DebtSlaveNoMore's Journal

Where are you and where are you going?
Barlotti
Posts: 172
Joined: Sat Dec 10, 2011 7:58 am

Re: DebtSlaveNoMore's Journal

Post by Barlotti »

How did your in laws handle their financial problems before you came on the scene?

I wish your in laws would give you and your wife more space. Does it occur to them that their financial neediness might be creating stress in your family?

llorona
Posts: 444
Joined: Sun Sep 23, 2012 11:44 pm
Location: SF Bay Area

Re: DebtSlaveNoMore's Journal

Post by llorona »

Obviously it's your call as to what determines the need for a bailout. But a baby shower? Really?

tommytebco
Posts: 257
Joined: Sat Oct 27, 2012 4:48 pm

Re: DebtSlaveNoMore's Journal

Post by tommytebco »

When we have saved a "pile" it is natural to brag a bit. Natural, but not wise.

It might be better to continue to live frugal and talk about that, only vaguely referring to "investments" which are for retirement.

A large segment of "us" feels the rich should share. This thinking gets perverted into situations like yours.

Chad
Posts: 3844
Joined: Fri Jul 23, 2010 3:10 pm

Re: DebtSlaveNoMore's Journal

Post by Chad »

I'm finally catching up with your journal. Very impressive. I feel like I have been slacking comparatively. Good luck with the extended family. I'm not sure I could be as generous as you.

DebtSlaveNoMore
Posts: 57
Joined: Sat Feb 02, 2013 7:27 pm

Re: DebtSlaveNoMore's Journal

Post by DebtSlaveNoMore »

@Ricky, they both do, however they have no savings to speak off. So every time they overspend, it either goes on the credit card or somehow it falls on my shoulders.

@Barlotti, my in-laws basically got a house free of charge and a large inheritance when my wife's grandfather passed away. So (much like my dw and myself 5 years ago) I don't think they have ever had to develop strong money management skills. The problem now however is that they are old, the inheritance has been frittered away and they still need money. What is happening now is that myself and my dw's sister's husband have been paying for the extras :(

@llorona, yeah I was pretty pissed off about that. But I'm currently developing some countering strategies that will be executed in the coming months. The trick is to stop/reduce the bailouts without visibly offending anyone.

DebtSlaveNoMore
Posts: 57
Joined: Sat Feb 02, 2013 7:27 pm

Re: DebtSlaveNoMore's Journal

Post by DebtSlaveNoMore »

@tommytebco, I never talk about it. I think DW has been bragging to her family about our situation. The bail outs are annoying but it keeps the peace in the household.

@Chad, thanks for checking in. The extended family situation is very annoying but ultimately I think it can be efficiently contained. The key, imho, is patience.

WorkingWageWealth
Posts: 51
Joined: Sun Aug 18, 2013 5:47 pm

Re: DebtSlaveNoMore's Journal

Post by WorkingWageWealth »

I continued to be inspired.

DebtSlaveNoMore
Posts: 57
Joined: Sat Feb 02, 2013 7:27 pm

Re: DebtSlaveNoMore's Journal

Post by DebtSlaveNoMore »

Here are the numbers for March:

Income:
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Expenses:
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Monthly Savings Rate: 32.5%

YTD Savings Rate: 29.4%

Months Living Expenses: 60 months

DebtSlaveNoMore
Posts: 57
Joined: Sat Feb 02, 2013 7:27 pm

Re: DebtSlaveNoMore's Journal

Post by DebtSlaveNoMore »

Here are the numbers for April:

Income:
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Expenses:
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Monthly Savings Rate: 36.8%

YTD Savings Rate: 31.25%

Months Living Expenses: 82.5 months

DebtSlaveNoMore
Posts: 57
Joined: Sat Feb 02, 2013 7:27 pm

Re: DebtSlaveNoMore's Journal

Post by DebtSlaveNoMore »

@cimorene12, this really is a tricky situation. I have for the time being found a very effective strategy at keeping these bail outs under control. I just publicly talk about how glad I am to help out my relatives in from of them and other relatives. This has worked out really well, because:

a. Nobody can say anything bad about me, since I AM helping out multiple people monetarily.
b. My wife looks good in the eyes of her family.
c. My in-laws and other relatives are feeling embarrassed so their demands for money gets toned down quite a bit.

