Basuragomi's journal

Where are you and where are you going?
basuragomi
Posts: 418
Joined: Tue Oct 15, 2019 3:13 pm

Re: Basuragomi's journal

Post by basuragomi »

The Time Budget

No matter the net worth, I only get 24 hours of time a day. This very hard limit places fundamental restrictions on potential ERE strategies.

I document decently-detailed daily diaries. I originally started doing this to figure out where all my time was going and why I felt like I was accomplishing so little with so much time expended. After a few years of doing this I think I have a fairly good idea of what I really spend time on.

I have a spreadsheet I made a few years ago that summarizes how I use my time, inspired by this xkcd comic. I mostly use it to schedule and track things like annual deep cleaning, but it is a useful tool to re-evaluate my activities and look for web-of-goals optimizations (excerpt below):
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This exercise has helped me realize some other core truths about myself:

I only have about 30 hours/week of creative, productive capability.
- About 20 hours of this are expended at work.
- The remaining time I spend at work is dissipated in other ways, both mandated by management (i.e. being in a flow state, pointless meetings, mindless busywork) and reclaimed by myself (darn socks at lunch, read the news, text my wife).

I have about 20 hours/week of social obligations.
- The majority of this time goes to my wife - at less than two hours/day, I start to feel disconnected.
- Maintaining a close friendship takes me at least 1-2 hours a week. I have many friends that I deeply trust, but only one or two really close ones.

~82 hours/week on household and physiological maintenance
- Only about 15 hours/week of this is actually avoidable via lifestyle design or spending money (take-out instead of cooking, hiring cleaners). Much of the time "saved" would be clawed back due to waiting for services as well. This is why I never eat take-out for lunch.
- Sleep, cooking and exercise are the most frequently-occurring activities. Hence they are the easiest to cut back on to free up time elsewhere. No wonder workers are always short on them. I can't imagine what parents go through.

~36 hours is used on passive activities - consuming media, being in a flow state via play or work, simply waiting, or goofing off.
- This is unwinding/decompression/down-time.
- I've tried to convert this to productive time. I cannot sustain it over more than a few weeks without burning out. Reject workism!

How the time budget relates to retirement strategy

The ERE method is broadly to save excess earnings for an irreducible spending baseline while building income-producing skills, then use those skills to make up the goods/income deficit. New income-producing skills are built using surplus productive time. The retirement strategy necessarily relies on income from this source. For this analysis, I'm going to assume that part-time work doesn't exist, which can be the case for some professions.
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The MMM method is to save excess earnings for all spending, then cease earning employment income. The majority of people on this board follow this strategy. No new income-producing skills are acquired. Instead, existing skills are exploited and often further specialized to earn in excess of the spending baseline. There is no structural reliance on income-producing skills after retirement, the focus is on balancing immediate investment income against future investment income.
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So a limit imposed on the ERE strategy is availability of surplus time. Someone working full-time might have 5-20 hours of this available. A worker with kids might have 0. If 1,000 hours are required to build a skill up to a level sufficient to earn income, this means 1-4 years before this skill is ready to be deployed, assuming no overlap between work and the skill being developed. If two or three skills are desired, that may well be 3-12 years. At a very high savings rate, net worth from working could easily achieve a MMM-style retirement before these skills are ready to be used.
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Without sufficient surplus productive time, earning to FI may be exactly as fast as the ERE strategy. With the salaryman's perceived risk from being jobless and their immediate (and often high) value to their employer, the ERE strategy starts to look a bit redundant. I believe this is why many participants here pursue the MMM strategy.

Putting it back together
I think it is interesting to look at FIRE strategies from a time-management perspective as I feel it was not addressed in the book. We have a very limited amount of time, and understanding how it is used is critical to setting achievable goals. Our society seems set up to produce many more MMM-type retirees than ERE-type.

I am using this tool to try and optimize my lifestyle by identifying simple ways to collapse activities together (e.g. listening to an audiobook while preparing dinner) or cutting out insufficiently productive activities altogether. I think at a high ERE level, every level of the hierarchy of needs should be satisfied with each activity one does.

Managing money, developing skills and ERE in general takes time and practice. The amount of focused, productive time we have is far less than our nominal waking time. Somebody with chronic illness or disability, someone working multiple jobs, or a caregiver could very well be too physically and mentally exhausted to pursue FI, much less ERE at a textbook pace. Because of these time limitations, I try to be mindful of my privilege when reading criticisms of ERE or early retirement in general.

basuragomi
Posts: 418
Joined: Tue Oct 15, 2019 3:13 pm

Re: Basuragomi's journal

Post by basuragomi »

I finally read Early Retirement Extreme

Got it from the library. Overall, I feel the philosophy matches my own outlook on life pretty closely, hence why I posted here in the first place. I like how the ERE philosophy is elegant. I view the borrow-spend-earn lifestyle like an outwards spiral of continuous increase in cash flow, cut short only by one's death or collapse of part of the system. Standard personal finance stuff tries to minimize the growth and ultimate size of the spiral at the point of collapse. ERE seems more like revolving around an attractor - things might vary, and equilibrium will never be achieved, but in the long term feedbacks will inherently stabilize the system.

