mxlr650's marathon journal

[Chad]

Don't use weight as your primary indicator. You can gain weight quite easily while losing body fat. Take basic measurements (waist, hips, chest, arms) and track how you look/feel instead. Weight should only really be used as a generic long-term indicator... not something you check multiple times per week.

Agreed. Muscle is more dense than fat, so you can lose some of the "bad" size while not losing weight if you are exercising. Thus, the need for measurements and not just a scale. You could also buy a cheap fat percentage caliper (less than $10), which does a semi-ok job of measuring fat.

[henrik]

I gained roughly what you are trying to lose in about two years after I started biking and running. Never had a weight problem and AFAIK nothing else changed, it's just that leg muscles are long and heavy:)

[mxlr650]

@Slimicy, Chad, Henrik: thanks for your cheers even though I did not put forth my best. I had calipers that I donated when cleaning the house. My waist and hip could easily trim 3-4 inches compared to 3 years prior, so unless that is not happening, muscle growth elsewhere is not really meeting the goal.

Update for Q3

Most of the savings is on auto-pilot, with some extra expenses in last 3 months. I bought a new MTB, and we have a guest for last 2 months — paying for travel insurance, food, and showing some attractions to our guest is adding to around $500 extra per month, and the guest will be staying for another month. Anyways, I am still way ahead of my savings goal, so its not a concern.





Spotted the following poster at an aviation museum, and both guest/I were shocked initially, but then again, this poster was printed in the 60s and may be they are curating this as well, so history can be communicated in the right context

https://farm4.staticflickr.com/3934/154 ... c4d8_o.jpg

I lost 1.5 pounds last month which is a good start, and when our guest leaves I will have renewed focus towards my weight loss goal.

Due to time constraints, my intended longer post may have to wait till next month update.

[spoonman]

That's the thing about a weight loss regime, it's very easy to get distracted while hanging out with other people. I gained something like 5 pounds in September because of all the social meals we were having.

Btw, you are making some awesome progress towards your retirement goal!

[mxlr650]

Happy Ney Year!! (I suppose I am still under HNY cutoff date of Jan 31st?)

@spoonman: thanks for your encouragement!

2014 year was great overall, and the main goal that was NOT achieved was consistent weight loss. Of all the things that I was tackling in 2014, weight loss never became high enough priority, and I will have a chance in 2015 to go at it again.
In spite of this setback, I am happy to report that I have not consumed Monster/Redbull or soda in last 5 months (been drinking energy drinks for ~12 years)

Not sure what is going on with my bike -- I am getting lots of flats even though there is tire liner. Either I have to find a new route, stop jumping on curbs or take it for a ride along Camino de Santiago

Now on to highlights!

Our Estate Planning is complete. Some background: If a couple own multiple assets, and there are multiple beneficiaries, there needs to be a mechanism identify who “owns” the distribution process, and who gets what. This can get complicated with blended families -- there must be some controls in place so the distribution and % of assets to beneficiaries who belong to deceased spouse’s side are not impacted after death. Then there is change to the list of beneficiaries themselves as well as the percentage based on moods, medications or both

An easy way to manage this is via “estate planning” where you create a “living trust”, and make that trust as the holder of all assets and use “will” to define the distribution percentages and beneficiaries. Most sad stories relating to estates stem from lack of estate planning. Example: assume a blended family, and the spouse dies, and without a will, the surviving spouse gets all the assets, and if that spouse dies, all assets go to legal heirs of recently deceased spouse and none to prior spouse’s heirs. An extreme would be “laughing heir” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laughing_heir. “will” is good but “estate planning” is better since it avoids probate process, and brings in few tax benefits.

We have no kids, but we have friends/family on each side, so we felt it was important, and we considered two options: AB Trust, Continuing Trust.

