ebast's crash course re-journal

[ebast]

Second Chances

Second ERE, second journal. Two years ago I retired early. Then after a year of that, I managed to take another job or two which meant other interests (and free time) went down while spending crept up. My first goal: get back to a reasonable spending rate. And post regularly about it here.

Back to Work: Early Re-entry Extreme

Work's an inconvenience. They expect you to come in five days in a row! And not only that, but they expect you to do only certain things while you're there, and for some reason those things are not generally recognized to include five-hour research projects to catch up on the history of the mongol empire, study your spanish conjugations, or take mid-afternoon bike rides to pick up a home brewing setup you saw for cheap on craigslist. Much less to commute home to spend some time in your garden while the sun is still shining, start up some lentil stew in the slow-cooker, or have coffee with a friend on a perfectly good and sunny Tuesday afternoon.

Not only that, but because all your coworkers are happily shoveling out every dollar they make each month to mortgages, landlords, and worse, housing is bloody expensive here (2 or 3 of the highest-priced housing markets in the nation, we got em!) That's okay, savvy EREer that I am: I get somewhat affordable housing a little more than an hour away from work. Long commute? no worries -- you can devote the time to reading, and that you do, but anything else: gardening/woodworking/personal grooming gets weird looks from your public transportation fellows, so save that for when you get home. If you get home.

Projects? Building a stitch & glue dinghy? Raising chickens on an urban plot? Making homemade wine & limoncello? Yes they could still happen, but glacially. When I wasn't working I kept schedules to make sure all the various projects I had spinning would progress. It's funny to go back and look at those and how much I'd get done in a week compared to now: I'm not complaining. stuff still gets done but in comparison when you're working, it's like standing still. Or working for the city. (Although, there was a job where I could've listened to five hour podcasts on the mongols...)

A fun exercise I should do: draw two columns. for one week, write down everything you accomplish at work in one. in the other, write down everything you accomplish at your non-work life. Compare.

Agh! Do not be discouraged. That's what journals are for, right?

Anyway, as a result of stuffing everything into the few hours left at the end of the day (instead of just cutting out hobbies as if they were liabilities which in the early stages they are)... I may have to acknowledge some pretty severe deficiencies in spending discipline. Mistakes were made. Let's see the damage:

Past 5 months (Average)

Rent: 1025
Dining out (with others): 309
Eating out (alone): 95
Groceries: 250
Drinks & spirits: 162
Coffee: 30
Healthcare: 66
Clothing: 5
Phone: 11
Books/Newspaper/Magazine: 48
Concerts/Theater: 35
Camping: 15
Car: 97
Train: 270
Bus: 41
Cab: 26
Bike: 5
Other: 74
Total: 2564

Analysis (that is, Excuses):

Well, a close reader might suspect there's some inclination toward ERE going on here from the clothing and phone averages, but yikes, I'm handing out a twenty dollar bill every day just for food. For a few months there the groceries & dining was covering two full people and so that may come down but this is a place to improve. I also had a number of good friends in town the past two months and although I could make them a mean lentil stew, somehow visits often become an exercise in finding fancy places to overpay for dinner (from which as far as I've seen, the biggest hits are typically pricy versions of cheesey bread.) In terms of big expenses, the rent's fixed for a time, but at least it is covering two. Transportation could be cleaned up (someday soon I need to sell that vehicle, and I don't mean the bike).

My goal is to cut expenses in half in the next few months. I'd like to get somewhere around my sustainable target of around $1200-1500/month.

I would also like to have some fun doing it.

[ebast]

Start from a bad enough baseline, it's easy to improve. I'm noticing a similar pattern across categories in reducing spending (from the standard lifestyle I adopted): first it just takes a little awareness to cut out the glaringly obvious, then there's setting up the habits and systems in place to satisfy that category in a more robust way. (and then: there's crazy Jacob stuff)

So, carrying right along:
Rent: 1600
Dining out (alone/w others): 40 / 122
Groceries: 166
Spirits: 77
Coffee: 3
Clothing: 27
Books/media: -83 (sold some books, downsizing continuing)
Concerts: 172
Car: 240
Train/bus: 326
Bike: 21 (lights for before 7am or after 4pm -- gotta love winter)
other: 30
Total: 2743

Food
Food spending is down 50%. Made some progress ensuring I have a delectable and healthy variety of groceries on hand so I can have good meals at home. If you make the time, fairly easy down here in sunny states - last year at this time I was trudging through snow thinking only about finding something warm, salty and fat to eat, whereas down here there are farmers markets all winter and with a tactical walk around the fruit trees of the neighborhood you can find yourself with a complete fruit salad in your bag. (any folks in colder climes feeling any envy, just wait till I get to the housing cost section. those free oranges are pretty expensive.)

I need to get better at: preparing large portions and using leftovers. I have a refrigerator at home and at work now, I need to take advantage of it. I also want to get better at not going out to eat at work. I was thinking of following Tyler9000's sandwich-bar-in-the-work-fridge idea but then I went back to read the original post and realized it included a few other ideas as part of an overall strategy which was so good and insightful about the different aspects of lunch, I think I'll follow the whole approach.

House
Housing costs are stubbornly high. The lease we have now is coming up to its close and so we've started looking around for something, preferably a temporary situation and in looking at anything on the more affordable side of the spectrum I've started coming across those situations you read about: roomfuls of eager applicants with bank statements/references/resumes/headshots/bribes in their hand. Like a casting call or something. For an apartment. Seriously, it is not uncommon to come to an open showing and see eight or ten people in a room all manicuring a story for the landlord lording over it all as if he were the judge of his own reality show.