Some thoughts:

The Renaissance Man
- I was surprised that the main physiological goal of the Renaissance Man isn't "look great naked," as that's the primary reason people work out. A pair of nicely-turned calves under their tights is mandatory dress for a true Renaissance Man. And a codpiece.
- In concordance with the book, I think that dragging a 100+ kg person around is probably the most intense physical demand that a modern layperson will likely encounter so that's what I aim my training towards.
- I was very surprised that the social goals of the Renaissance Man did not include learning multiple languages. Not only did actual Renaissance Men know 3+ languages each, it is a very useful skill and enables one to literally socialize.

ERE Philosophy
- On the distinction between specialists and generalists - specializing in a broadly applicable topic, like machine learning, data structures or finite element analysis, seems more useful than most shallower-but-broader skills. However, it does seem that these broadly-applicable skills go obsolete very rapidly as the state of the art advances.
- It seems that there are significant barriers to transitioning between various quadrants (Salaryman, Renaissance Man, etc.) with respect to time and resources. A very high level of achievement in the starting quadrant seems necessary to complete a transition while minimizing consequences from failure. Kind of a Catch-22, as operating at a high level in a given quadrant provides lots of resilience already.
- The description of tightly-coupled systems reminds me a lot of self-organized criticality. I've seen plenty of major capital projects completely fail because the managers removed all slack (that was originally included) in the pursuit of higher returns. Arguably political systems self-organize in the same way, power accumulates with fewer and fewer people who develop independent hierarchies.

Renaissance Man Lifestyle
- 15 minutes wiping down a bike after every winter ride seems excessive. So does spending $1,000+ on a bike. Jacob seems to love his bike far more than I do mine.
- Going without insurance seems like a bad idea to me, even if I can easily replace all my belongings. One of the big things I get from insurance is liability coverage. Seems prudent since in the litigation-healthcare complex the costs are made up and the points don't matter.
- The idea of monetizing hobbies makes me instinctively recoil. I get that monetizing hobbies is meant to supplant employment income. However, these days the wording is superficially close to the "work 60 hours a week then work 20 more hours hating what you once did for fun" rhetoric of the workism zealots. Same words, different context.

Investing and returns
- The book was published in 2010 and index investing has only become more popular since. Some of the FIRE Reddit forums will ban people for advocating alternate equity investing strategies! I wonder if the effects of index ETFs have already become noticeable in the historical record.
- With reference to a time budget, I wonder what level of diversification one can achieve with individually-picked stocks. Complete lack of time to research investments plus loss aversion definitely makes index ETFs more attractive. Maybe a study for the future.

General
- The classic LaTeX typeface instantly jumped out at me. Felt somewhat like reading a very long journal article.
- "Building a car" is a goal mentioned several times on this website and once in the book as a very difficult task - I found that amusing, as I have built a highway-going vehicle (except for the motor, battery cells, hydraulic brakes, safety harness, fasteners, dampers, tires, and raw materials/SMD bits) and it took a year. It is admittedly much easier to be in a student club with tools and space devoted to the task.

basuragomi
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Re: Basuragomi's journal

Post by basuragomi »

November 2019 Update

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Passed $500k net worth! Mostly because of CAD depreciating. Oh well.

ERE-type things I have been doing
- Winterized and tuned up my bike.
- Finished darning all my white socks. Now for the black ones.
- Made birthday cards for people. Wondering if I can sell some on Etsy, they're mostly very dumb puns.
- Read Early Retirement Extreme.
- Fixed the latch again on my microwave. Fittingly, I originally got this high-end microwave for free because the latch had broken.
- Cut down video-watching time to one hour a day, during lunches.
- Made a lot of sourdough bread as usual.
- Kimchi has over-fermented after almost a year. Making lots of kimchi fried rice as that leaves it more edible than as a side dish.

ERE failures
- Kitchen scissors broke. Didn't have a bolt small enough to fit and the tang wasn't wide enough to accommodate a larger hole. Replaced with larger full-tang scissors that should be more repairable.
- Bought a small cutting board that fits in a quarter sheet pan. Original plan was to salvage a cast-off full-size one and cut it down to size. The plan failed due to very low Wife Acceptance Factor (WAF).

Things to consider
- Cheap/free gym alternatives. Key exercises that are difficult to replace are barbell squats and deadlifts. Living in a very small apartment doesn't help. I could get a used bike trainer and duffel bag full of gravel, but a 100+ kg duffel bag brings its own problems.
- Putting CFA progress on hold. The reward:effort ratio is pretty low compared to other things I can do to build income streams. Engineering jobs also pay much better than low-grade analyst jobs and seem more satisfying and semi-RE-compatible at the moment. Not sure if I'm just getting burned out on studying.
Last edited by basuragomi on Sun Nov 21, 2021 2:16 pm, edited 1 time in total.