In AB Trust, living spouse becomes “A” spouse (Above ground) and deceased spouse becomes “B spouse (Below ground), and estate is split into two parts. B portion of the estate is now frozen, so the beneficiary list or percentage cannot be changed without the consent of the beneficiary (figure how many times can that be successful). This is great for blended family and related situations.
In our case, each of us will be leaving a small percentage of our estate to friends/family, and majority goes to charity. After one of us die, not being able to change charity listing based on emerging trends (http://www.propublica.org/article/the-r ... t-disaster) was unacceptable. It is also well known that many charities are very litigious when they are aware that they are the beneficiary, so I would hate to be not in a position to utter a metaphoric fuck-you to anyone feeling entitled.

We chose Continuing Trust which allows surviving spouse to change beneficiary list as well as percentages, and we have trust in each other that family/friends identified by the deceased spouse will remain unchanged. We also chose to have a no-contest clause wherein, if someone challenges the estate they get zero.

Estate planning also offers tax shelter which is a huge plus. After estate planning, Hague Trust Convention kicks in so the trust is recognized in most parts of the world that we plan to live. Once trust is setup, we used the paperwork to change the beneficiary on all of our financial assets, or change the title to a trust, as well as create new accounts in the name of the trust.

Advanced Healthcare Directive to dictate the action in case of incapacity is also done.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estate_planning
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advance_he ... _directive

Financial Update:

In 2014, for the first time we started tracking our expenses in Quicken, and after few months of tracking expenses, we analyzed our expenses with the intent to optimize. The only area we felt worthwhile improving was eating out -- instead of eating out couple times a week like we did in prior years, we agreed on once a week. It has been few months since that decision, and we have become used to eating out just once a week. More importantly we were really happy that we had been running a tight ship over the years even without any external tracking or ever budgeting.

Our 2014 annual expenses amounted to 2.6% SWR, and by just moving out of the SF Bay Area, SWR can easily drop to 1.8%. Since we invest in aggressive growth portfolio, an SWR of <= 2% is highly desirable, so even with a 50% slump in portfolio, we will be <= 4% SWR.

We reached our travel fund goal, 6 months earlier than expected. Selling SUV and bonus helped a great deal.




Our paycheck for next few months will be very minimal due to Property tax, 401k, and few house repair expenses. Anyways, we have few items to complete before logging out. Will update as things happen.

Clutter Removal:

We are starting the second pass of our three pass house clean, where we are currently tagging things going for charity, family, friends, and a small portion that will be in family storage till we are ready to grow roots in some place.

One of the current big tasks is digitizing: documents, and few important books so they can be donated. I was thinking along the lines of buying a fast book/document scanner (http://diybookscanner.myshopify.com/pro ... canner-kit) as well as photo scanner, when I came across a fast scanner at local library. I love this cloud-enabled, auto-orienting, edge detecting, UI controlled scanner that can create password protected PDF! http://www.scannx.com/book-scancenter/. I am 80% done with my document scanning.

I also found a 1200 DPI photo scanner that I will be using to scan all the photos in coming month or two. Once second pass is done, our physical possessions will drop significantly, and our shredder output will increase significantly

A question to readers: What did you not anticipate before retirement that you think is useful to know now that you are in the know? Appreciate your responses. Thank you.

[mxlr650]

I read The Time Paradox: The New Psychology of Time That Will Change Your Life when it first came out 5-6 years ago, and read it again early this year, and wanted to post a brief summary of the book since then. DW is out of town, and I am not well, so all I have done this weekend is to stay indoors and do some community service for some forums that I frequent. So here is a brief summary of the book. Enjoy.

The book starts off with the story of Santa Maria della Concezione, a small church at the top of Spanish Steps in Rome, whose cramped walls, ceilings, chandeliers are decorated with discolored human bones, replete with a complete skeleton holding a scales of justice. An inscription on the floor at the foot of a pile of bones reads

• • What you are, they once were
    What they are, you will be

Which was Capuchin Monks way of reminding us of our ultimate destiny

Time Paradox book is about the psychology of time, not physics of time, and its two paradoxes

1. Our attitudes towards time have a profound impact on our life and our world, and yet, we seldom recognize it
2. Moderate attitudes about past, present, and future are indicative of health, while extreme attitudes are indicative of biases that lead predictably to unhealthy patterns of living