People seem fairly comfortable or just resigned to have to jump through these hoops, maybe the reality shows have trained us well.

Well, hopefully we will find something reasonable. Or else we're voting ourselves off the island.

Transportation
Lots of car expenses this month: registration renewal/insurance and then materials to work on a stubborn overheating problem which I think I finally got fixed over a long weekend. I know - all for somebody who never drives his damn car. I am not keeping this car long-term and I don't need it as a daily driver, so at first glance this is not a real rational economic allocation of effort, but I'm fixing it up to eventually sell and I get a kick from taking a day to play with something mechanical, figure it out, and make it work. (Yeah, obviously this is what you say when it goes well, not when you have an expensive lump of old rusting Italian metal taking up space in your driveway. Just quote me this on one of those days.)

I think I will probably set a goal of selling the car in spring so these will go away. Not much I can do on other transportation costs for right now. Those are tied in to work and I have no desire to live near work for personal reasons and the real estate is substantially more expensive there anyway.

What else.. got tickets for a special concert for the lady. Pricey, but this was something I wanted to do right.

So that's the major areas for now. I'll get into more detail and specific goals in the year ahead. Best wishes for this new year to everyone - it's gotta be a good one!

[Rural Kiwi]

A great read, keep it up!
I see you spent a fair bit on spirits, I assume this is alcohol and not the ethereal kind! Have you considered home brewing? Surprisingly easy and simple to do at home, if your government allows you.

[ebast]

Kiwi - much appreciate the idea! Thanks to your suggestion I picked up an airlock and some champagne yeast yesterday and am going to take a first pass by making some cider, as inspired by the dead simple Honey Badger (MMM) approach (which I'll start off with) and also Jacob's discussion of country wine (some good tips and ideas here). Picked up all the materials at a local homebrew place and got out of there under $10. Spent a little time looking through all the hops and malts and if I do figure this out, could end up spending a bit more there

sidenote: on the cost issue, I've cut back on the consumption. No strict rules now but just trying to be more choosy about it. I'd been combining beer/wine/liquor into the Spirits category for reporting, and in trying to get that down I realized I'd have a drink a day, commonly thinking things like:

• Long day or I finished some project - I deserve a beer.
• Long train ride - not so fun but it'd be relaxing with a beer.
• This dinner would taste even better with a beer.
• Nice Sunday afternoon - why not have a beer?

You replace beer with cookie (or even dog biscuit?) and you see just about the maturity of the psychological process going on there.

In checking out the MMM site I saw him categorize it as "pointless casual drinking (disguised as the well-deserved beer or red wine at the end of a good workday)" which I thought was a little too accurate. It's nice to have a treat or kick back now and then, but there's other ways to do that. I see in that article also that he has found other ways by replacing beer with squat and while I'm not quite up to that level of enlightenment just yet, maybe something like that's worth an experiment too. Hey, I've a friend whose kids I've seen plead for grapes like my siblings and I used to beg for candy at that age, so anything's possible..

(just wait - "sorry honey - I'll be out late with the guys, having a few squats.")

[ebast]

shit-shooting
I take different routes biking home each day from work. It's a habit I picked up when I used to live in a big big city, the kind where every block has something to see and you can never see every block. You go a few blocks out of your way, it can be a more stimulating ride and doesn't take much longer anyway.

Typically, I am not exactly running any time trials on the way home and I find low-traffic sideroads more relaxing for the late evening. On one of those routes tonight I passed by a park where I overheard some typical yelling in the dark going on between what appeared to be a few drunk guys but was in fact a hot debate going on as to whether the internet do or don't support artists by a few men with what turned out to be instrument cases at their feet. I stopped to overhear a bit of it and while I'm not entirely sure on the veracity of technical arguments being marshalled on this one, it sounded like the don't camp had a pretty prima facie and definitely higher-volume case behind their argument.

I'm not sure if these guys meet in the park every late evening to debate trends in the recording industry or were happening through and needed a smoke or were busking there earlier in the day, but the thing that hit me is that since I moved out here, my level of shooting-the-shit with buddies has seen a distinct drop since the days when I lived near a bunch of preppers, con artists, and armchair sociologists who could manage to disagree on just about anything and fill an hour telling you about it. I think I kinda miss it! Definitely do not want to overdo this one, but as odd as it sounds, how's that for a SMART-goal for this year: measurably increase my daily available allowance of shooting the shit.

[ebast]

Contradiction Proofs

So, it has come time to confess in my postings on the Early Retirement Extreme forum that I am considering quitting my job.

There's still a bit to do in getting my financial house in order, but I am already wrestling with how I will decide when to quit. Or if maybe it's time already. Or was three months ago...

Here's one way I've been thinking about it. I have a decent job: coworkers are good, I have a fair amount of latitude and respect at work and I enjoy having tasks to take on each day and the resources to do it. My most-elicited gripe has been that the job sucks away a sizeable amount of spirit and time away from other pursuits and projects. When you look at it: I am devoting my mental focus to solving other peoples' problems. Important enough to them to pay me for it, but not otherwise critical to me.

I know a lot of times constraints are self-imposed and we may have more ability to shape our situations than we realize. One trick I have to test stubborn assumptions that are causing me problems is to take the proof-by-contradiction approach to life: so you think you don't have enough time to do what you want because of work?

