August 2023 through October 2023

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:

1. 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)
   
2. 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)
   
3. Take on high-paying freelance book cover design and typesetting jobs (short term, but extremely lucrative when I do these jobs)
   
4. 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)
   

This means that any time I have a decision to make about time, I can sort it through this list. It's a very helpful metric to gauge: When do I watch the kids so that my wife can focus on her business? Answer: As much as possible when I'm not working my day-job. That's the most FIRE answer.

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.
  

July 2023

This month had some real high points.

First, I took a trip out to where my company is headquartered for a kickoff project. I brought several books with me to read, but two in particular were finance-related. The first book, Stacked: Your Super-Serious Guide to Modern Money Management by Joe Saul-Sehy and Emily Guy Birken was only okay. It was fun (to the point of being distracting, at several points) but in my view lacked a strong why element to the argument. The authors outlined how to hedge yourself on many different fronts financially, and that was great insofar as it went, but they never really explained why to do that. I finished the book feeling fairly indifferent to it. I'm not sure I'd recommend it to anybody.

The second book I read was an incredible read: Raising Your Money-Savvy Family for Next Generation Financial Independence by Carol Pittner and her father, Doug Nordman. This book was an extremely practical look at how to pass down healthy financial attitudes and training to your kids. I had already started implemented some of the things they mention in the book with my own daughter, before reading it, and it fit perfectly with the type of things I want to teach my kids. The biggest takeaway was let your kids make mistakes with their money. Do not attempt to control them, even if it's through passive suggestions. Hands-down recommendation for people with kids. This is what should be taught in homeschool economic curriculum! (Well, this and Early Retirement Extreme.)

When I returned to town, my wife and I and the kids drove to another state to see the school bus I'd mentioned in the previous post. I didn't get exact measurements, but it appears to be nearly 40 feet long, flat-nosed, 1983 Bluebird, white. The inside has been gutted entirely (and was actually used in some capacity by a previous owner). It barely has any miles on it, it came with two top-notch air conditioners. The engine has been signed off on by a former bus mechanic (the dad of one of the people I was visiting). There were a few cracks in the windows here and there, but it checked out. They wanted $10,000 on it, and it met all my expectations and my wife's expectations, so we shook hands on it. They were thrilled to sell it to us, someone they actually had heard about before, and who we clicked with immediately.

After I got back in town over the next couple of weeks, I drew up a bill of sale and a promissory note to purchase it for $10,000 with 10% interest (which is only 5% interest after inflation). The official payback period is one year, with the first payment coming in September (after I get my quarterly deferred paycheck plus quarterly bonus) but I think I can get it paid off this year. We'll see. Next thing is to figure out how to actually get it moved, where to move it to, and so forth.

One last low point - I was contacted by a man who has edited some historical theological articles by a particular author. He was exploring self-publishing his book. I shared with him some of my ideas, and without going into too many details that would compromise my anonymity right now, I'm going to spin up a second small publishing house geared toward making historical theological works available in a classy way for a modern audience. This could feed backwards, too, because the man has written a host of books that I'd love to publish through my main Machete Press publishing company. We'll see.

Lastly, my wife went on a weekend trip to a lovely cabin in the woods near a beautiful waterfall. This was her version of the trip she sent me on last month, but this time I got to go with her. We had a lovely time reading and resting by the waterfall, and I brainstormed a very simple two-page author's contract to send to the man I mentioned in the previous paragraph. Very lovely time. Not at all frugal, but it was a great time to take some a deep breath in creation.

The month also had some real low points.

Earlier this year, my wife told me that if I didn't close off the crawlspace, we'd have another major flea problem like we did the previous year, when a stray cat got under our house and introduced fleas. I said I'd take care of it. I didn't. The week before I was scheduled to fly out to my work, we had a huge flea outbreak. Long story short, I spend hundreds of dollars on pest control to come make the problem go away; we bought a steam cleaner much sooner than we'd been planning on it, we ran the washer and dryer non-stop, bought other flea-related items, and most thoughts of frugality went out the window. No fun whatsoever, and it took weeks to get rid of them. (Writing this post on August 4, I'm still not 100% sure they're gone, but they're nearly gone. Four weeks! Awful.)

A second major issue was that our van just stopped starting while I was out of town. It seemed to be coming from a parasitic drain on the battery from the automatic doors, but it wasn't holding a charge, and the doors weren't working at all even when it was jumped and running. Lastly, a bunch of concerning lights on the dashboard showed up indicating that there was more going on than just the doors. To make a very long story short, I took it into our Honda service shop an hour away.