I'm not sure how long this tactic will last, but so far so good.

DebtSlaveNoMore
Posts: 57
Joined: Sat Feb 02, 2013 7:27 pm

Re: DebtSlaveNoMore's Journal

Post by DebtSlaveNoMore »

May has come and gone, here are the numbers:

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Monthly Savings Rate: 65.9%

YTD Savings Rate: 38.18%

Months Living Expenses: 110.5 months

DebtSlaveNoMore
Posts: 57
Joined: Sat Feb 02, 2013 7:27 pm

Re: DebtSlaveNoMore's Journal

Post by DebtSlaveNoMore »

Here are the numbers for June:

Image


Image

Monthly Savings Rate: 66.0%

YTD Savings Rate: 42.8%

Months Living Expenses: 90.5 months

Half year retrospective:

It's been over 6 months since we moved to a lower cost state. And many unexpected/hidden costs have cropped up. Our average savings rates definitely have not gone up as I had expected even though our core living costs have been effectively reduced by 50%.

As far as I can tell, the monthly surplus generated from the move has all been eaten up by a combination of lifestyle inflation, unexpected housing/auto repair expenses, and bailouts to my wife's relatives. At the end of the day, we are still pretty much looking at a 50-60% annual savings rate instead of the targeted 80-85% savings rate.

Now on the one hand, the lifestyle inflation and bailouts have really improved our marriage/relationship. My DW now has all the trappings of an upper middle-class life. She also has more spending money than nearly all of her friends and female relatives. Moreover the bailouts is making my wife look good in the eyes of her family. As a result, there are very few arguments in our household about the budget.

Otoh, with such high living expenses we are looking at at least 8 years before FI, assuming no additional lifestyle inflation. The thing that really gets to me is that, I'm totally fine living without any of these bells and whistles. If we could just shrink our standard of living down to where it was back in NYC, then I could quit my high stress job within 24 months.

Being that the situation is what it is, the only way to shorten the time to FI would be to drastically increase our monthly income while keeping a lid on further lifestyle inflation. The problem is that, I'm hitting a wall in terms of further income potential. I feel that all of my productive capabilities are pretty much maxed out at this point.... :cry:

George the original one
Posts: 5404
Joined: Wed Jul 28, 2010 3:28 am
Location: Wettest corner of Orygun

Re: DebtSlaveNoMore's Journal

Post by George the original one »

I think you can only increase that income by becoming a business with employees.

DebtSlaveNoMore
Posts: 57
Joined: Sat Feb 02, 2013 7:27 pm

Re: DebtSlaveNoMore's Journal

Post by DebtSlaveNoMore »

@George the original one

I feel that's the only way to go too. I have been trying to expand my software side business, but it's rough going mainly because I have so little free time left.

@cimorene12

The $1000 dollars of public transportation was because I had to take the train to NYC several times that month due to work.

DebtSlaveNoMore
Posts: 57
Joined: Sat Feb 02, 2013 7:27 pm

Re: DebtSlaveNoMore's Journal

Post by DebtSlaveNoMore »

It's been 2.5 years since my last post, and there has been significant changes during this time. To summarize:

1. I am definitely no longer a debt slave.
2. My son is no longer a baby, he's a hyper-active little boy
3. We have acquired a 2nd house to live in, our first house is back to being a rental property.

I like to get back to these ERE journals because these posts keep us on track. So for the month of November, here are our stats:

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Monthly Savings Rate: 81.7%

YTD Savings Rate: 62.4%

Months Living Expenses: 176

Notes:
We are currently focused on paying off our 2nd house's mortgage. The entire mortgage is scheduled to be paid off in 5 months. I find that after a certain point, slashing expenses further disturbs the peace of my household. So overall, we have had much more success in terms of growing our income(both active and passive) rather than cutting down on expenses.

Eureka
Posts: 340
Joined: Fri Jun 10, 2016 11:03 am

Re: DebtSlaveNoMore's Journal

Post by Eureka »

Welcome back!

I just read your whole journal and enjoyed the way you chronicle your journey through life. It was a good read. It also made me reflect on my own situation. I can easily live on the amount of money you get from your financial investments, but I guess I also dislike spending all my time working way more than you do.