Forget it.

Just pretend it's not true. Assume you do have enough time for work and interests: take up those projects and take them up fully! Do what it is you want to do, engaging even to the detriment of work. Maybe you're coming in late or leaving as early as possible. maybe you study during lunch and listen to materials during the day. There are authors who wrote their first novels in secret cells in their Excel spreadsheets and I've known a few people who planned out starting their own business while working at somebody else's, and for a long time it's been corporate climbing advice among the sociopathic to spend all your efforts at your current job lining up your next one. But my point here is that if it's really true that I can't fit it all in: I'll sure find out soon (and bluntly) enough.

On the other hand, there's the always-startling (to me) office phenomenon that at work, a lot less happens than you think. (in many ways.) People have discussed a number of successful loafing strategies here. Coworkers can gossip and the boss can grimace, but a lot of times with these things: Nothing happens. It is entirely possible if I went that route, I might just get away with it.

[ebast]

MAP Estimation

Hello, my name is ebast and my hobbies are:

1. Working
2. Riding public transportation
3. Worrying about food spending
4. Thinking about retiring
5. Reading the internet

That's a joke. Kinda. Also an apology in advance for more carrying on here in my journal with more thinking about retiring. I find that often when I write stuff down it helps me get it out of my head - either out of my system or committed down on paper - so hopefully this helps me stop kicking up the same dust & move onto further things.

So last time around I talked about moving on due to my urge to do other stuff. A more incisive angle at it would be: why don't you want to do this stuff you are doing (at work)? Yes you can develop coping techniques to persevere, but why aren't you firing on all cylinders?

I'll start with 3 cylinders. People here have brought up Daniel Pink's Mastery, Autonomy, & Purpose as detailed in his book "Drive" (cartoon video here - thanks Dragline!). These are the criteria I had tried adopting (without erm, reading the book) for considering possible projects or the less-fun chores of diagnosing work ills. If you're not feeling positive about work, there's a good chance the root cause falls under one of those and I find it helps sharpen my diagnosis and treatment to know which.

Well for this post I went out and finally read the book! I always wonder about the generalizability of these "These Three Discoveries in Social Science Will Make You Happier, Love Your Job, And Win Friends And Influence People", and then you read the original paper and it's all based on one controlled experiment around giving 15$ to a bunch of bored undergraduate psychology students.

"Drive" is much better than that, with some depth, and if you chase the references down seems like a distillation of a lot of interesting business case studies and results in social science around what motivates and satisfies people. It will not be surprising to readers here that extrinsic reward via monetary compensation is not the be-all and end-all and in fact is often at cross-purposes with getting the best out of yourself or other people.

He promotes his big three "Mastery, Autonomy, Purpose," which are pretty much as they sound. Although, I'll admit (from my initial understanding) I had misinterpreted the "Mastery." After reading the book I think of it more now as "Mastering": not a state of ego-flattering above-average competence or simply respect from your peers but instead an unending series of (often difficult, even painful and trying) personal challenges on the approach to better and better ability. Even experts look at their work and see its shortcomings.

I was also worried "Mastery Autonomy Purpose" sounds a little lofty so might not apply to all but the fanciest careers. Also, that it doesn't explicitly call out some other important criteria I share with those often mentioned here (such as the social environment of people you're working with... people've offered a few other good checklists but I can't seem to find them right now.) But whatever, long story short, it gives a nice place to start and may cover more than I think. Like, take the first paying job I had:

Lifeguard on a beach (like!)

• Mastery: Pretty good. the accreditation process and continuing education we had was not the most strenuous compared to say, competitive swimming, but you gain some important, useful skills. There were friendly competitions every summer to show them off. You probably top out of this after a year or two.
• Autonomy: Very good
• Purpose: You're guarding lives, right? People appreciate having you there although in reality the day-to-day of the job was much more akin to playground-monitor ("hey - no throwing sand") than rescuer (never had a rescue while I was on duty). Your primary purpose is both commonly valued and clearly defined (compare that to some office jobs I've had!)
• (Social): There are worse places to be as a teenager than on a beach in the sun working with a bunch of other physically active teens/twenty-somethings, and everybody has evenings off. What, you thought we wore sunglasses in the morning cuz of the sun?

Also, another job I had, and a career which I've always thought does a nice balance of the three. Depends entirely on what system you're in so YMMV. And note, I didn't do this long enough to get disillusioned, so there's still a little idealism here.

Teacher, post-secondary (not sure if I like)

• Mastery: All you can eat. Separating it into mastery of the subject material and success at teaching, it's hard not to feel competent in whatever subject material when you're both daily explaining it to people who've never seen it before (as well as defining the criteria for understanding). Every student is a new challenge. On the teaching front I didn't meet any teachers who felt they had the teaching challenge licked and the dedicated ones were constantly trying to improve year over year and find better ways to explain or investigate the material they taught.
• Autonomy: this obviously depends a lot on where you're teaching and the loudest howls of complaint I've heard from fellow teachers traces to losses here, but for me the overall experience was one of great autonomy. As one teacher told me: in class, she was captain of the ship. We were a little resource starved but not to the extent it impinged meaningfully on class and I had effective control over course planning, class sessions, and assessment.
• Purpose: C'mon, you're educating the youth! that said, I and others did wonder if we were teaching useful skills or really enabling lifelong learners or appropriately setting the students up with a realistic view of what was required and possible in their chosen fields. Personally purpose-sapping was that (with impressive exceptions) the majority of students are there for the grade, not the material, with tactics to suit. It's hard to blame students who have been in school their entire lives and then treat my class as one more in a never-ending series of classroom hoop-jumping performances, not as a chance to dig into some new challenging area and develop what mastery they find exciting themselves, but so it goes. Education... wasted on the ignorant...
• (Social) May have been where I was, but beneath the veneer of collegiality it was so unsocial I may have been teaching in the Northwest Territories. There is some collegial encouragements at the beginning, but once the year kicks in, everyone gets so busy with their own classes and scholarly work. Due to everyone mostly going it their own, despite the rhetoric, from what I've seen you'd get more day-to-day cooperative knowledge-sharing and camaraderie working on Wall St. or wrenching bikes.