It would seem that at the end of the day, the problem was a whole host of issues stemming from a minor accident in November 2022 . . . which I had taken the insurance money from, paid off the van, and moved to liability instead of fixing the issue.

To elaborate, in November 2022 we (not my wife or myself) hit a deer driving down the road. There was substantial bumper damage, but no dripping of any kind, no leaks. The airbag light was blinking, which indicated that something had happened, but I interpreted it as simply the vehicle recognizing that there had been an accident and that the seatbelts had been tripped.

At the time, we had comprehensive insurance on our van, so I filed an insurance claim for the deer. Within just a few weeks later, someone backed into our driver's fender, so I filed a second insurance claim for that, too. I received about $3,000 of insurance money.

Once I realized what a pain it was going to be to coordinate with the shop (an hour away) to get things checked out and repaired, including new bumper and fender, I figured that since there wasn't any leaking, no weird sounds from the engine, and no discernible problems (aside from the blinking airbag light), and since I was frugal now, I would take the insurance money (since I could, legally) and pay off the van entirely (we'd bought it from a family friend), and move on with my life.

Except there had been damage, and it just took eight months to show up. I ended up paying Honda about $4500 to repair a host of issues. To think, that would've been $0 if I had stuck with the insurance claim process.

The flip side though is that my van wouldn't be paid off now, I'd still owe at least a couple thousand dollars on it, so truth be told - I'm not entirely sure if I walked away from the situation that badly off.

I immediately got back on comprehensive coverage. My monthly insurance bill went from $32.99 to $65.70. An extra $32.71 per month to know that any issues will be 100% covered? Yes, please. This was definitely an instance of being pound wise, penny foolish. If you're going to own a vehicle, don't skimp on the insurance unless you really think it through.

June 2023

This month's entry may be short because I'm writing it in early August. (Still haven't developed the habit of keeping regular notes!)

I think I forgot to mention it in my May post, but the day of the meeting I purchased Emotional Intelligence and started reading through it. The book is great! It's the book I needed growing up and didn't have.

So, for right now, my focus is really heavily on work. I've stopped trying to optimize everything in my life, because that mental place of always looking for the next optimization pulled my attention away from the number-one driver of our FIRE journey: my day job. It's been really nice to be freed from that mental prison of sorts. I have to be in the office at 8am; I have to be there until 4pm or 5pm. I don't have the freedom to burn the candles at both ends to maximize every moment of my day. That stress is gone. (But, in its place, I do have some stress about being let go from my job despite my best efforts to course-correct, but I don't think that's likely based on the amount of positive feedback and mentorship I'm getting from my direct boss.)

I'd like to reflect on where we've come over the last six months, and show a nice chart with our expenses, but the reality is I just don't have that data right now to present.

This definitely wasn't particularly frugal, but in the middle of the month, my wife sent me on a late Father's Day trip away for a weekend. I stayed in a really neat old Airbnb for a couple nights - I left my laptop at home and only brought books. I read and read. I made coffee and put on a random record on the record player they had, and listened to it from beginning to end. I did it again the next day. I walked to and from the town square. It was a really nice couple days of solitude.

One last major item! For some time, we've been wanting to get a school bus and convert it to a skoolie home. We've been thinking up to now that we'd have to save $50,000 or so to do this. My son, who I hadn't thought had really wrapped his head around a skoolie, randomly prayed the other evening, "God, please help us to get a skoolie at time." "At time" apparently meant "soon." Within a few days, my wife mentioned to me that a coworker of hers has a friend who is selling her stripped-down skoolie. She showed me pictures, and I got on the phone within another day or two to schedule time (in July!) to go see it. Love at first sight! It sounds like it runs extremely well, has had all the seats and everything removed from it, and is in good shape. Not the finished bus we'd envisioned, but it's a beautiful, white, 1983 Bluebird bus. Who knows, we may end up with less than the original $50,000 after all's said and done.