7Wannabe5
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Re: Basuragomi's journal

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

I think your analysis is quite interesting. However, I would note that I believe it is more relevant to consider Motivation/Interest/Vigor/Attention rather than Chronos Time. For example, I started my own small business which supported half the expenses of a 4 human frugal household while I had two children at home, a full-time job with two hours of commute, a less than fully supportive spouse, and a big old house in constant need of repair, with only $8000 in capital to work with. Sometimes a human will hit a sort of bottom where they just have to do more for a period of time in order to do better or less in the future. Also, the fact that working on starting my own business was absolutely what I wanted to do with the limited free time I had at my disposal was key. If I had been lacking this combination of very negative and very positive motivation, I definitely would not have been disciplined enough to do it.

basuragomi
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Joined: Tue Oct 15, 2019 3:13 pm

Re: Basuragomi's journal

Post by basuragomi »

@7W5: That's why I focused on creative/productive time. I described the equilibrium that I have currently reached, which is the result of external pressures on my life. Someone who is under much stronger pressures, as you were, will find their creative time substantially increased or decreased.

How did it affect your mood? I find that when I push away from my equilibrium state, but with external pressures staying the same, my mood spirals down as I burn out more and more. It is a good argument for the maximum effort lifestyle change/s-curve method, as a gradual but taxing change can ultimately be less sustainable over the time necessary to see results than a radical effort that ceases prior to mental exhaustion. I think your story was very much the latter.

When I worked in the Arctic, I could see it happen with pretty much everyone - being pushed to work 10-12 hours a day for weeks on end, people got very irritable and careless after about four weeks in. After six weeks they were basically burned out. And this is with all meals, lodging, transport, etc. provided in good quality.

basuragomi
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Re: Basuragomi's journal

Post by basuragomi »

Buy your weight in X
A handy scale I worked up a while ago to see what one could buy their weight of. All values are in USD, though some items are costed from Canadian experiences (some things like nuclear waste disposal are impossible in the USA, other prices vary).

Nuclear waste, disposal of: -$170/kg
Copper: $6/kg
Vodka: $20/kg
Uranium oxide: $63/kg
Wagyu beef: $240/kg
Silver: $494/kg
D2O: $680/kg
Fetal bovine serum: $1,000/kg
Industrial diamond: $3,000/kg
Cannabis: $7,000/kg
Platinum: $17,500/kg
Gold: $42,000/kg
Viagra, active ingredient only: $300,000/kg
GFP Polyclonal Antibody: $3,000,000/kg
Gem-grade 1ct diamonds: $20,000,000/kg
Adrenaline autoinjector, active ingredient only: $238,000,000/kg
Human stem cell factor recombinant protein: $30,500,000,000/kg

basuragomi
Posts: 418
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Re: Basuragomi's journal

Post by basuragomi »

Spending

I don't want to be overly focused on spending and SWR, but one can buy their way out of a lot of problems. Risk assessment is necessary to determine how resilient my lifestyle is to eviction, disaster, illness, etc. With some risks quantified wrt potential spending required I can at least set a reasonable upper limit on how much financial slack my lifestyle in semi-retirement would require.

So with that in mind, this is how much I spend on average, a combination of our household budget and personal spending:

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Annualized, and excluding reimbursed costs, 2019 should come in at a total of around $26,000.

Savings rates:
2013 - 83%
2014 - 71%
2015 - 73%
2016 - 73%
2017 - 59%
2018 - 53%
2019 YTD - 66%

This year has been bad in terms of spending. Two destination weddings (stuck under Vacation) and a half-dozen more weddings on top of that.

My goal for next year is to spend less than $20,000. This graph is currently my spirit animal:
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It's just a squished reciprocal function, but I use it to determine what my "upheaval-proof" savings pool/earnings rate needs to be. If I can reduce to 80% of current spending, ~$20k then I go from 20 years savings to 25x, following the 20x curve. If spending goes up 20% to $30k (e.g. if we get renovicted and decide to rent a market-rate place) then I go from 20x savings to ~17x, and would need about 25x baseline savings (that point is closest to the 25x curve) to stay above a 20x minimum.

My intent in the next few entries is to analyze my expenses (wrt the web of goals) and make plans to change things that are not Pareto-optimal. Firmly at Wheaton level 5, but baby steps.

basuragomi
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Joined: Tue Oct 15, 2019 3:13 pm

Re: Basuragomi's journal

Post by basuragomi »

Housing - My limits

Living off-grid in a homestead or in a converted van has a lot of appeal. It offers large amounts of autonomy, either through flexibility or through lack of antagonists. But those living arrangements can require intensive trade-offs with respect to time, physical resources and hassle. I notice that most van dwellers do not stay in their van beyond a year or two, and even many tiny house dwellers give up. Similarly, I would not be willing to camp for weeks on end. I've considered what problems I want to solve with my housing arrangements and what long-term solutions I'm willing to pursue.

