Well - I let my blogging slip, and now I'm paying for it. I had a draft for the first bit of August, so I'll post that here, then summarize the high points for what I can remember of the rest of August, September, and October.
August
August!
Fleas are mostly gone, our van is repaired, and I had a
very good report from my boss and the CEO about my work performance.
New year month, new me.
I put some thought into
my (many) plates I have spinning and set them in priority order, by how
much they contribute to our FIRE journey:
- Be
so good at my job at my day job that I get raises quickly (forms the
current core of our FIRE journey, both now and long-term)
- Support
my wife as much as possible so she can build her business quickly and
well (the more I support her, the faster it will grow, and it could
really take off and shorten the retirement time horizon long-term)
- Take on high-paying freelance book cover design and typesetting jobs (short term, but extremely lucrative when I do these jobs)
- Publish
books through my two small publishing imprints (short term not very
lucrative, but a very restful hobby of mine that could long-term make a
nontrivial dent in our nest egg)
The month started with a challenge: Can I pay off nearly $40,000 of debt by the end of December? My current thought is that if I do that, then I can start in January 2024 socking away money into index funds, and be totally debt free.
I knew that if I kept our credit card balance to $0 (except for any transactions that would be reimbursed by my company's FSA account) then there was a very high chance that I could take the entirety of my deferred payment/bonus check (which I get quarterly) and pay the two remaining checks toward debt. That would be two checks of $10k each toward debt.
Then, I'd have to figure out how to generate an additional $20,000 over five months to cover the balance. And, I think I did it. Based on conversations I've been having with clients right now, I made a list of all the work that could be on my plate, assigned rough estimates to the items, sorted them by when each item is likely to come through, plus how likely the client is to actually have the funds on hand when the project can be done. I reached out to one main client - the same day I made my list - and locked in a commitment of about $10,000 of work for the rest of the year! So exciting - $30,000 accounted for, only about $8-10k to go, and those items are going to be bits and pieces of different small projects. I think I can pull it off.
September through October
High points after this:
- I did successfully line up the additional $20,000 as mentioned, but at this point it looks like about half of that is going to end up in 2024 due to some other folks working on the project taking longer than expected.
- We purchased a school bus! We looked at it in July, but made it out and signed the documents in August. It's a ~40' 1980s Bluebird, flat-nose - incredibly roomy. All the seats and everything have already been ripped out already. In October, we went to get it moved; after attempting over the course of two days (and multiple breakdowns) to get it home, we ended up taking it to the mechanic near where we bought it from to replace all the hoses, belts, filters, and ultimately get new tires. (Maybe I'll do another post on this in the future.) We hadn't planned on doing all this quite so soon, but it needed to happen anyway.
- We did a bit of research in September
and realized that the area that we live in is really, really toxic.
There are super high levels of pesticides used on the acreage in our
county, so we've decided that for the sake of our family's long-term
health, we have an ethical obligation to move. Currently, we pay $350
per month for our rental house, so unfortunately, this means our rent
would triple or quadruple if we were to buy or rent another house in the county we're looking to move to; we're
wanting to aggressively finish the bus sooner than later so that we can
just move into the bus and actually lower our monthly bill instead of hike it to pay for another house. We'd ultimately like to buy a 3-5 acre lot with hills, forest, and a stream, but that's probably a couple years away.
- Prioritizing renovating the bus and moving sooner than later has meant that, unfortunately, I have to reserve cash for the repair work and so won't end up paying off all our debt in 2023. This is okay with me, since I realized I'd been overlooking a small amount of money that we needed to pay off even though it wasn't technically "our" debt. (Long story.) It's about $5,000.
- We did pay off some debt however in September! We made one payment of $2660 toward our skoolie, and about $1600 toward another loan. Paying off debt will be a bit slower of a process than I thought in August, since I'm having to allocate funds for ongoing skoolie renovation work that would be going to pay off debt, but it's moving along.
- In September, I took my son to the theater to see the new Paw Patrol movie. We got pizza and popcorn. This wasn't frugal at all, but it was worth it to me to make a huge memory with him. I have to remind myself in my extreme frugality to not be so frugal I pass up legitimate opportunities to build memories with my kids just because they aren't free. Sometimes the opportunity is too perfect to pass up, and this one was.
- Last, but not least, toward the end of October my wife was having some what appeared to be serious health concerns around her lymphatic system. We were concerned that she may end up having some kind of cancer - I was preparing mentally for her to have Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma. (Notably, the pesticide used on crops in our county has been found to cause Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma.) This all happened while I was out of town on my quarterly business trip. As we learned only a few days later, however, to our shock, it turns out that the symptoms were due to pregnancy! That's right, we're expecting another baby, and all the concerning symptoms line up perfectly. All the more reason to move - shooting to complete the skoolie and move in sometime in Q1 2024.
- We're no longer concerned about cancer, but that scare did make me realize that we're living "paycheck to paycheck" with our health. Not in a financial sense, really, but I realized that it took an emergency (so it seemed) to get me to take seriously certain elements of our health. Just like someone who lives a deep finance lifestyle isn't impacted by the loss of a job or another financial emergency, so living a truly healthy lifestyle shouldn't be impacted by a health emergency - meaning, you shouldn't start eating healthily, start being outdoors, start paying attention to your sleep just because you may have cancer. You should already be doing that. (At least, the analogy is clear to me.)
- A few months ago, I had a meeting with two of my superiors where they communicated to me that I wasn't meeting the expectations they had for my work. As it turns out, my response to this ended up being such a radical shift in the right direction - beyond what either of them expected (their words) - that not only was my work reputation completely cleared, but I actually won the employee of the quarter award from my team. This was remarkably encouraging to me.
- Sometime in the last couple of months, I decided to pause my Machete Press projects through the end of 2023. I just needed some bandwidth to catch my breath. Wife is seriously ramping up her Elderberry work and I need to be around more mentally to support her.