There are six time perspectives identified in the book and you can determine your time perspective based on the answers to the questionnaire (link at the end of this post). Based on the responses to the questionnaire and research, authors identify six time perspectives that people could take and reasons behind them

1. Past-positive (trip down the memory lane)
   
   • Relive positive things that happened in the past and its positive impact on the feelings, thoughts and behavior. Here mental reconstruction of past events is more important than what did happen
   • People who live in their memories of glorious past
2. Past-negative (regret your past life)
   
   • Negative events in the past leading the negative attitudes or a current negative reconstruction of past events that may have been benign
3. Present-fatalistic (resignation)
   
   • Environment of political and economic turmoil can orient people towards present since the future is uncertain and may not necessarily be better
   • Less education, abject poverty, and rampant drugs can lead people to more likely live in the present (e.g: inner-city ghettos)
   • Present oriented people are likely to be less concerned with work and more cynical about current efforts paying off in the future
   • Those whose life path is controlled by forces that the individual cannot influence (medical condition etc)
4. Present-hedonistic (pleasure seeking)
   
   • Enjoy all the pleasure and avoid all the pain
   • Focus on immediate gratification, self-stimulation and short-term payoff
   • Seek novelty, sensation, and high energy – i.e. college life ☺
5. Future (tomorrow will be better than today)
   
   • Future, like the past is never experienced directly, and it is a psychologically constructed mental state fashioned out of hopes, fears, and aspirations
   • Key idea of future orientation is that the person plans for everything before execution, and change of course is not acceptable; This as opposed to going with the flow, and doing activities that have no defined purpose, helping others, wasting time, etc.
   • Future oriented people view past as a reservoir of mistakes to be rectified and successes to be repeated and expanded and have little use for an impulse-driven present. Basically the mantra is “meet tomorrow’s deadline, complete all necessary work before tonight’s play”
   • Future orientation is a prerequisite for membership in the middle class. Ambition and need for achievement drive a future orientation that focuses on work, savings and planning for a continually better life through one’s efforts
   • Upper middle class can take any time perspective they want - a combination of past and future - old rich who care more about adherence to tradition/legacy also while planning for the future so they can remain wealthy.
   • Future orientation, for all the goodness of future orientation, it has some really nasty negatives when things are out of balance
     
     • Planning takes center stage, and wasting time becomes sinful, and emotionally distressing
     • Progression of mental toxicities such as impatience and anger towards situations that is slowing progress
     • Sacrificing family, friends for success, workaholism. Fortunately people in ERE community already know this and not all get into that cycle
     • Having been competitive for so long, some of the activities are not longer pleasurable because of performance concerns and anticipatory anxiety. This a big one for me.
6. Transcendental-future: Religious and spiritual view of life/death etc. I have skipped this chapter since it does not interest me

There are few other time perspectives that the books touches upon

• Holistic present: absolute present, a concept central to Buddhism, asserts that absolute present contains both past and future (as opposed to Western linear view of time), and is neither slave to the past nor a means to the future; and daily meditation is the way to experience in absolute present moment unfiltered thru the lenses of past and future. By opening your mind fully to the present moment, you give up longing and desire for future possibilities and surrender past regrets and obligations. Its called holistic present because the mindfulness can fill your entire being, and it reflects neither pleasure seeking of present-hedonism nor the cynicism and resignation of present-fatalism. This is not my cup of green tea
• Another quick path present orientation is drugs: they alter our consciousness so that our past and future concerns and rational thinking modes are suspended while the mind’s eye looks inward to a limitless present. Of course there is bills to pay (and finances to manage) when the person gets back to reality after few hours or few years for some

The six time perspectives above are theoretically unrelated, and the score on one dimension is unrelated to the score on others. However, in practice, research finds consistent patterns in individual time perspective profiles.