Looking forward to following your writings.

DebtSlaveNoMore
Posts: 57
Joined: Sat Feb 02, 2013 7:27 pm

Re: DebtSlaveNoMore's Journal

Post by DebtSlaveNoMore »

Wow I can't believe it's been 3 months since my last update. It's hard to remember to update this journal because things have been going pretty much on auto-pilot at my household. So here are the stats for February:

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Summary:

Monthly Savings Rate: 70.3%
YTD Savings Rate: 69.7%


It's smooth sailing so far this year. Our savings rate seems to be holding steady at around 70%. It was impossible to drive it to higher levels this month due to unexpected medical and auto-repair bills. Also the grocery and restaurant spending seems to be going aggressively upwards for my family of 3. I remember years back when we were paying off student debt that our household was able to eat well on just $200-300 dollars worth of groceries a month. I need to work with DW to figure out how to bring the the food bills back to reasonable levels. $1700 a month a food seems too high to me. I don't like to disturb the peace in my household, and my DW rightfully points out that we are still saving 70% of our income. So I just need to figure out a nuanced way to approach this with her.

DebtSlaveNoMore
Posts: 57
Joined: Sat Feb 02, 2013 7:27 pm

Re: DebtSlaveNoMore's Journal

Post by DebtSlaveNoMore »

Hi all,

I can't believe it's been 9 months since the last update. Here are my household's income/expense stats for the month of November:

Income:
Image

Expenses:
Image


Summary

In terms of monthly savings rate, we are now consistently getting 70% or better. We should be able to close this year out with an average savings rate of at least 67%. 2 Significant milestones were hit in November:

1. Paid off the mortgage on our 2nd house in November.
2. Household Net worth has exceeded 1 million dollars in November.

Image

I still remember 9 years ago when our household was drowning in 192K of school debt with no savings and we became super frugal. That life seems so distant now, almost dream-like. Nevertheless, I'm still working on convincing DW to moderate her dining, groceries and personal cash expenditures. I'm fairly confident that if those rationalization steps can be put into place, we can reach a savings rate of 80% or greater.

Fish
Posts: 570
Joined: Sun Jun 12, 2016 9:09 am

Re: DebtSlaveNoMore's Journal

Post by Fish »

You might enjoy visualizing your income and expenses with a Sankey diagram. Since your income exceeds your expenses by a fair amount, using equal-sized pie charts doesn't do justice to your financial awesomeness.

http://www.getrichslowly.org/2017/12/06 ... -diagrams/

DebtSlaveNoMore
Posts: 57
Joined: Sat Feb 02, 2013 7:27 pm

Re: DebtSlaveNoMore's Journal

Post by DebtSlaveNoMore »

Hi all,

I can't believe it's been almost a year since my last post. I want to give some updates on several momentous events that have happened in the last 12 months. I'm also looking for some advice from folks who have FIRED already.

Our family has a new member
Our second child was born in April of this year. She is a sweet little baby who has thoroughly captured our hearts. I have started a 529 for her and plan to build it up in the same way that my son's 529 has been built up. My daughter is not only a good baby with predictable eating and sleeping patterns, she has also been pretty low-cost. There was a small bump in terms of grocery bills to account for my wife eating extra to feed our daughter. We re-used most of my son's baby supplies (crib, carrier, stroller, clothes...etc), and donations from relatives made up most of the rest. Due to some high risk pregnancy concerns, my wife had stopped working since January of this year and has been looking after the baby this whole time. So we haven't had much of any child care costs. The only real spike in baby cost so far seems to be in monthly health insurance costs. Now that DW is ready to get back into the workforce, I am expecting childcare costs to sky rocket in 2019.

Minimum FI threshold reached
In November of this year, our total household net worth reached 1.2 million. Deducting the amount for our primary residency, and applying the 4% rule, results in approximately 36K/year of dependable investment income. This is an important milestone for me since it marks the point in which all necessary expenses (e.g property taxes, healthcare, food, transportation, utilities, 529 contributions) for our household can be met with investment income. Now our real annual spending is double this number, but nearly all discretionary spending is for luxury goods/services (e.g fancy new clothes, expensive vacations, organic groceries, spending money, gifts/bailouts, eating out 2-3 times a week at sit down restaurants).