May 2023

A few months ago, I was moving through Mr. Money Mustache's website and noticed that his family was featured in the book Equally Shared Parenting: Rewriting the Rules for a New Generation of Parents by Marc and Amy Vachon. Of course, I ordered it right away, always interested in new ideas and especially if either Mr. Money Mustache or Cal Newport are involved. The book sat on my shelf for awhile due to other things going on, but I finally got around to it over the first couple of days in May. Unfortunately, it seems like the authors and their book have sank without a trace, which is really a pity because it was a fantastic book. The short takeaway is that the book calls for a new for parenting (or simply marriage, if there are no children) that empowers both spouses with full opportunity to be involved in their children's lives. This is smart for a few reasons:

1. Probably faster pace for reaching financial independence. If both partners have a part time job, or a full-time job that's slightly reworked and/or fewer hours per week, this means their income will be equal to or greater than just one spouse working.
2. Both parents get time with the kids. A child has two parents, and should get both of them. Dads and Moms both bring things to the table that the kids benefit from.
3. Because both parents share the load when it comes to household responsibilities, nobody's unnecessarily bogged down with housework or bottlenecked when it comes to doing things.
4. Continuation plan in the event of a major change. If one spouse is fired or involved in an accident, or there's a new baby in the home and the mom is out of commission for a bit, nothing grinds to a halt because both parties share the knowledge of the house and children.
   

This month we also got down the air conditioners - up to 20-25kwh, but it's nice to sleep at night.

I've also spent more time figuring out quite a number of food recipes - my wife has lentil sensitivities, which is a bummer because lentils are magic. I figure that we only need to cook 10 meals per month, if each meal lasts 3 dinners total. I'm exploring a relatively even split between beef, chicken, fish, and lentil dinners. Those are all great proteins.

Last month I did a stint of handwashing everything, but that got a bit old and I wasn't sure that it wasn't introducing more friction into our day than I really want, so we went back to using the dishwasher.

I started taking cold showers this month. Not so much to save money, though not running the hot water heater is a great incentive, but because it's supposedly good for me and I'd like to be more resilient. So I started acclimating myself to cold showers, starting the shower with a trickle and gradually turning up the cold water and ending it with full blast cold water.

Recently I was exposed to the idea that I have ADHD. The little I've read so far makes a lot of sense of some of my struggles with attention, and my wife reminds me that as a kid I was actually diagnosed with it. That said, I hate having the label since it seems like everybody around me has ADHD now - it seems kind of like a fad. Of course, this really isn't fair since I don't know everyone who claims to have ADHD, and from what I know of it, it's actually quite possible that it's endemic. At any rate, I bought Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder by Gabor Maté.

A second thing I've been working through is the idea that I deal with codependence. This too makes a lot of sense of struggles I've had through the years. Facing Codependence: What It Is, Where It Comes from, How It Sabotages Our Lives by Pia Mellody was recommended to me very highly, so I have started reading it. I'll probably put my ADHD and codependency thoughts into another post as relates to the deep finance journey.

At the end of this month, which I'll plan to cover in another post in the future, my direct boss and the CEO called a meeting with me and communicated that I've not been meeting expectations for my role in a large number of areas, and if they don't see efforts to course correct toward some specific targets by June 23, we will need to discuss termination. Almost immediately, it was clear to me that these issues (which I didn't realize were problems before the meeting) stemmed from my ADHD, codependency, attempts to over-optimize my life, and moving a little too quickly into a non-conventional workweek that impacted my teammates. Suffice it to say, I made some major changes in my lifestyle and thus ended my experiments with a six-day workweek from 8-2pm entirely. But I'll save the details for another post.

If I Had Been Retired Today, #1

Who knows, this might become a thing, so I am preemptively numbering this Issue 1. The idea is to demonstrate the lost productivity due to having to catch up on personal financial literacy (i.e., FIRE, what other kind of personal financial literacy is there?)

If I had been retired today, instead of having to work a job to bring in money, I would have . . .

• Started in on outlining and writing a commentary for my kids on the Book of Proverbs. My 7yo is reading a lot now, and I've been wanting to write some legitimate theology books for her, on her level. And if I do them well enough, I'd be able to sell them, and make some money like that. I might even be able to get them illustrated, or do it myself with stick figures.
  
• Spent a good bit of time designing the information architecture and user flows on my Machete Press website. I have a number of things I want to do with it, including hosting audio and video and building a really nice online reading experience, and I'd have gotten a lot of really good traction today on figuring out exactly what I want in a full version if money were no issue.
• Made some substantial progress on the latest Machete Press books I'm working on publishing - a book on international relations and a book on economics geared toward teachers, written from a Christian perspective. I may even have wrapped up the current stage I'm at with both of those books and moved them forward into the next phase.

I did make a little bit of progress on the Machete Press books, and I might still be able to do a few minutes of wireframing, but it'll be a fraction of what I could've gotten done because I had to clock into the office for 8 hours and 15 minutes.