I am mostly past-positive, very little present-orientation, and a very dominant future-orientation. I became future oriented most likely due to a mix of stable family, good education, having a steady career, and being successful. However, my high school/college life was not all-future orientation – it was a good mix of present and future orientations, and I am glad I enjoyed the student life without blindly devoting to grades. In fact I would have had huge regrets if I had good grades but did not enjoy my youth. I took two years off from college to volunteer, to travel, and also to help build school in in South America etc. However, my work life has been predominantly future oriented.

What is it about my future-orientation that I find repulsive?

The book talks about the following psychology experiment: In a phycology experiment at Princeton, the researchers were investigating how students behaved in preparation for giving a speech on the parable of Good Samaritan. As the students were getting ready to walk to the auditorium which was a block away, one group were told they were “late” and need to hurry up to give speech and the other group were told they “had plenty of time”. While walking towards the venue, each student was tricked into encountering a situation where someone was in obvious need for help, and with no one around (probably to eliminate bystander effect) – the student had to make to choice to rush to the venue and give speech about being a Good Samaritan and possibly impress others, or to stay put and help.

• Researchers found that students who were told to have plenty of time invariably stopped and helped, where as 90% of students in “being late” group failed to stop and help because they were headed in the “future” direction, and their mind-set was focused on next task on hand.
• So, “present” oriented people (plenty of time mindset) are less likely to be successful but are more likely to help others, where as “future” oriented people are most likely to be successful and the least likely to help others in need

So essentially, people who are best able to help are the least likely to do so. I have to admit that I was this future obsessed asshole till few years ago, and while I am still not a saint, I have recognized this and am working on it

Now that I am on the way out soon, I would like to re-orient myself to a good mix of present and future. Maybe dedicate half of the week[1] for activities without a plan, doing things without a purpose, and never aiming for any achievement. I am not sure how easy it is, in fact it may be quite difficult considering how habitual I have been with my mental processing, but since “future time perspective” does not seem to have evolutionary roots, it seems doable.

Future time perspective does hone certain character strengths (discipline, perseverance, planning) like no other, however keeping that mode in check is critical to enjoying life. I was lot more present-oriented during my student life, so I have hope that I can break out of being in future oriented cognitive jungle and start enjoying life’s pleasures fully again. It may take few years for it to become a habit, and I am not in a hurry

[1] Oops, I am already tracking what percentage of my time shouldn’t be tracked

In summary, this book is about understanding, strengthening, and even reinventing one's relationship with time, which has the potential of freeing us from thoughts, and actions that arise out of outdated perspectives.

I would rate the utility of the book at 5 out of 5, and the structure/flow at 3 out of 5.

Thanks for reading!

Links:
http://www.amazon.com/Time-Paradox-Psyc ... 416541993/
http://www.thetimeparadox.com/zimbardo- ... inventory/
http://www.thetimeparadox.com/transcend ... inventory/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bystander_effect

[jacob]

I consider myself almost entirely future-oriented. However, I did not relate much to that description. Indeed the focus on plans and deadlines made me think of Dreyfus level 1 thinking?!

Here's how I see the future:

* The future is the possibility of any number of trajectories that fan out of the present some of which are more likely that others. By trajectory I mean something like a forward looking history: a potential history.

* Choices can be made so as to make some more likely than others and in particular choices can be made to group paths together so as to make changing paths easier. This is what the entire web of goals(+) is about.

(+) Web of strategies is a more apt description. I find that I actually have few goals. But I do have lots of strategies.

* The future is definitely not a plan to be followed once committed to. It's always a collection of many different trajectories.

* The future is approximately as real to me as the present is. If the present is the current input I derive from my senses, the future is the current input I derive from my mind.

* The better I understand the world, the more likely it is that the future actually does become the present for me. Since this ability actually has substantial pragmatic utility, perhaps this is where the drive to understand comes from. On the flip side, the more I know, the less patience I have with anyone I know to be factually wrong.

* My current present is my past future. So if I optimize my present future, my future present will be optimized too. I appreciate the future vision of my past self very much.

* Basically, I have much more optionality and accessibility to the future than the present. I can do very little in the present, so I care less about it.