Well, this is getting long, so a quick instinctual summary of my current situation.

Current job:

• Mastery: yup
  Autonomy: yup
  Purpose: no.
  (Social): Decent

Ok, starting to see the problem here.. I'll have to dig into this myself in future posts, but it can be a revealing question, what's the MAP with your current gig?

[ebast]

Exchangeability
According to car companies 79% of Americans consider car ownership extremely important to your success and happiness, and I'm sure an even higher number would promote their smartphones as essential kit for the satisfied life. According to HR surveys, in the workplace supervisors have higher satisfaction than rank-and-file employees.

Good life advice? I think we all know one or two exceptions to the conclusion that the secret to satisfaction is having the latest Android, driving an Audi, and working your way up to middle manager (yikes!).

Another one (according to psychology professors): The important thing in life is not making tall bank, but refusing it to instead engage in lifelong pursuit of Mastery, Autonomy, Purpose...

Should we take that one with a grain of salt too?

Well, hang on.. first grain of salt to deal with: is Dan Pink that psychology professor?


CAP theories
No. Dan Pink is the business writer who popularized "Mastery, Autonomy, and Purpose." Which bears an eerie similarity to (and to be fair, cites the work from) Self-determination theory (wiki/SDT website). That's a theory that's been around since at least the 70s and in which two psychologists (Deci & Ryan) recently in the 90s came up with a mechanism promoting "Competence, Autonomy, and Psychological relatedness" for intrinsic motivation. (note to self: for fame, don't be the first to think of it - be the first to give a TED talk on it.)

That work has a lot more depth than just the book if you actually want to see where this stuff comes from or ask important questions like, I dunno, can my Purpose be 'to crush my enemies and see them driven from me'?

But the question that started off all this thinking anyway was that psychologists were questioning the Skinner give-the-rat-a-treat model to understand why organisms often participate in activities that appear to have no immediate reward, and led to thinking about intrinsic motivation:

Intrinsic motivation is defined as the doing of an activity for its inherent
satisfactions rather than for some separable consequence. When intrinsically
motivated a person is moved to act for the fun or challenge entailed rather
than because of external prods, pressures, or rewards. The phenomenon of
intrinsic motivation was first acknowledged within experimental studies of
animal behavior, where it was discovered that many organisms engage in
exploratory, playful, and curiosity-driven behaviors even in the absence of
reinforcement or reward (White, 1959). These spontaneous behaviors,
although clearly bestowing adaptive benefits on the organism, appear not to be
done for any such instrumental reason, but rather for the positive experiences
associated with exercising and extending ones capacities.

Positive experiences associated with exercising and extending ones capacities. sounds good to me.

Well, anyway, that led people to wonder how extrinsic incentives (like money or fame) affect performance versus this intrinsic incentive, since there were some baffling examples where adding carrots & sticks in line with the donkey model of human nature stunningly instead seemed to make the donkeys perform worse! As one recent survey and analysis puts it, the conclusions so far:

1. extrinsic incentives boost performance.
2. intrinsic motivation boosts performance.
3. extrinsic incentives reduce intrinsic motivation.

Yep. Fun one to puzzle out...


Putting the I in ERE
I think there's also some relevance to ERE and its related variations which especially in the initial stages of outreach have to deal with peoples' objections around loss or rejection of extrinsic reward systems. ERE has to reveal all of these hidden intrinsic benefits to what are considered low-reward activities as it makes the case for replacement of extrinsic with intrinsic motivators: from focusing on money earned or amassed and meeting social expectations to personal discipline & individual resourcefulness as we go from an 'American dream'-sized house in a desirable neighborhood to having roommates or having no house at all!, owning an enviable car to learning to repair your own bike, or from delicious instagrammable dinners ordered fresh to your whims each night to the regular work of starting up the lentil pot.

It's even one way to cast the disagreements over the worth of travel, which can in some cases be a jousting over how intrinsic vs. extrinsic are the motivators... extrinsic criticisms (listing itineraries or showing off exotic photos on your facebook page of your big world travels each year) bumping up against intrinsic justifications (learning languages, relating to other cultures, etc.)

Or even about changing jobs, where an extrinsic motivator like social status / external recognition would be less valued than the internal satisfactions of the work.

ERE: making the extrinsic intrinsic since 2007!


CAP Models
Well fine, but how do you figure out how intrinsically rewarding something is? Or which of the three aspects it is that matters in your decision?

