Early Retirement Extreme Forums

December, 2019 Work/Life I started slowly settling into the new role. I've been working a lot harder than earlier in the year, though not a whole lot compared to other points in my life. I've been doing some reading about this ("Mythical Man-Month," "Managing Humans," "Phoe...

Good luck! That's a ton of library fines. I see you have a fair amount of book expenses... Many libraries have ebook and audiobook checkouts directly to your phone/ereader. These don't even require visiting the library, so it's very convenient. In my case, they get auto-returned, as well. What kind ...

@bostonimproper - Everyone says congrats, but it doesn't feel like a promotion exactly :). I'm kinda happy that I'm still coding, not because I love coding so much (although I do), but because at least I have some concrete control over a few things. It's frightening being a backseat driver for some ...

November, 2019 Work/Life Huge update this month. Earlier this year I'd chatted with my boss and she'd brought up the possibility of my moving into a manager role. I thought about it for a while and the team priorities were all over the place, so I wasn't that enthusiastic. In the past month she cla...

@GTOO - Yes, I noticed the same thing when I visited Portland and the trend has been the same. In the 2018 Annual Homelessness Assessment report on homelessness, Seattle was ranked as number three in absolute terms among cities in the US; the homeless population is 50% less than NYC but the city its...

October, 2019 Work/Life This was the end of a very busy year of weddings, so the gf and I were traveling one weekend. I'd really hoped to stop but I have two work trips coming up (both tied to work/family events with the gf - it's handy working for a large company with offices everywhere). I'd rath...

I had mixed feelings about dividend investing. The pros: - Dividend stocks naturally tend to be pretty stable unless you're really chasing yield (which I did a little of...). - It was super-rewarding to calculate monthly/quarterly income and to see that go up. I would calculate dividends ("I re...

September, 2019 Work/Life September saw the (near) end of our busy summer. We had no weddings (after three in August), but were traveling for about two weeks. Also the gf's father visited for a week. We have one more wedding in October and then almost nothing at all planned, which I'm really lookin...

I'm curious whether you hold different assets (in a tax-advantaged account) purely for tax purposes. Basically, instead of holding an ETF which is a basket of A & B, holding A & B independently. If A appreciates and B depreciates, you have an option to tax harvest both by donating A (not pay...

August, 2019 Work/Life A very busy month - three weddings, several trips, and lots going on. It's been chaotic, and it will remain so through mid-September, when the gf's father comes to visit us. It's not been as bad I expected but I'm still exhausted. The good news is that I will soon have caught...

@bigato - I don't think it's my culinary technique that needs improving, although I'm not a skilled cook. It's something I feel at pretty much any restaurant I go to: if there's mushroom, it's like someone just cut a mushroom in half and it still has that rubbery texture, or for example the free sal...

July 2019 Work/Life July was relatively quiet, especially since the gf was traveling for work, for a while. August will be pretty busy. I made some changes since my last update, about 20 days ago. I think the biggest one was to start working out again. I'd stopped mostly due to back pain a few mont...

@Jacob - I'll probably switch to that. I let my dishes sit with water in them to loosen everything up. Then I run warm/hot water for a quick rinse, scrub, and rinse again. While rinsing I move any dishes that wouldn't fit in the sink from the counter and let them fill up with the rinse water. I'm pr...

@Chris - Yeah - I feel good when I'm not doing bad things - not just bad when I do them :). For me, that's less of a driver of behavior, or at least not a motivation to start improving behavior. The sensor thing is actually something that would work well for me when doing dishes (I leave the water r...

June 2019 Work/Life Frankly, June was stressful to me. We traveled in the beginning of the month to the GF's friend's wedding in LA. This marked our fifth wedding since November. We have either 3 or 4 left until November. Of these 8-9 weddings only one is in a city where where we reside. They are b...

May 2019 Work/Life A generally quiet month - I was gone for the first week on work and attending a wedding, and then did some local travel for a weekend. It was mostly routine, but overall I wasn't so productive. In this case it was more in a "good" way, taking a step back and relaxing a ...

@classical_Liberal: Yes, I'm not being too serious, but I do not want to start slacking off on the goals that matter to me. I realized with regret ~2 years ago that I could have developed some useful skills with just 1 hour a day of practice, because the benefits compound; when I skip days I miss ou...

April 2019 Work/Life It's been a busy month, with a week of travel and assorted other stuff. I'm still pretty happy at work, and I think I'm in a good position to really focus on some cool areas of program I've long been interested in (but never looked at). One thing that's been surprisingly nice i...

I had moderately painful plantar fascitis for a while. I think it came from running in bad shoes. It was going on for about two-three months consistently. I tried the brace while sleeping, it was alright. It's 100% gone now (for about 18 months), and I think two things were responsible: a very inten...

March 2019 Work I'm back at work and now it's been about a month of real non-training work. I'm enjoying it. My team is very laid-back, more than I am. I was worried it would be a team of super-geniuses (given the area of software development), but I feel I have a lot of opportunities to contribute...