Teach me how to sluggy

[maskedslug]

Welcome! I'm new to these parts, and want to start a journal to keep myself honest and hopefully soak up some wisdom from all of you.

Apologies if you read my intro post, some of this will be repetitive!

Current affairs

• Late 30s, married, employed as a software engineer. Job is really hard to complain about, as far as jobs go

• Currently WL4-ish, looking to improve my general handiness and solve more problems in-house.

• Living in a house we bought ~1 year ago in the suburbs. This was a mistake. We do not like the suburbs, and would like to sell the house and return to the city

• Have about $900k in assets (including the equity in the house, which is only ~$100k of that)

• Aside from housing, we spend about ~$25k/year combined. Our mortgage payment is nearly $3,000/month. So housing absolutely dominates our spending. I'd like to bring this down significantly.

Top of mind

• Housing We're going to look at an apartment in the city later today. The rent on this unit is 60% what our mortgage payment is, so it would be a pretty lovely change of pace. Plus the reduced maintenance, utilities, and car-dependency would be really nice. We have a close friend who lives in the same building, too, which is a big draw.
  
  Neither my wife nor I are entirely sure what kind of housing situation we really want. Part of me hates going back to renting. But I'm feeling a little trigger shy after making such a goof with our home purchase last year.
  
  We had our roof replaced soon after moving into our house, and decided to have a skylight removed because of condensation issues. What remains is a hole in the ceiling with a beautiful plywood view. To start getting the place ready to sell, I'll be putting my limited drywalling skills to good use this weekend, and closing that bad-boy up.

• Cycling/fitness. Since covid, I've turned into a bit of a hermit, and been way too sedentary. Moving to the 'burbs has only made this worse. I have used my bike as transportation exactly 0 times since moving here. I'm trying to get back into some semblance of "in shape". I'm focusing on primarily zone-2 cardio training now, and have been doing ~90 minute indoor bike rides on my trainer. A relatively pathetic 90w is my current zone-2 sweet spot. Hoping to see this go up over the coming months.

• Work. I'm getting close to my FI number. And if we can bring our housing costs down a bit, we'll be ready to rock. I'm having a tad of the "One More Year" mindset. I know I could figure out a way to scrape some money together in the future if I needed it. But I'm having a hard time actually believing it's a wise idea to give up my relatively easy money-fountain. Sitting at a computer desk most of the day is not exactly a healthy way to spend my time, and I certainly wouldn't be doing this if it weren't for the paycheck—there's very little passion here.

Ok. Not sure what other details would be relevant for an introductory journal post, so we'll leave it here for now. Thanks for reading!

[sodatrain]

Welcome! Sounds like you are well on your way. Congratulations!

Looking forward to reading more!

[AxelHeyst]

I’m interested in poking at your thoughts on housing. The burbs was a mistake, but neither you nor your wife are sure exactly what you want (besides being back in the city). Have you thought about experimenting with different cities, or alternative housing solutions? Sometimes when I’m feeling ambivalent about a decision I’ll make a deliberate attempt to expand my Overton window in terms of what’s possible. Suspend judgement and make a list of all possible options, bonus points for listing crazy and weird ideas. Your response to some of those ideas might provide insights. (Eg live on a boat in a marina in the city? Become an apt bldg manager like Ego? Bam, instaFI. Sell the house and then live for three month in different cities around the world/country while WFH? Etc)

[maskedslug]

Welcome! Sounds like you are well on your way. Congratulations!

Looking forward to reading more!

Thank you!

I’m interested in poking at your thoughts on housing. The burbs was a mistake, but neither you nor your wife are sure exactly what you want (besides being back in the city). Have you thought about experimenting with different cities, or alternative housing solutions? Sometimes when I’m feeling ambivalent about a decision I’ll make a deliberate attempt to expand my Overton window in terms of what’s possible. Suspend judgement and make a list of all possible options, bonus points for listing crazy and weird ideas. Your response to some of those ideas might provide insights. (Eg live on a boat in a marina in the city? Become an apt bldg manager like Ego? Bam, instaFI. Sell the house and then live for three month in different cities around the world/country while WFH? Etc)

I appreciate the prompt! And p.s., I love your podcast.