How to Retire in 5 Years

I have read several books on financial independence but have not found, that I remember, a clearly laid-out formula of what one's expenses should be to retire after five years of only working a day job with no second streams of income. Here it is, with the caveat that this is subject to revision over time:

(take-home pay, plus any pre-tax contributions like 401k) * 0.167 = expenses

Another way of saying this is that if your expenses equal 16.7% or less of whatever your take-home pay is plus any pre-tax contributions, then you will be able to retire after five years of work.

Example: if you have a take-home pay of $100,000 after taxes, annually, with no pre-tax contributions like 401k, your expenses are at or below $16,700 per year, and you sock the remaining $83,300 into index funds, then you will be able to retire after five years of this job, assuming no raises, no debt, and no inflation (let's keep the math simple for now).

The 16.7% comes from the formula of annual expenses x 25 = retirement number. This is just 25 divided by five years, plus a sixth part per year to actually live off of: 1/6 (one part for the year's expenses, and five parts for index funds) = 16.67%.

The reason we have the bit in the formula about pre-tax contributions is because you are of course putting those into index funds also, and so your real amount of money that you're putting into index funds every year is that 401k contribution in addition to the massive take-home pay amount.

More examples, assuming no 401k contributions:

• If your take-home pay is $50,000, then your expenses need to be $8,350
• If your take-home pay is $60,000, then your expenses need to be $10,020
• If your take-home pay is $70,000, then your expenses need to be $11,690
• If your take-home pay is $80,000, then your expenses need to be $13,360
• If your take-home pay is $90,000, then your expenses need to be $15,030
• If your take-home pay is $100,000, then your expenses need to be $16,700
• If your take-home pay is $110,000, then your expenses need to be $18,370
• If your take-home pay is $120,000, then your expenses need to be $20,040
• If your take-home pay is $130,000, then your expenses need to be $21,710

If your expenses are above the max allowed, then you either need do one of the following:

• Be alright with a longer time horizon for retirement since it will take longer to save up
  
• Lower your expenses to below the limit
• Do some side work to bring your income level to match that required by your expenses

If you are single this should be insanely easy. There is no reason that a teenager couldn't spend a year or two in deliberate practice gaining a solid skill, get work as an employee or a freelancer, and retire completely from mandatory work by the time others are graduating from college. If they are planning to marry and have children, they may need to work a few years longer if their to-be spouse has not also been working this same plan, since now the amount of money needed is at least doubled. But raises will factor into the equation, as will compounded interest, so the additional funds needed won't take near as long. Worst case: retirement by 25. Not so bad, is it? This is my goal with my kids.

April 2023

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.

In May, here are the specific things I'd like to make progress on:

• 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.
  

March 2023

This month we tore apart the old wheelchair ramp that leads up to our house. It got very slippery during the rain and I'd fallen a couple of times recently, so I knew I needed to take it down for safety's sake. I took it apart with the kids nail by nail, and stored the wood in a shed behind our house for turning into a back stoop/porch at a future day.

With the last cold snap gone, we are down to using between 10-30kwh per day. I'm struggling with having anxiety over not being able to control everything.

Wife is 100% on board with building out a clothesline to use instead of the dryer, which was a surprise. Got a free clothesline from my mother and pulled up some old treated posts from our property to use as a clothesline.

The Primal Blueprint arrived, and I started reading. I'm holding my nose for sure on the Grok speculation/foolishness, but making major lifestyle changes, such as going without socks and shoes unless needed. (Less laundry!)

I also owed the lawn with the electric mower that I got from my cousin back in January. The battery died slightly less than halfway through mowing the lawn; after an hour and a half charge, it was enough for me to finish mowing enough before the severe weather moved in. Makes me rethink getting a reel mower - its battery won't run out.

While mowing, I listening to Andrew Huberman on cold exposure. Cold showers are good for several reasons; one reason is they don't kick the water heater in!

Wife is going out of town for several days in mid April, and the kids will be staying with my mother in law. I will have the house to myself. I will shut the entire thing down and see if I can live comfortably off 6kwh per day (4kwh is what our house used last month when we were on vacation).

I discovered the crockpot and realized you can use it far more flexibly than I imagined. You can brown ground beef in it; you can add rice about an hour before food needs to be ready and the rice will be totally cooked. You can even bake sourdough in it! I want to challenge myself: 

1. Can I create a solid breakfast plan that just never uses the stove or oven?
2. Can I create a solid dinner plan that only ever uses the crockpot?
3. If I need to use the stove to create sauces, etc., how can I batch things?