Tested an 8 week early retirement trial
When my daughter was born, I negotiated an extended 8 week Leave of absence with my employer. I wanted to help out DW with the newborn but I also wanted to try out FIRE to see if there would be unexpected scenarios. Now for the last 15 years, this is the longest single of period of time that I had off from work. The experience was quite eye opening and I learned many things:

1. My day job takes a tremendous toll on me on physiologically and mentally, but I didn't even realize just how much it took out of me until I had an extended period of time away from it. After about 3 weeks of not working, I went to the doctor of get a physical and the doctor mentioned that my blood pressure was lower than my last checkup. Now my blood pressure had been trending upwards every year for the last 5 years. Over the 8 weeks, I managed to workout once a day, 7 days a week, and I lost around 15 pounds. But it wasn't only the exercise. I also had full control over my food supply, being able to cook most of my own meals in a relaxed way allowed me to make better, healthier food with less meat and way more green vegetables. It made me feel much calmer and clear headed. Getting 8 hours of sleep every night was a game changer, the level of energy and focus that a well rested body can deliver is amazing.

2. When I'm not working(and everyone else is), my neighborhood becomes almost like an alternate universe. Everything that would normally be congested, broken down, angry/dysfunctional becomes almost Utopian. The local roads seems to be built just for me. The bus service runs perfectly on time (to the minute). The bicycle lane actually functions for bicycles. The local state park becomes like a private resort just for me. There are no lines in stores and supermarkets. And the library has tons of free and cool things to do.

3. When there is no structure and no pressure, I waste a lot of time. I created ambitious lists of things that I wanted to do prior to the leave. But by the end of the leave, I had done less than 20% of it. I think there is something with my mentality that needs structure to function efficiently. There were many days were I basically didn't do much of anything. And the day goes by quickly and very pleasantly, but afterwards there is this distinct sense of a lack of something. By the end of the leave I was resorting to writing down simple tasks at the beginning of every day and then checking them off to convince myself that I had done useful stuff during the day. It's a pretty frustrating feeling because I set milestones for myself but when there is no pressure there is nothing that motivates me to achieve those milestones. This was not expected and I don't really like this feeling.

4. As part of my day job, I advise C-Suite executives of Fortune 500 companies on key technology decisions. When operating at this level, there is a certain strategic aspect to the management of conversations, relationships with key leaders, and the balancing of often times competing organizations/factions within clients. When in the thick of it, I intensely dislike this aspect of my job. It often feels as if I'm contorting logic, reason, and common sense to achieve short-term machiavellian goals. But during the leave, it was as if that portion of my brain that was constantly running at 150% was abruptly idled. I found myself missing this kind of strategic thinking and I started playing online strategy games to capture that feeling of success and control. But then it is like #3, after hours of gaming I achieved exactly....NOTHING. In my day job, the same type of thinking produced revenue , but it also changed the physical world and the structure and composition of people within entire companies(for good or ill). This was also unexpected and rather disturbing to me. My mind apparently need to do activities that I find disagreeable to do in my day job.



I need some advice and perspective from people who FIREd

As this year is drawing to a close, I've been thinking a lot about FI and where I want my family to be 3 to 4 years from now. My day job is becoming increasingly unbearable to me. But at the same time this stressful, hateful job seems to gives me certain elements of pleasure, it's almost like a perverse form of masochism. From a hard numbers perspective, we are approximately 3.5 years away from being able to cover 100% of our current luxurious spending levels, so if I grit my way through it, me and DW can FATFIRE.

So here is my first question, should I LEANFIRE or FATFIRE? or somewhere in between?

Now the other tricky aspect of this entire thing is my need for structure and pressure to get anything done. I feel like if I did FIRE, there is a high probability that I'm going to waste away years being a lazy, unproductive person and would not be setting a good example for my children. So I'm exploring a few ideas to prevent this entropy from happening:

Becoming a CIO or CTO of a small non-profit and use the goal of trying to save the world to motivate me to do work
Somehow getting myself into a chillaxed startup and get the other members of the startup to motivate me to do work
Re-creating several online income streams (as I had many years ago) and get those streams to force me to do work

So here is my second question, do any of the above tactics actually work for those who have already FIRED? Or are there other better ideas out there?


Thanks for any advice and tips!

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