It's definitely a bit of a mess in my head. I like the list idea—I'll give that a go for sure.

We've moved around a few times, and have some ideas of what we do and don't like. We met and lived in NYC for many years. Before moving to the much smaller east coast city we're now in, we did some international living: staying in Valencia, Spain for 3 months (which we loved), then a follow-on stay in Split, Croatia for another 3 months.

Some things that will likely shape our options:

• We chose our current area because my family is close. We see each other often, and that is something we do value

• We've both lived most of our adult lives in major cities, and have come to value being able to walk places reasonably easily and safely

• Ideally, we would have enough space/sunlight to be able to grow a small garden and maybe have some solar panels

• We have a sweet little baby cat. So ideas more on the nomadic side of things are probably tough

[mountainFrugal]

Welcome @maskedslug. I look forward to following along.

I am curious if you are a hip-hop fan and your screen name is in reference to Slug from Atmosphere and your mask is a reference to MF Doom?

[maskedslug]

I’ve been busted. You nailed it

[mountainFrugal]

Ha! Well in that case check out Oddissee if you are not already familiar: https://soundcloud.com/oddiseemusic . He produces and raps. It is a great combo.

[maskedslug]

Ha! Well in that case check out Oddissee if you are not already familiar: https://soundcloud.com/oddiseemusic . He produces and raps. It is a great combo.

Thanks for the recommendation—this is excellent. I was mostly twiddling my thumbs at work, waiting for an incredibly slow data migration to run. This kept me entertained for a while My brother is also a big hip-hop fan, so naturally I shared with him. He'd already known about oddisee, because a friend of his randomly sat next to oddisee on a flight somewhere, and had shared that story. Pretty funny!

On the housing front, we were introduced to a real estate agent that a couple friends had used to acquire their homes. This guy is a million times more professional and helpful (and non-pushy) than the last agent we dealt with. We've been looking at relatively small ~900sf-1200sf houses. My wife was initially pretty insistent than we needed 2+ bathrooms, but I think I've assuaged concerns in that department (a bucket + toilet seat lid is a pretty viable cheap emergency second bathroom, if things got desperate enough). We're still keeping our eyes open for rentals, too. No concrete plans, just kind of weighing options and seeing what's available.

In random programming tinkery news: I chatted with my mom this past week, and apparently her Facebook and Instagram accounts had somehow gotten disabled for suspicious activity. Guess her password got leaked or something. She was pretty upset about losing all her Instagram photos. Randomly after a few days, she was able to get back in. Ever the opportunist looking for fun programming projects, I thought it would be cool to make a totally private family-only Instagram alternative, and archive all her Instagram posts for her on it. It's now up and running, and she loves it, and is relieved to see all her photos are safe. It's just a little progressive-web-app intended to be used on a phone. I'd never done the full PWA thing before, and have been pretty impressed by how much "app"-like stuff you can do with them these days.

[Western Red Cedar]

Welcome to the forum masked slug!

@mf - that was a deep cut on the username. I suppose the mask was a pretty good hint though.

[maskedslug]

We put in an offer on a house in the city, and just got word that our offer was accepted! It's a significant downsizing—this new house is almost exactly half the square-footage of our current house. And it's about $150k less expensive, which is nice. I'm very much looking forward to pulling my bike off the trainer it's been hooked up to for the past year, and putting it to actual real-world use. We'll be about a 5 minute bike ride from anything we'll need, all on slow 25mph narrow city streets.

We made a cash offer. Still trying to figure out the best option to limit my capital gains taxes. My current plan is to:

• Take out the max $50k 401k loan, which is effectively a free loan (you pay interest, but you pay it to yourself)

• Take out a margin loan for ~$150k which we'll pay back ASAP once our current house sells. We expect to net ~$150k, so this should only be for about 1 month. With Vanguard, this will be around ~$1,500. To avoid ~$13,000 in capital gains, this feels like a pretty good deal. Not nearly as good as Interactive Brokers' rates, but we close in 2.5 weeks, so don't have enough time to get in on those relatively sweet margin rates.

• Grimace a bit, and sell the remaining ~$100k in stocks, and worry about the impending tax bill next year

[thef0x]

Congrats on the new pad!

Thanks for posting about the 401k loan, didn't know about that, very interesting.