The result is this table below (click for bigger).
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The dark squares represent solutions that I'm not willing to tolerate long-term. This chart also doesn't include criteria I have for choosing a community to live in, just housing. Finding a suitable community is a very different problem and not one that I have enough experience with to evaluate.

A few people here seemed fine living in RVs and off-grid for over a decade. I wonder if they got more satisfaction out of their solutions than I did (e.g. I hate using wood stoves - they track in so much debris and require stockpiling), or if they have a higher tolerance for the risks and hardships of those living arrangements.

For me, I love cooking in bulk, and that ended up making RVs and tiny houses marginal for me. Maybe for a long vacation stay or in an emergency, but not otherwise. My wife is generally more demanding on the shoe storage and internet access front so that disqualifies all but houses and apartments for her. There are also other unexamined problems that don't really apply to me like space for children/elderly parents, accommodations for disabilities, or specialized workspaces.

When I talk about my housing options later, these limits will be the base assumptions that I'm starting from.

basuragomi
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Joined: Tue Oct 15, 2019 3:13 pm

Re: Basuragomi's journal

Post by basuragomi »

Housing - Options

Current solution: Rent
Currently living in a 1-bedroom apartment in a large house. We pay about $1,450/month. The average 1-bedroom apartment in Toronto rents for $2,400/month. That's the discount we get for living in a basement, despite it being personally preferable to a 16th-floor condo. Rent control limits us to about a 2% increase year-on-year, but market rate rentals are increasing at about 10% a year and have averaged about 7% over the last 5 years. This places a strong incentive on landlords to cycle through tenants as fast as possible to avoid rent controls.

We can only get evicted in two ways, via attempted "renoviction" or for the landlord's personal use. We have enough savings to easily overcome a renoviction attempt. A personal use eviction would cost the landlord a minimum of 12 months' rent, the required time before re-rental without penalty is allowed. If market rent continues to climb at 7%/year while rent control stays at 2%, at some point our landlord will be tempted to take the hit and evict us.

I made a spreadsheet to determine the optimum time to evict us using the assumptions above and a 4% required return (the approximate cap rate for this property). It came out to be about 3 years from now, when our rent would be about 75% of market rent for a similar unit, or about a $6,000/year difference. The IRR of eviction and leaving the unit empty for a year would be about 5% at that point. Our rental situation is likely secure for at least another 3 years and probably much longer as most of our neighbours have been here for over a decade.

Alternate rental solutions
Can I save money while renting? Yes.

Option A: Live with my grandparents or other family. This would be ~$300/month to cover our portion of resource usage and keep people happy. However, it wouldn't be fair to my wife as I would essentially be a caregiver/gopher and we would both spend a lot of time playing family politics. Likewise, living with my wife's family would be psychologically taxing for everyone. Our families don't have the social norms in place to enable multigenerational households. Modifying those norms is a problem better avoided with money at this time.

Option B: Take over the property management of this building. We could not initially do this as we were too busy with work. With semi-retirement this would be doable. If it would save $300-400/month, I would take on this role at the next opportunity.

Option C: Rent a cheaper place. The most readily-available option would be to rent a room in a larger unit and have housemates. This would save about $500/month at the expense of privacy and a stable home situation. I've had great housemates and I've had terrible ones (like the furry that kept reciting his erotic Balto fan-fiction and never flushed the toilet). There are advantages to housemates, but the risks are something I would prefer to avoid with money.

Rent vs. Buy
This house was last assessed by the city at $2.4 million and would sell for around $2.8 million today, judging by nearby sales. Our rented portion of the house would amount to about $0.6 million of equity. So the landlord is getting ~3% gross return on our unit. Most other properties in this city offer about a 3% cap rate. Keeping our money in investments rather than property equity seems way more attractive!

With a 4% required rate of return, I'd have to save $4,000 for every $100,000 of house. This puts an upper limit on house price at around $300,000 as there's about a $4,000-$6,000 irreducible minimum cost for a house in Canada with property taxes, conventional construction, municipal water, sewage, etc.

The $300,000 limit means that if I want to buy a place to live, I have to leave the province. The entire GTA and all of Southern Ontario is far off the efficient housing-transport frontier. I would look for a small house or lot within walking distance of downtown in a university town. The biggest cost would be travel to visit family and friends back in Toronto. I worked out buying a house in Sherbrooke, QC as an example and that would save about $12,000/year, including higher taxes and heating costs. Adding in travel costs would eat into those cost savings to about $5,000 if I bought a car or about $8,000 if we rented or bussed to visit a few times a year. It's an option, I'll call it option D. I'm also open to building my own house and living the rural life, but I really prefer the urban lifestyle.