Take Competence (Mastery). Among tech people, it's not unusual to hear people taking a job in part because "they'll learn a lot". Jobs themselves advertise the ability to work with cutting-edge technology and the industry constantly manufactures new mastery challenges for itself. Or in the financial world they'll tell you you're working with the smartest people in the world and boast about how many physicists are roaming the halls. I have one friend who has bounced between those two worlds and that's where he gets his rush - it's not even as important exactly which company it is or what it is they have him doing but he wants a steady stream of challenges among 'world-class people' and then ideally a little recognition if he solves them. He was the kind of guy that gets three degrees in college but also the kind of guy that didn't seem to care a whole lot about autonomy in that process.. tell him what he needs to do and he'll suck it up and hustle hard on whatever project he finds himself on.

Compare that to another friend I have who works at a large company you're probably familiar with. He's been there a while now and every 2.5 years he switches groups. Each time he switches, it's because he's in some group whose manager is too controlling or narrowly business-focused and not allowing him enough leeway and the new group is more open, lets him focus on what he wants, and is smack full of potential. (unsurprisingly he is a classic enneagram #8, btw, but that's for another post.) In the new group he's positively thrilled.. at least until the new group becomes the old group. The Autonomy is strong with this one...

To bring it back to my journal I've been feeling a little short lately in the Relatedness/Purpose dimension. That's what started this -- I mean, when I was a kid I thought my purpose was to figure out a way to make millions of bucks so I could buy a few houses and several cars to drive between them. That sure seemed like a motivating enough purpose to me back then, but it's hard to see how this is an intrinsic purpose. Don't get me wrong. It's one great thing about work that they pay you. Sure they have their own reasons for that (downside to this is their reasons often become your reasons and their goals become your goals), but I appreciate the gesture.

Intrinsically, I can learn a lot at my current job... but then, I could learn a lot without it too.

Ok. One nice resilient thing about the work world (vs. going it on my own in the attic), is that I can combine my efforts with other people and all the fantastic infrastructure and support to accomplish something I could never do myself, something bigger in the world, all in a framework (of career & work) which is universally understood and never questioned. In my case the nice altruistic spin to look at what I'm doing would be that I can put my shoulder to the wheel to help in providing useful services, giving people useful tools to help them do stuff they need to do.

But if my current work is making tools, it's for that middle-manager in the audi. And it's designed at keeping her there.

that's nice, eh? how to get financially independent: feeding others' dependencies.

time to consider my other options...

[jennypenny]

(note to self: for fame, don't be the first to think of it - be the first to give a TED talk on it.)

I'm enjoying this version of your journal.

[ebast]

Another month older...
Enjoying my first glass of home-brewed cider while writing this. The champagne yeast approach turned out a dry almost white wine-like cider.. pretty sophisticated for apple juice.

checked out at the local fancy food place & they were selling 750ml bottles for $12-20. This method yields 5 of those for 8$.

it was so easy & successful, I can now only try something harder & more failure-prone!


January
Rent: 1200
Dining out (alone/w others): 17 / 132
Groceries: 187
Spirits: 66
Coffee: 22
Phone:15
Concerts: 29
Car: 11
Train/bus: 316
other: 26
Dating: 161
Total: 2182

@jenny - thanks for the encouragement. I am trying to stick to at least a monthly posting here in order to keep myself accountable (a bit surprising what that's like once you start!). I also have a pet project here: living w/o a job can look quite different than living w/ one, and maybe it would be useful to give one more example logging the effect of retirement and post-FI spending modeling: These are pretty unimpressive numbers I have ERE-wise so I'm interested in seeing whether I can get a nice boost in the transition and end up in a sustainable retirement. And live happily ever after...

One thing I've been using to model that for myself is looking at spending - (rent & commute). Rent & commute are tied to job (and more generally exchangeable if you think about it). Of course I will still have to pay housing after FI, but some interesting & varied options will be available. This figure gives me an idea of how much leeway I'll have on the rent side when that happens. This month was not a terribly good one given I had few surprise expenses. Still, down to $711 non-rent&commute spending (with lots of fat that could be trimmed), versus last month ($872) and the six month average before that ($1269). I can snap in various housing costs there and if I squint enough, maybe in a more affordable location, it just might work...

Bank error in your favor. Collect $50
Some good news on the income side: got a nice letter from the IRS informing me a dispute was resolved in my favor. The amount will literally pay for multiple months of expenses post-retirement, one more example of the lovely leverage you get taking regular work-world figures in high cost-of-living areas and applying them to post-ERE expenses. Now, dealing with the IRS was surprisingly straightforward but they are not what you might call quick. At every date at which they were to make a decision on this one they politely and in duplicate sent letters requesting, or maybe informing me, that they would need extensions (I decided generously to grant them), so this has been some time coming and I won't have the money in hand for a month or two.

Instead of blundering through the hoop-jumping on my own, it would have been quicker if I had used an accountant who would've known what was needed ahead of time. I've often heard that accountants pay for themselves (this would likely be a clear case on time value of money) and yet I still resist getting one. What is this? I mean, I ask: "do you want to do this yourself even if it is assuredly going to take longer, there is a sizeable chance you end up with less money, a small chance you right royally screw things up, not to mention a good chunk of the time is taken up with fun administrative tasks like copying things in triplicate for the IRS?" And still I say "Bah! I'll just do it myself!"

There are arguments that knowing the process helps you position yourself tax-wise for the future, and there's the satisfaction of accomplishing it yourself, but next time.. well, so now I say for anything big I should pay an accountant to handle it more effectively and efficiently. But at the exact same moment I am thinking, well I figured this one out...