[Ego]

My current present is my past future. So if I optimize my present future, my future present will be optimized too. I appreciate the future vision of my past self very much.

The perfect epitaph for your gravestone.

[mxlr650]

* My current present is my past future. So if I optimize my present future, my future present will be optimized too. I appreciate the future vision of my past self very much.

* Basically, I have much more optionality and accessibility to the future than the present. I can do very little in the present, so I care less about it

In some areas in my life (such as investing, DIY skills), I have always been future oriented and will always remain so where I will be looking out for better strategies. But, some areas do not qualify (hobbies, traveling)

One of the hobbies that i would like to revive is motorcycling. I have not done much last year, and prior to that i was mostly a week-end warrior with few weeks off every couple years for full time riding. So my skills are intermediate level at best. I will not acquire more skills just by devoting more time to practice, and to get to the next level there is fear to be overcome; even then, outcomes are uncertain and are often dependent on various factors. While I have high degree of intrinsic motivation, i also have some level of extrinsic motivation when it comes to competitive sports and situations such as motorcycle racing encourages risk taking beyond one’s safety envelope. While all risk cannot be eliminated, some of those induced by “imagined” outcomes can be eliminated by being in the present and fully enjoying it. This could mean not imagining better version of self, and mental conditioning to eliminate frustrations. Frankly, I will be happy and fortunate if i could ride for as long i can walk around.

Some of my comments in the book review post were referring to these specific situations where a future version is not necessarily a better version.

[mxlr650]

Two weeks ago I resigned -- I gave two weeks notice and since I did not have another job lined up, my company asked me to extend my stay for 2-3 months, promising extra financial reward as well as limited hours. When you are expected to leave work the same day if you get laid off or if you are going to competition, I did not see a reason for extending my last day. Anyways, last two weeks including the last day were hectic to say the least, but things turned out just fine. Sooooo, I wanted to wait till I was out the door to say that I am officially a retiree and there is no paid work from Monday!

My path to retirement turned out to be a very different than the one I imagined ~15 years ago -- I thought I would be financially successful doing startups. Did two startups, got great experience, it cost me ~80k and both went up in flames. I could have continued on the startup streak, but there is life to live, so I decided to fallback on my frugal skills to achieve FI. So this is one Silicon Valley story that will not make it to newspapers as it does not sound sexy

Early obsession with computers steered me to work in the technology realm, starting out with R&D and branching out to business side of things, giving me hands on experience in the whole product lifecycle. Barring few dark spots, I have thoroughly enjoyed my working career, and one of the reasons for that might be due to my preference towards variety/challenging projects with good compensation and not on title/visibility in the workplace.

Anyways, work is not a favorite topic here and my enjoyment of it sure sounds like listening to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJrVZCbKxsE from start to finish especially if you hate electronic dance music sooo, I will stop braying.

Thanks to Jacob and many members here for maintaining such a great forum!

I will post updates periodically on the happenings. Meanwhile, good luck to you on your path to FI -- I look forward to reading your journal!

[Gilberto de Piento]

Congratulations! What a huge accomplishment.

[C40]

Woo HOO!!

Congratulations

[jennypenny]

My goal is to save 150K USD by 4th of July 2015 and retire;

Right on the money. Well done.

[George the original one]

"And another one's down, another one bites the dust" Enjoy!

[mxlr650]

Thank you GdP, C40, JP, GTOO!

We sold the house FSBO (no seller's agent), and it was a great experience; we got above asking price and did not have to pay seller's agent commission. We had been tracking market for a while and IMO netted top dollars! I will detail on our experience in a separate post.

All our long and short term physical belonging are boxed (way less than 10 boxes). We are already on a road trip around the USA for next few months.

I will post update in a month (as i am mooching a public WiFi). Things are looking/sounding awesome right now https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k21dSfGumyc#t=330

[mxlr650]

We sold the house FSBO (no seller's agent), and it was a great experience; we got above asking price and did not have to pay seller's agent commission. We had been tracking market for a while and IMO netted top dollars! I will detail on our experience in a separate post.