Emigration
Move to a cheaper country. USA, Thailand, 2nd/3rd-tier China, rural Spain/Italy, the Baltic nations? Live on a cruise ship 24/7? Honestly not something I ever really considered. Not sure how much it would really cost because all the ex-pats seem to be into buying a Western lifestyle with lots of booze and nightlife while they're there. I know that $20-30k/year is considered normal for traveling through SEA. I hate hot sticky weather, sitting on the beach too, and we would likely encounter lots of racism. Not really fitting any of my goals.

Summary
Null - Current rent: $1,500/month
A - Multigenerational household: $300/month
B - Rent & property management: $1,200/month
C - Rent with housemates: $1,000/month
D - Buy: $500/month + $200-300/month in additional transportation
E - Emigrate: $500/month + $?

A is an emergency option - e.g. in the event of renoviction. I intend to pursue B if it becomes available. Everything else doesn't really save enough money to be worth the compromises. D would likely become an option as our family and friends continue to diffuse across the world, or if the housing market in Canada collapses with a shock to the currently insane appetite for debt.

There is a lot of slack in this system. In an emergency, option A would bring my savings to 30x expenses without any other reductions in spending, and would let me help out my family (and vice versa). In the future, if option A becomes unavailable it would allow option D to re-introduce the slack. I am satisfied with the present arrangement.

basuragomi
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Re: Basuragomi's journal

Post by basuragomi »

The DIY inflection point

A beginner doing something takes far longer than a professional. If that thing is intended to save time, then it's likely that the beginner is actively wasting time compared to alternate solutions.

E.g. Deboning a chicken makes it roast about 30 minutes faster than with bones in. Deboning a chicken would take an amateur about an hour. With barely any practice, this can get down to 30 minutes or less. The deboning process starts to both save time and produce a superior product - at this point it doesn't make sense to pursue alternate solutions and using the skill becomes the default assumption.

So there is an inflection point where the skill starts saving more time than it costs. At that point it starts to pay back the initial training effort. With further use we reach the break-even point where it becomes worthwhile to have pursued the skill after all.

How much relative effort does it take to reach the inflection point for various time-saving skills?

My guesses:
Easiest: Basic IT troubleshooting, learning to ride a bike, interval training, changing engine oil
Medium: Basic electronics repair, learning to drive, filing taxes, intermittent fasting
Hardest: Learning to cook, programming, tailoring clothes, polyphasic sleeping

I'm planning to start cutting my own hair in the new year. I'll be happy if I can get it to under an hour after 20 attempts since that's about the breakeven time including travel for me. That would imply a year or two to reach the inflection point. How long will it really take?

jacob
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Re: Basuragomi's journal

Post by jacob »

My general rule is that if I have to do something more than once, I'll learn to DIY it. In my experience, a careful amateur can do a job with the same quality as a rushed professional working on the clock for any and all jobs that aren't "rocket science".

There are secondary effects to learning something even if it only has to be done once, such as being able to judge whether a professional is doing a good job (a linear effect) or incorporating whether was learned into other projects (an exponential effect).

ertyu
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Re: Basuragomi's journal

Post by ertyu »

Late to this, but I'd vote for the baltics. Nature is beautiful, the climate is close to your preferred one (not hot and sticky), also those areas are comparatively sheltered from climate change and the immedicate effects of climate change refugees who will first arrive in southern europe.

Russia might take you over, but by that point everyone will likely be at war with everyone else anyway so

7Wannabe5
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Re: Basuragomi's journal

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

Northern Michigan is much less expensive and basically same climate/eco-system as Ontario. I could buy 4 800 square foot cabins in crappy shape on 2 acres for around $80,000.

basuragomi
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Re: Basuragomi's journal

Post by basuragomi »

@jacob: I agree that an amateur can match quality. The most extreme I've seen are people that do their own ingrown toenail surgery. They claim to cause less trauma and heal faster when they make their own cuts. However, it can be very difficult as an amateur to know when something is going wrong and how to deal with it. E.g. any idiot can cut down a tree. But how many know how to safely deal with a tree that gets hung up, and brought the necessary equipment? It's easy to die of exposure on Mount Stupid and never realize one was in danger.

@ertyu: I definitely want to visit the Baltics and get a feel for the countries. Upon further research it doesn't seem substantially cheaper than staying domestic, but getting permanent residency seems fairly easy. I'm really interested in what living in a country with a declining population is like. Guaranteed instant nuclear death upon WW3 starting is probably a bonus.

@7W5: The ERE lifestyle seems to preclude conventional snowbirding, and upon further research USA permanent residency would need substantial amounts of time/money to get - far more than any cost savings. Maybe I could winter over in a cheap Michigan cabin and summer back in Canada in a camper van as the world's silliest snowbird.

basuragomi
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Re: Basuragomi's journal

Post by basuragomi »

December 2019 update

Image

Over $100k of net worth gained this year. I'm not banking on that happening twice.