Expenses
Some good news on the housing front coming up which I'll save for another post. Majority of dining-out expense was following my new policy due to going out with coworkers for lunch (who somehow never just want to grab a taco) weekly or so at lunch. Oh yeah, and Dating.

Painting the Town (& everything else) Red
Adding a line item for dating this month due to going out on the town with the lady. Interesting to think about how efficient a commercial industry, especially with valentine's coming up, there is at extracting money from that aspect of life. Just for contrast, our big blow-out in the city was the day after we spent all of six bucks for trail nibble and enjoyed six hours tramping around the hills for free. Which was better? Well, she'd pick the hills in a heartbeat.

Me too. But, then, there are people who could forget about trees and go out every week so it's interesting to give that experience a try too. This was a big dressed-to-the-nines-going, big-night-out on the town, which I hadn't done in a while. I found myself falling naturally into generous enabling host-role - she balks at having pricey drinks at intermission -- no, no I insist of course we can.. then spiriting her off to fancy dining, lofty views, all the rest... (on this one I decided we are going out, no budget, & we'll see what happens.)

I know the courtship or cynic's view of it all is that you find some excuse to spend a lot of money, maybe to demonstrate how valuable you consider your date or maybe also to show how little money matters to you (showcasing your success and what, excellent breeding potential?) There's also, I'd note, a more tactical view when out with someone (especially if you've never been before) that shuffling through venues in an external whirlwind of sights might induce a little internal whirlwind as well as snap in an instant shared experience and comfort together, or that approach of ignoring prices and usual restraints might set up a feeling of exceptionality and throwing caution to the wind which can help one throughout the date's adventure. Dropping a lot of money to do this just happens to be the dumbest, most generic way to do this. Still, enjoyable for what it is.

Well on that note, best valentine's wishes. I recommend hill-romping.

[ebast]

Found a place to live. Moving from what was a good neighborhood for exploring and which I would rate moderately walkable, hm, according to an impromptu urban-focused walkscore I am making up on the spot:

1. Walkable Paradise ('flat-tire-proof'): virtually all needs --material / social / exercise / spiritual - may be procured within a round trip walk of under an hour and critically important: others in your neighborhood also choose to walk for these. Surprisingly affordable food may come from nearby stores, ethnic markets, and farmers markets.
2. Pedesitic (for the tricksy EREer): you live in ERE-reasonable walking distance of a major pedestrian-friendly district (often, 'downtown'). Affordances, food, etc. match the walkable paradise but with the secret distinction that most of those people you see walking by have just gotten out of their cars parked down the street.
3. Moderately walkable ('ERE walkable': most needs may be (possibly expensively or subpar) obtained by a round-trip walk of two hours, even if everybody else mostly gets in their car to do it. Food may come from a trip to the Aldi, the Trader Joes, or a grocery store you'd rather forget.
4. Bikeable ('If your bike breaks, you need to fix it NOW.') Needs may be obtained by a round trip bike of an hour. Sidewalks appear to be mostly decorative. Food comes from the Costco in another zip code.
5. Southern California

Well, that needs a little work. Walkscore I am not (although I've seen some pretty crazy scores for places I've lived there too). But at any rate, I am moving from a nice moderately walkable neighborhood to more of a bikeable neighborhood. It's a nice place for a quite reasonable rent given the craziness of the real estate market I talked about earlier. While I'll miss the convenience of where we currently are, I will appreciate being in a safer neighborhood - last month, for example, someone decided to unload a clip on our street at 3 in the morning, hitting the houses on both sides of me as well as two of my neighbor's car windows. No injuries, at least none reported. Not clear what the target was and police weren't sure what happened. That fell into the unexpected-but-not-quite-surprising-enough category for this neighborhood given what happens on a week to week basis.

One tradeoff that always comes up in these overheated housing zones and some folks must deal with here is how much you are willing to trade safety for price. These random events can happen anywhere, but some places are a little randomer than others and I find myself frequenting questioning the how far out toward the dicey regions do I want to go...

One complication: it's virtually impossible to ever know objectively how dicey it is. Take New York. I once went out with a girl whose parents lived north in the leafy suburbs of New York City, where her father commuted into the city each day. (He worked in the old WTC and survived all that, but that's another story). Anyway, they rarely if ever went into the city and warned me with quite fearful stories about even venturing into Times Square. Now, anybody who's been to Times Square recently knows it's about as frightening as Disneyland (and probably safer besides) but they were reaching back to the NYC of the 1970s and 80s and that was the lore they had. I've seen the same thing in, say, Chicago, where well-to-do folks reserved way up to the north sincerely warned me about braving the streets around Logan Square alone.

Sometimes the advice is right. Sometimes it is way out of date. Sometimes in the other direction it explains away the risk. Sometimes it's told with a touch of relish and even self-congratulation that the speaker doesn't live there themselves. However it's told, it always resembles to me some sort of pre-modern pre-statistical means of sharing information about risk. In that manner it is potentially useful and maybe it explains why our attention perks up when people start talking about it and how eager are others to jump in and agree.

But it'd be nice to get a more objective picture. I know there can be issues with reporting but I periodically check in with the crime reporting maps (like crimemapping). If you want to compare across locations, it'd be great if there were a comparable crimescore like a walkscore and there nearly was... or more accurately there is, only as that article reveals, the Walk Score guys decidedly to do what they could to conceal any sort of aggregate comparable number. From the story: "We felt the crime maps in the real estate industry made cities look more dangerous than they really are." so, uh, since we (and the listing services paying our bills) don't want the conclusions you're going to draw, we're, uh, not going to show you that particular data.