Posted my FSBO experience here: http://www.forum.earlyretirementextreme ... =14&t=6900

Took me a while to write it all, and now I will be back on road reverting to fun mode

[steveo73]

My goal is to save 150K USD by 4th of July 2015 and retire;

Right on the money. Well done.

Hi - is this all you saved to retire ? If so that is badass.

My path to retirement turned out to be a very different than the one I imagined ~15 years ago -- I thought I would be financially successful doing startups. Did two startups, got great experience, it cost me ~80k and both went up in flames. I could have continued on the startup streak, but there is life to live, so I decided to fallback on my frugal skills to achieve FI.

I'm a big fan of this approach. I see no need to go for the hail mary. I think the robust frugal approach is achievable for everyone however very few will actually take this path.

[mxlr650]

Hi - is this all you saved to retire ? If so that is badass.

that's what i saved as travel fund -- it is not badass
I was already FI when I started the journal.

[mxlr650]

DW and I switched to Republic Wireless (RW) as there were lots of positive reviews -- well, $10 definitely sounds attractive compared to $50+ per month. My experience with RW in the past 3 months has been the absolute worst and instead of a rant, here a list of what I have gone thru

• Soon after the switch to RW, we started receiving tons of garbage SMS as well as telemarketing calls, and we were miffed as the numbers we had ported to RW were already on donot-call list and we never had this issue with the previous cellular providers. With some digging with RW, I learned that, RW assigns two phone numbers to each subscriber – one for the sprint cellular infrastructure, and another for RW VoIP purposes. So, all the spam was originating from the new number that was added to our RW service. As a fix, RW assigned us a different number, and we put that number into donot-call -- after that the spam stopped, but not completely.
• Voice quality with WiFi as well as with Sprint has been really bad. Sprint’s CDMA network crappiness was not a surprise, but it was a surprise that even on a quiet WiFi network the call quality was bad. OTOH, I had consistently better results with WhatsApp or Viber. One customer service person thought I was in an echo chamber; another time I was asked to not use speakerphone when I was on phone mic. Boy, I could go on.
• Had to call 911 to report a highway incident, and all i got was a busy tone. It was not like 911 lines were busy with too many callers, my call on Sprint network was not going thru, WTFinF?!
• Many of the services that do reverse number lookup to determine your identity will not accept both RW numbers as a valid mobile phone number. Basically you would need non-VoIP mobile number to use services like Yahoo mail, AirBnB, etc. Most banks/other online services that send you SMS will work fine though.
• Software quality of RW software that gets loaded into the phone has annoying behaviors (I have no insight into how this crapware is written, but a guess purely from a blackbox perspective). When you turn off the WiFi and make a call thru cellular, call gets disconnected few times before the call goes thru. It is annoying to see the non-maskable notification prompting you to turn on the WiFi when you turned it off precisely because the WiFi call quality was crappy or you were in a non-WiFi area and you wanted to save battery. VM timestamps are always in EST, and if you do not live in EST, you will learn to determine time zone adjustments to the VM timestamps –a new skill you never had to learn all your life! When you clear all your VM, and if you are used to seeing VM icon go away from the notification screen right away, you will readjust your expectation for it to go away in next day or two. If you cannot wait that long, there is always that handy phone reboot or restarting that RW crapware.

Smartphone is important to me since it has camera, recorder, chat, apps, etc, and there is no way I would use flip-phone. Switching from one major cellular carrier to an another major carrier is not a big deal, but when switching from a major carrier to a no-name like RW - I should have remembered/practiced the Swedish proverb – don’t throw your old bucket till you know the new bucket does not leak. I am stuck with this garbage for couple more months till I get to home base.

[steveo73]

Hi - is this all you saved to retire ? If so that is badass.

that's what i saved as travel fund -- it is not badass
I was already FI when I started the journal.

That makes sense. Thanks for clarifying that. I thought 150k to retire on was sweet.