ERE-type things I have been doing
- Darned more socks and even repaired the knitting on a pair of gloves.
- Refreshed the waterproofing on my outerwear for the winter.
- Learned how to make dashi broth. Good easy (& cheap!) alternative to chicken stock.
- Developed a vegan pho recipe. It's not entirely unlike pho, and is tasty and convenient.
- Hosted dinner parties instead of going out to socialize. I actually asked people to bring their own bowls & mugs as I didn't have enough large ones. It succeeded and we saved some styrofoam from being wasted.
- Agreed to an xmas gift armistice with siblings. Have yet to convince the in-laws.

ERE failures
- Spent a giant pile of cash (pictured in the graph) traveling across the ocean for the final wedding of the year.
- Ran out of chain lube. Went with the easy option of buying some new lube instead of sharing/scrounging an alternative (leftover motor/gear oil?).

Things considered
- Gym alternatives:
Short-term solution: Attempt to buy/bribe access to a local condo's 24-hour exercise room.
Medium-term solution: School gym when I go back.
Long-term solution: Community centre gym via midday visits.
Oddly-appealing solution: Mouse-proof compact rack+bench in shed plus bike trainer that spins a small drum of laundry. Two in one!
- CFA exam:
I stopped studying and will stay at level II. I want to spend my active time on something that can generate more opportunities than just another potential full-time job.

Things to consider
- Weekly/biweekly games night: Good alternative to going out to socialize? My wife's book club shuttered so she might appreciate it. The main issue seems to be getting everyone's schedules clear - and enough time to clean beforehand.
- Dance lessons - up to what level of skill do they remain useful?
- Have to repair a luggage wheel and also make a new rolling coffee/storage table before my wife decides to buy one. Basically a small melamine nightstand on wheels. Wondering what would be a good wheel arrangement - I think two legs and two fixed rollerskate/skateboard wheels would work the best for the task, but I can probably scavenge office chair wheels. I have leftover melamine board + trim from making my murphy desk and can easily trash-pick scrapped shelving for more of it if needed as the dimensions should be quite narrow.

2019 in review
This was the year that I achieved financial independence. Even with blowing wads of money on travel and/for weddings, my realized investment income far exceeded my expenses, as did unrealized income. My other non-employment income matched half of my expenses. I have an easy pathway to reduce my expenses 20-40% should I need to draw on that slack. I've spent the last few months internalizing this independence, going over numbers and observing how my outlook changed. @classical_Liberal mentioned after my first post that money is "basically a solved problem" and I've finally started feeling that way the past few weeks.

My biggest revelations:
I genuinely love my job. My outlook on work is changing. Part of it is a multi-year realization that the bar to be a good performer in most workplaces is set really low, and that employment income in the quantities that I need is hence easy to come by. I like the work that I do. I have tons of autonomy, work on interesting problems and get to travel to interesting places. I'm excited to come in most days. I think I'm in the right career/field for me.

I want to make interesting things and solve interesting problems. The ERE book talked about having a strategy, and I think this has been mine. I have been progressively restructuring my routines over the year to allow me to focus more on making and solving, and I can see where employment fits into that and where it would not. My previous semi-retirement plans fit into this strategy quite nicely.

My 2020 ERE goals are pretty simple: I want to start making things that can generate income. I'm pretty happy with everything else and confident in my ability to affect whatever changes are necessary to other parts of my life. If you can't tell, I'm quite a Pollyanna!
Last edited by basuragomi on Sun Nov 21, 2021 2:17 pm, edited 1 time in total.

classical_Liberal
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Re: Basuragomi's journal

Post by classical_Liberal »

basuragomi wrote:
Mon Jan 06, 2020 5:54 pm
I genuinely love my job. My outlook on work is changing. Part of it is a multi-year realization that the bar to be a good performer in most workplaces is set really low, and that employment income in the quantities that I need is hence easy to come by. I like the work that I do. I have tons of autonomy, work on interesting problems and get to travel to interesting places. I'm excited to come in most days. I think I'm in the right career/field for me.
This is super cool! Frankly, I'm jealous. I mean, ultimately FI only matters if one can't achieve (or maintain) this situation. I think the overarching goal of most who come to FIRE is to reach a situation where they get to do things that are; important to them, exciting, interesting, and probably the freedom to change it up if need be. If you can get paid enough to live while achieving those goals then financial capital is just a backup. I really wanna get to this point, I'm just not sure how. Maybe you can shed some light on how your "multi-year" process worked?

basuragomi
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Re: Basuragomi's journal

Post by basuragomi »

classical_Liberal wrote:
Mon Jan 06, 2020 6:56 pm
This is super cool! Frankly, I'm jealous. I mean, ultimately FI only matters if one can't achieve (or maintain) this situation. I think the overarching goal of most who come to FIRE is to reach a situation where they get to do things that are; important to them, exciting, interesting, and probably the freedom to change it up if need be. If you can get paid enough to live while achieving those goals then financial capital is just a backup. I really wanna get to this point, I'm just not sure how. Maybe you can shed some light on how your "multi-year" process worked?
This is going to be long. It involved changing my perception of work from whatever it was before to yet another hobby.