This month I also repaired my iPhone. While on vacation last month the screen broke for some reason - the pixels all died. So instead of hiring out the repair job, I ordered a new screen and repaired it myself.

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!

August 2021 through December 2022

The posts on the blog up to this point have varied in quality, but now that I've gotten a bit onboarded onto the ERE/FIRE system, I'd like to write in a bit more of a structured format. I'm not fully sure how to begin this more serious post, but here goes. I'll start with background leading up to the hardcore beginning of our FIRE/ERE journey in January 2023. I'm writing most of this while recovering from a week of fever, and I'm not a practiced writer, so bear with the clunky writing.

I first learned about FIRE in August 2021, traveling home from an out of state visit. I had started to deal with some burnout surrounding my job and while on my trip, on a whim, I decided to just throw my resume out there - what did I have to lose? Somewhere during this out of town trip, I also heard of this Mr. Money Mustache for the first time. I'm not sure what brought him to my attention (I think maybe I heard about him through Cal Newport?), but I was intrigued although I didn't have time right then to listen to anything or read any articles. It wasn't until the 10-plus hour drive home that I put on a podcast episode in which he laid out his method of retiring within just a few years.

Why did this idea of retiring early get my attention so quickly? Folks are interested in early retirement for all kinds of reasons. I enjoyed my work, to be sure. That specific job had become a grind, but I did actually enjoy the work that I was doing in software design. I wanted to retire because I had a very clear sense of what my calling was, and I knew I could not do my calling to its fullest extent while I had a full-time job taking 40+ hours per week; regardless of how much I enjoyed my job, I loved the snatches of time I got to do my calling more.

I define calling the way Gary North defines calling: "The most important thing you can do for the Kingdom of God in which you are the hardest to replace." Anybody can do software design, but I knew that I had a very unique calling in research. I'm not going to discuss my calling right now since that would identify me, but suffice it to say, the prospect of never having to work for money again and being free to devote the rest of my life to my calling was extremely persuasive. I knew I had an ethical responsibility to retire as soon as possible, now that I realized it was a thing.

Prior to the podcast with MMM, I had no idea I could retire early - it didn't even enter into my mind. But the podcast gave just enough construction materials to where I could put together a plan and it completely changed my outlook. I knew that if I was to have any kind of a shot at early retirement, I needed to get a job that paid quite a bit more than what I was earning - which wouldn't be hard since I was at the lower end for sure of my market.

As an important aside, my family had gone through a bit of a tumultuous last few years (coupled with a really tight paycheck) and we were all in the need for just a year of stability with no new things. I knew that plunging straight into FIRE was a bit beyond what my family could handle.

When I finished with that podcast in August 2021, I really didn't know too many details about how other people did FIRE, what it really looked like for them, or all the different strategies to get there.

My initial plan in August and September 2021 was to spend Year 1 in my new job, catching my breath and having some family stability with no new things. Years 2–5, I would begin the process of securing approximately 25 rental units, each returning an average of $200 per unit per month. This would cover our expenses, and I could retire by the end of Year 5. 

This plan was good enough for me to move forward on what I knew was the next right step: getting a job that paid $80k-100k, which was what I knew I was worth. I secured a new job by the end of September 2021, that paid at the lower end of that range, but more importantly did not have any of the elements that had been causing burnout for me at my previous job. I then took 2022 to just rest and recover from the previous few years.

Bento Boxes and Tracking Food Expenses

This evening, my wife and I bought some bento boxes, so we can take meals with us and avoid buying overpriced, unhealthy convenience food that will make us feel bad afterward. We bought two brightly colored bento boxes for our kids and two black ones for us. We looked for the ones that were reviewed best for being leak-proof.

I've also started tracking our meals. I am going to build three large spreadsheets:

1. Shopping / ingredient list. This will be a list of items we buy, where we buy them, the size or weight, the common measurement we use it in, and the price for that measurement.
2. Recipe list. This will be a database of recipes using the ingredients we buy. The goal is to know exactly how much, in our local economy, a recipe costs.
3. Daily food journal. Aside from recipes which will likely pull in a single value from the recipe database, each item in a meal will be its own row. Recipes will likely pull in a single value from the Recipe list journal. The goal is to find out exactly what are true groceries costs are. I will count the meals when they are made, and not count leftovers. This way I do not have to keep up with who ate how much, how much was thrown in the trash because of picky eaters, and how much went in the fridge, and how much my wife ate two days later for lunch. It will all even out.
   