There can be all kinds of risks wherever you live. I once lived right next to an actual Superfund site, and in those sort of environmental exposure situations, it seemed people rationalized the risk away and eventually forget about it: they joke about glowing in the dark, but think: hey, my family and I haven't developed any strange rashes yet and then forget about it until something comes up in the news. Or they start glowing in the dark. With crime, however, the standard advice 'be aware of your surroundings', not to mention adopting self-defense precautions means you receive and generate multiple little reminders throughout the day, so psychologically it can register with you more heavily even given low statistical incidence.

Housing roulette. Well, as I said, fortunately in this case we were moving out anyway, so we won't have to deal with those particular risks of a neighborhood going bad. Good. But another way to look at it is: it just means whoever's moving in will.

[ebast]

Late update. Have been busy setting up for some changes in work and ventures which I will cover as they happen in future updates this month. But first the numbers.

February
Housing: 885
Eating out (alone/w others): 35/123
Groceries: 134
Spirits: 74
Coffee:12
Phone: 50
Car: 13
Clothing: 8
Train/bus: 279
Bike: 96 (new round of panaracers for the stable)
Move: 95
Gifts: 80
Other: 3
Total: 1887

Favorable trends continuing. When I get a little more data I'll start graphing, but I feel more confident on approaching my $1500 top-end target soon. This month broke under the $2000 spending line although to be fair that was due to savings on rent more than any spending discipline. Not so hard when housing is such a fat juicy target, hovering at 50-60% of costs.

Although-- it's easy to forget how targetable it is. I have a friend who just bought an apartment in the lovely Bay Area for something shy of $1mil, and is quite a bit proud of what a deal he got. Well, it was a deal for him. Of course, reading the forums here, you see you can get a perfectly nice place in a naturally beautiful area with stimulating activities just outside your door for probably under fifteen percent of that. (In this country.) Housing can offer crazy savings, but you have to remind yourself because everyone around you is busy reinforcing the conventional wisdom around you. Reasonable housing costs: geographically enforced wheaton levels.

Moving
Big event this month was moving. Back of the envelope shows that in chasing work & other opportunities I have now lived 10 places (3 time zones) over the past 2 years. Not out of any decision to become semi-nomadic, but all kicked off because back in my twenties I tried a 2 month cheap sublet I found off craigslist in a far-off neighborhood I'd never explored. And survived!

It's funny to look at it now, but I wasn't so sure at the time. The things I worried about then: not having decent kitchen stuff, not having even a whole closet for my stuff, figuring out how to get along with a roomate again- it all worked fine. Simple kitchen stuff and crappy stamped-metal knives (call it the Ikea Little Miss Starter Kitchen Kit) can still make a meal, a bag or two of clothes & stuff will get you through a few months anywhere (and you can add what you need for cheap), and the roommates were fine, if I couldn't keep a bottle of wine in the kitchen or hidden under the sink in a brown bag underneath a bucket with one of them. They were Broadway performers (or wanted to be) and the place was extensively decorated with dozens or maybe it was hundreds of these fleets of little yellow rubber ducks, each with someone's name written on the bottom. Wasn't sure whose decorating idea that was until I saw whenever one would come back from a tour they would have a new little flock to add to the collection. Representing all the people they'd um, ducked on each tour. Broadway: If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere! And will.

Stuffed with the stuff that is fine
Anyway, the other thing that moving does is get one to give a proper clear-eyed assessment to just the amount of stuff one has accumulated and is presently transporting around the country. Maybe not so much needed the forums here where folks seem to have pretty respectable iron will & self-discipline: if somebody decides to reduce their possesions - bam, next month they've done that.

But if you don't have that discipline? The problem here is that the easiest thing to do, cost-wise, with every thing lying around your house is to leave it there! To not think about it. Throw it in the garage.

In one of those places I lived, I was in a studio apt on the second floor above a carriage house (landlord-talk for a garage). I had a full kitchen, full bath, all of my possessions, and I used to remind myself, all in the exact footprint of what the landlord had for his cars. And you know what?

His cars didn't fit! So much crap had he & his family accumulated, they stuffed the garage full of it and parked both cars in the driveway. So actually, to get it right: I was there in the space of which the landlord devoted to crap he didn't want to deal with.

Not even criticizing him because it's a default which is perfectly rational: fill up your free storage space and don't waste time deciding and getting rid of predicted low-value stuff. It's not costing you anything to keep it there and you can always retrieve what turns out to be valuable.

But what to do if you want to change that equation? One approach is psychological self-discipline which I (and my various wine-swiping past roommates) are, let's say, working on. Maybe you metricize it and produce one of these counts of the number of things you own and hopefully that motivates you toward a more broadly optimal situation.

But those metrics can be gamed and require that self-discipline stuff again. So if that's not working, if you want to reduce clutter, minimize, nothing will accelerate that process and nothing will give you the ruthless razor-eyed edge to make sharp cuts than putting a cost on each and everything thing and a strict deadline to decide that!

Moving is a great way to do that. It assigns a very specific cost to everything you have to pack and haul to the next place. Also a deadline to force your choice. Get a smallish truck/van and decide to dump the overflow. Get a smaller van the next time. It enforces some strict prioritization and some hard choices. By the third or fourth time, you've had about enough of hauling your fourth grade framed honor roll certificate and your complete set of baseball cards from when you were seven. it surprises me now what I thought I really needed to keep just a few years ago.