In school I worked a lot and I was surrounded by people who worked a lot. There was constant reinforcement of the idea that the people that work the most are the best. It was very easy to conflate status from quality work with status from working more.

When I started working full-time I noticed that our grad students were some of the laziest coworkers I had. They were eager to pass off or ignore all the tasks they could, even those directly required for their dissertations. It was a big shock. I had thought that graduate students were even more motivated workers than us lowly undergrads. But many of them never changed their behaviour, and most of them completed their programs, typically through a long burst of panicked activity at the end. I threw myself into work - easy when isolated for weeks in the Arctic - since everything was new and exciting. But an underlying drive was fear that if I wasn't working hard enough then I would be unemployable.

I worked more and saw that many of my coworkers didn't perform at my level. They gave up immediately on problems I found fairly basic (e.g. downsample a LIDAR grid until it stops crashing the CAD software). They spent most of their time on Facebook and produced terrible quality un-publishable work. I was shocked again. Didn't they want to get things done? How could they hold a job working like that? I kept making myself useful and trying to expand the scope of my work. My fear of not working hard enough was heightened by their shoddy work.

We had quite a few layoffs and all of the coworkers are now gone - the last one was laid off a few weeks ago. I instead got substantial raises. But they found new jobs. By all accounts they don't work any harder, but someone needed the help and now they are there. I was no longer shocked. Most people I’ve worked with did the bare minimum, and many even below that. I now believe that most jobs are calibrated for that bare minimum level of effort - that is why employers effectively tolerate lazy employees. The only way to truly underperform is to not show up.

I always had a lot of autonomy in my job. I work for a very small company and was able to cover a lot of tasks. I learned new skills far beyond my initial job description and applied them in ways that, though not typically profitable, impressed my bosses enough to keep me around. That also satisfied my fear-driven compulsion to work hard. But my role became more fixed over the years. The amount of ways I could "work harder" dropped as I reached routine competence in many skills or some skills proved worthless with respect to the job. As I got more efficient my unproductive time also increased. This was really not good for that compulsion to work harder.

I was stressed out over not working enough while doing very little. This turned into burn-out. I ended up behaving just as my former coworkers did - doing the bare minimum and spending most of my day avoiding work. This did not improve the stress situation.

After a few months of burn-out I gave up. I was trying to work and goof off in self-approved ways, ephemeral diversions that wouldn't be considered "not working." Basically mindlessly browsing news articles. I decided to take wasted time back for myself. I exercised, ran long lunchtime errands, studied, left early when work was finished, programmed, and caught up with my own life. I took days off not for travel but just to relax at home. I found myself hoping to get laid off so that I could get away more. But doing the bare minimum just means performing at the median, and that won't get someone fired.

I was surprised when doing anything but work made actual work fun. Before, I was searching a shrinking problem space for more and more menial solutions. Now, I was treating each assignment like a self-contained task. There was a clear problem, a clear goal, a known set of tools, and a clear endstop to the endeavour. I got to be creative to apply everything appropriately. I still seek new challenges, but I consider myself experienced enough now to recognize when a challenge is appropriate and when something can reduce to a previously solved problem. The challenge in that case is hitting every point correctly.

The final step came from reaching financial independence. That removed any last doubts I had about treating work like a hobby. I'm not worried about being seen as a slacker in the future. Just showing up consistently seems to confuse people enough, and completing work without complaining puts one above the median.

I started with wanting to expand work into something more, to unite it with every other skill I could acquire. Maybe I did it out of desire for a challenge, or of fear, or due to social conditioning. But ultimately every task has constraints. Trying to force them wider was making me miserable. Viewing work as just another hobby let me enjoy the fun parts, and accept the boring parts. I don't get frustrated at my ukulele because I can't make it self-tuning, I just enjoy nailing a song performance or figuring out a new one. Then I put it down when I’m finished.

Someone could easily look at everything I laid out and say that I just needed some time off to decompress. That may be true. But I certainly enjoy employment now in a way that I never remember it feeling.
Last edited by basuragomi on Fri Feb 19, 2021 9:32 pm, edited 1 time in total.

classical_Liberal
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Re: Basuragomi's journal

Post by classical_Liberal »

Very nice response, thankyou! Here are my initial thoughts.
basuragomi wrote:
Wed Jan 08, 2020 5:55 pm
I started with wanting to expand work into something more.... Maybe I did it out of desire for a challenge, or of fear, or due to social conditioning.
This describes me very well. If you're going to do something, do it well. Like, I'm not really sure how to get out of that mindset. Others have mentioned this to me before (IRL and in this forum), but I kind-of dismissed it, making excuses that my current job is really important and whatnot. Maybe it's true, my job is really important, maybe it's not. People survive with sub-par nurses all the time.