Dryer Repair

Several days ago, our dryer stopped heating. In the past, I would call the appliance guy and be done with it, but not now. I researched the issue and tore the dryer apart with my daughter. We determined the heating element's coil was intact, so the problem was either the thermal fuse or higher up the chain. 

(However, we did notice that the venting system was misaligned with a 1/4 inch gap. This was probably leaking lint into the interior of the dryer. In addition to a fire hazard, this likely caused the heating element to break. We vacuumed the inside of the dryer out.)

I called my father-in-law who used to do a lot of appliance repair. He suggested that if the warranty is expired (it was) my best bet is to just purchase a new heating element entirely.

I purchased the heating element for about $95 including shipping. I bought it brand new. I do not skimp on parts for brand-new appliances that I want to preserve. This means I do not buy off-brand parts.

It did not fix the problem. I went back to Google and learned that dryers have two breakers (or in our case, fuses). One cause of a dryer tumbling but not heating is because the fuse powering the heat could have been blown. I checked. It was. I replaced it. The dryer heated.

I asked my father-in-law what I was saving by doing it myself, versus calling some rando appliance guy. His answer: at least $150 in labor, plus parts.

Gains:

1. Working dryer
2. Knowledge of dryer
3. Safer dryer
4. Approximately $55 saved at minimum (36% savings)
5. Quality time with daughter

First houses of 2023

Today I viewed three houses.

Red Rock Road, Virginia Street, and Plaza Court. 

Red Rock Road was a nice roomy house on 2.7 acres. Lots of potential as a 3 bed 2 bath.

Virginia Street was a foreclosure. Listing agent would not show me the house if I did not have proof of funds. My private lender is out of town right now and can't get me a proof of funds letter. I got another listing agent to show me the house. Some very funky things there, but potential as long as the numbers work.

Plaza Court was sold by the end of the day - yesterday another buyer put in an offer that was accepted. This house was trashed because whoever lived there was a slob, but it was actually the property that would require the least work.

There will be more deals.

I also confirmed with my private lender that he's willing to fund a deal.

I need to read up on rehab costs. I need to run numbers on the other two houses and submit offers. I also need to keep working on other things - good week for real estate in my mind. Perhaps I'll be able to crunch numbers Thursday night with a more experienced friend of mine and then, on Friday, submit offers.

Landlord agreed to allow us to deduct some of our rent money toward improvements - missing doorknobs, missing cabinet pulls, weatherstripping. Our house is super old but we love it so much and he's such a flexible landlord.

Once we removed that $50 line item from our budget, our monthly expenses dropped to below $3,000 per month.

Need to find a good receipt-tracking app. Maybe Everlance? I'm happy with Driversnote but it doesn't appear to support receipts.

Categorizing our efforts and family projects

Paying Off Debt

- Intangible

- Van

- Charity Loan

- Projects I could not complete

Building Our Income

- Elderberry

- Machete

- Parachute

- Real Estate

Lightening Our Load

- Getting rid of junk in the attic

- Ebaying junk in my office

Improving Our Home

- Cleaning up the yard

- Small fixes around the home

Start and stop

Start and Stop

At the Right Time

Be Fully Focused

For Work and for Rest

Fitting our hustles together

- Parachute Software

- Elderberry Press

- Machete Books

- Real Estate

Where does it all fit together? Figured it out. Here's how.

Dryer won't heat

Dryer won't heat. Tumbles, but no heat. Took it apart with daughter using YouTube video and a drill. Pulled the heating element out and inspected the coil - nothing.

Lots of lint though; looked like the connection between the drum and the vent wasn't connected well inside the dryer itself so lint was getting into the main body. Possibly related? Safety hazard at any rate. Vacuumed it up and screwed the whole thing back together for now.

So it apparently be a thermal fuse, or something further up the chain. Going to try and find someone who can teach me how to fix it in the near future.

Great learning experience.

The $84,000 Week

January 1-7

Been on FIRE mindset since August 2021 when I discovered MMM

Knew what i needed to do to retire - initial five year plan

Next right step: new job

Needed a year of calm

Bad past performance caused Mrs Chicken Stick to be leery

Took 2022 as a year of calm, year 1 of 5-year plan to retire

Knew I would focus heavily on FIRE in January of 2023

Then . . .

Business trip, bought a bunch of books ahead of time on FIRE

Read them

Put together a five-year plan

Wife got on board

Cut expenses from $4100 per month to about $3100 per month

Life changing