. She eagerly embraced hypermiling and that same day increased her mpg on her car from 32 to 39 mpg on average.)
One important takeaway from this week's total failure: I had set a goal of clocking 72 hours for my company this week so I could secure some time off down the road. I was stressed out when things didn't go according to plan and I did not get that accomplished at all due to illness. It was during all this that I realized I am overworking myself. Cal Newport posted an article about the extreme working habits of Danielle Steel, and my wife realized that she's falling into the same trap that Cal is talking about. This article really got me realizing that our current approach to FIRE - the approach of work ourselves to the absolute max to retire as soon as possible - is not sustainable for our family. We are going to create burnout, I think, even though we are seeing tangible fruits from this extreme working - especially in wife's case with the business really starting to gain traction as a result of implementing the marketing strategies that we decided on for Elderberry. The way to achieve FIRE for our family is through slow productivity - instead of stressing the entire time to shave 3 months off our goal, we need to do it sustainably so that the journey there is sustainable and we don't burn out.
In May, here are the high-level things I want to focus on:
- Consistent bedtime and wake time. Getting to bed no later than 8:30pm every night, waking up at 5am, and shooting for just normal 8 hour workdays. Huberman says that sleep is the foundation of health, so I figure I need to take this seriously.
- Taking the baton on the kids more so wife can get more Elderberry work in. This means that I'm in charge of the kids while wife is in the room working. If kids have questions or issues, they come to me. This won't be a problem at all with the early-morning plan as I'll be done with my day job work around 2-3 in the afternoon.
- Sustainable scheduling. Not maxing out every day or every week to the absolute fullest, but setting an "autopilot schedule" that involves margin and then working it.
- Setting up some of the same marketing strategies we're using on Elderberry for Machete Press, and releasing one new title. I'm doing the pre-release read through now for any last errors, but I need to set up some of the automated campaigns we're doing on Elderberry.
- Transition at least a few of our menu plan meals to lentil-based crock pot meals. I need to find some good non-stove, non-oven meals for the summertime . . .
- Keeping a more reliable Deep Finance Journey blog so that I'm not trying
to remember what I did in March while I'm writing the blog post at the
end of April.
- I'd love to make some progress on working off some old project debt I have, but we'll see. We'll call this our stretch goal.