The fact most jobs are set up assuming the employees are basically incompetent is really frustrating! All the "red tape" required to prove you're doing the bare minimum takes time away from being able to excel in your job. This indeed is the source of a large chunk of my burnout in any job I've ever had. It feels like being set up to fail, or at least underperform. I think the second largest is boredom, having to repeat similar BS day-in, day-out.

I think working for a smaller company has a lot of advantages. I've worked for smaller companies in the past, and in a way it's better to have the owners respect and "ear" as an outperformer, because then you can slack in the areas you want without fear, but take on extra in the areas that alleviate boredom.

While I truly believe being an outperformer has some advantages, for instance I don't think I'd have my half-time opportunity if I had been "average", it also sucks so much life energy that jobs have a 2-3 year life span life span and careers only about 5-7 for me. By the time I'm mastering something, I'm moving on because I see all the constraints, preventing me from going to the next level and get burnt out. Maybe this is part of my problem?

Anyway, this exercise has been super helpful, I need to let it "marinate", as @horsewoman would say. Since I'm new to this idea of doing bare minimum, do you have any "tips & tricks" type of helpful hints to get started?

JollyScot
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Re: Basuragomi's journal

Post by JollyScot »

I understand the feeling with this. During my full time employment years I felt I was delivering more than everyone around me. Yet being told repeatedly about how "busy" they were. At the point of quitting work I was furious because I was paid the same or less than my peers, so what was the point.

Now I half do consulting and don't care much what others do. I deliver what's being asked for and the rewards go to me. What everyone else is up to is largely irrelevant, I sit in a different bucket of people to them now.

I get your comment on job life spans, first 3-6 months you get a core knowledge of what is going on. If done properly you will end up knowing more than most of the team. It quickly because obvious who does or does not know what going on. I typically only last 4-5 months before I get bored now. Difficult bit is over then its just same old same old. Some larger scale work ok, eventually you get meeting'd to death.

When you start managing, if the majority are average then there is not much you can do. This is the resource you have. You know who the star performers are, but HR policies specifically stop you from recognising that. Everyone needs to be the same you know.

Best I can suggest is pick up the difficult or interesting roles and "outsource" the boring stuff. There is always someone who will swap your boring work for their hard work. Ignoring the relative difference in productivity isn't worth it, took me a while to get over it.

I suspect "professional" qualifications also helps with it. I know a lot who qualify as a super duper pro now. Then off they go and be useless with their new bit of paper. Unfortunately in a lot of things being qualified doesn't mean good. It would be a brave person who picked someone not qualified over qualified. May account for lazy people, what's the point after the paper after all.

horsewoman
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Re: Basuragomi's journal

Post by horsewoman »

Hi Basuragomi! New to your journal, I've followed a bread crumb left by @c_l in wolf's journal.
classical_Liberal wrote:
Wed Jan 08, 2020 6:40 pm
This describes me very well. If you're going to do something, do it well. Like, I'm not really sure how to get out of that mindset. Others have mentioned this to me before (IRL and in this forum), but I kind-of dismissed it, making excuses that my current job is really important and whatnot. Maybe it's true, my job is really important, maybe it's not. People survive with sub-par nurses all the time.

This is not contradictory to my mindset (which we have already established is very different from yours :) I like to do things well, too. I have a high amount of energy and an innate drive to solve problems. But I'm not really a perfectionist, so mostly I live by the 80/20 rule - meaning, it is perfectly alright to do things 80% well since very few people would even notice if your performance is higher than that.
You like to measure things, so maybe it would help to do some mental exercises to suss out what 80% means for you in certain areas and give it a trial run, to see if not giving 100% has any negative effects. What I'm trying to say, and what @Basuragomi has touched upon as well - your 75% will look a lot like 100% to the majority of people. It's like Wheaton levels of productivity - you think it is perfectly normal to have such a high output, since it is your modus operandi, but indeed it is on a higher level.
classical_Liberal wrote:
Wed Jan 08, 2020 6:40 pm
While I truly believe being an outperformer has some advantages, for instance I don't think I'd have my half-time opportunity if I had been "average", it also sucks so much life energy that jobs have a 2-3 year life span life span and careers only about 5-7 for me. By the time I'm mastering something, I'm moving on because I see all the constraints, preventing me from going to the next level and get burnt out. Maybe this is part of my problem?
This describes me pretty well, actually. But I don't burn out, rather I bore out mostly. It is hard to distinguish between the two sometimes. Have you ever heard of scanner/multipotential personalities? It is a perfectly normal state of being to go from one career to the next, only it has a slightly bad rep in our specialist society. Obviously this correspondents very nicely with Jacobs quadrant of salary man... / renaissance man. For further reading check out Emilie Wapnick site "puttylike" or Barbara Shers work about scanner personalities. It was revelation for me, that's for sure!

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