I look back and a few moving purges have pushed out a lot of stuff I would still be holding on to in a closet somewhere. Minimalist survey-wise we (combined) are total-possessions down to the sub-4 range. (Begging the question, if you can stuff it all into a van and travel in a day's notice, why don't you!?) Call it post-hoc rationalization but looking back I can't think offhand of anything I regret losing. I've followed Bruce Sterling (partial transcript) and treat factory-produced stuff as printouts which you can easily acquire a new copy of. Favor documenting (taking and storing a picture) of sentimentally important items if you can let go of the original. Or give sentimental stuff to people who will treat it sentimentally. Keep good tools.

He didn't say what to do with all the ducks.

[jacob]

If I want to start an argument with DW---and why not, after all we're married---all I gotta do is to say something like: "Next time we move, we're only taking the car and a small trailer, so everything else has gotta go. There's no sense in paying $3000 to move $1000 worth of stuff [again] when we can just go buy it if needed."

We have arguments about stuff, especially superfluous stuff.

Naturally, I, therefore, sent the Sterling transcript to her. Much to my surprise she found it "very interesting".

Then she asked if akratic had written it?

Thus if anyone trouble convincing their SO about the value of only the things that are either beautiful, useful(tools), or in daily use around a good strategy may be to ask akratic to write their SO an email although I suppose Bruce Sterling will also do as a fallback!

[ebast]

@jacob - sounds reasonable to me!

I have personally found some success with a 'Captains & Admirals' approach wherein I get to decide all manners of tactical things like how big the van is----well, that is, after she decides where exactly this van is going to go.

have not sent her akratic's writings yet. I think these days they would be etched on birchbark.

[ebast]

So, I quit my job. Now I better learn how to live retired.

It was surprisingly easy. Will it work out? I expect my expenses will jump around quite a bit in the months and years to come, but as far as I can predict, I have enough saved up to allow me to do some interesting things.

(and not enough to do the boring ones.)

here goes!

[jennypenny]

Congratulations ebast!

[Ego]

I have enough saved up to allow me to do some interesting things.

(and not enough to do the boring ones.)

here goes!

The Goldilocks crossover point would be a useful metric.

Congratulations.

[ebast]

Mile 1 (note: objects in view may be a bit further along than they appear)

Back to the beginning! And now entering the image-posting bandwith-busting show-offing phase of extreme & early retirement, and what better to celebrate a little freedom than a road trip down the Pacific coast. (Insert breathtaking view of cliffs, mist, and ocean here)

erm.. here. there we go. new at this.

Playing a little catchup because I have been busy journeying and not journaling. So, to recap: off the bat to celebrate retirement, traveled down to visit a couple I am old friends with. They have somehow managed to find themselves a place in a cabin once occupied by Willy Guthrie in a fairly convincing rustic forest situated in Los Angeles county. I say fairly convincing because it's a little less pastoral when the old red barn you passed on the way up has a film crew lighting it up like a teen pop concert on the way back down, but so it goes... LA. My friends've managed to find quite a place but they always do (I was convinced this time it was due to some ridiculous & unattainable showbiz connections, but nope. craigslist. Internet: the only connection you need to know.)

The car only goes so fast and so far (kinda like its occupants) so we camped along the way, which here in the populated part of the golden state works out to around 20-30$ a night. I had campsite reservations made online for the way down but decided not to on the way back up. Was a little unsure if we'd be sleeping on a bed of california stars, but discovered that there were some open sites at a supposedly - as reported by that 'Internet' again - full-up campsite (Pismo). Apparently at the campsite there, they keep a few for drop-ins and if you are off the weekend rush you have a decent chance of grabbing one. Every so often it really pays to ignore what you read on the Internet.

Also there at Pismo, for fifteen bucks or something, you can park your RV / van / tiny house right on the beach, and actually come to think of it the whole way down I was noticing RVs on the access roads along the beaches. Not sure how much they have to vie for space or if there's a catch, but kind of amazing to fall asleep to the surf & wake up with a window looking out over the pacific. Apparently, a number of people have figured that out and I came back wondering why so many others tolerate houses without wheels.

Car broke down twice on the highway (fixed it the first time and the second, right outside Compton, was blessed to have shuddered to a stop next to a Tiajuanan mechanic who didn't speak English but had a box full of tools in the back of his van.) It's an old car. But it is a convertible, which cannot be beat for tooling down the coast along highway 1. In one overlook there, Early Retirement Extreme met Regular Rich Retirement in the form of an older, paunchy, testarossa owning retiree who came over to chat about my car. I told him his was faster. (I did not tell him but I have a thirty year head start).

The 20 year-old cyclist blazing by laughed at us both.

Made good enough time on the way back up that we even stopped for a little sunbathing & much needed relaxation. Turned out it was a clothing-optional beach so I apologize for the nudity here, but hey, it is the west coast.



ok, enough pictures. A picture's worth a thousand words, and so my ERE resolution will be to use more words in the next post.

They're cheaper.

[George the original one]

Fiat 124 Spider... you need to frequent the mirafiori.com forum.

[ebast]

George - not bad! Actually have the little brother (engine in the back), but will check out the forum all the same.

Proud to say, even, it was just put into service for a temporary move. Well, ended up commandeering the passenger seat (meaning the girl had to bike) but all we needed fit!

Sounds bad I know... but she got there before me.