CDR's Journal

[CDR]

March 2021 Results

12.06% Spending Rate
87.94% Savings Rate

April 2021 Results

1.40% Spending Rate
98.60% Savings Rate

The April savings rate is cheating, because I got a significant amount of money back in my tax return. I've saved this money separately from the other money I have been saving. I haven't decided what I will use it for yet.

In March I read Time Management for System Administrators. One of the exercises was to write down all the goals you wanted to accomplish in the next month, year, 5 years. Then you had to get specific and prioritize them. I did this exercise, and it led to my most productive month (April) since 2019 at least. Certainly this year.

Another factor was this was my first full month at the IT job. The new job breathed some fresh energy into my life. It makes a huge difference mentally to know that what you spend 8 hours a day doing it helping you move towards your goals. Everyday at the job is another day of experience in IT, and that is exactly what I need.

I can confirm April being the most productive month this year because I use Rescuetime to track everything I do on my computers and phone. I had forgotten I used this, and was horrified with my stats for 2021 so far. This also motivated me to get stuff done. There are some goals on my Rescuetime account that I created a long time ago, so I thought I would share these here.

March

31h 48m of Very Productive Time (Goal is more than 60h)

55h 14m on Very Distracting Time (Goal is less than 22h 30m)

51h 18m on Entertainment (Goal is less than 30h)

April

65h 38m of Very Productive Time (Goal is more than 60h) +34h (ish) from March

28h 41m on Very Distracting Time (Goal is less than 22h 30m) -27h (ish) from March

26h 37m on Entertainment (Goal is less than 30h) -25h (ish) from March

I lost steam the last few days of April. Kind of sucks, but considering I wiped out all but three goals I had set for the month, I'm fine with it.

As promised, I am starting to take my health and exercise more seriously. April saw me work on push-ups and go for walks, May is bringing a variety of changes to my day-to-day schedule to involve a lot more exercises and stretching. This is the first time I am trying to bring a variety of exercises into my life all at once. Instead of focusing on getting on the treadmill 3 times a week, I am mixing up my month between treadmill, stair walking/running, and cycling. Push ups, body weight squats and jumping jacks are also in the mix as well.

I also realized I've never read a book on fitness in my life, so my goal is to read three books on fitness this month. My books of choice are:

Never Gymless by Ross Enamait
Complete Calisthenics by Ashley Kalym
Building the Gymnastics Body: The Science of Gymnastics Strength by Christopher Sommer

So far, Never Gymless has been a good read. I am very interested in workouts and exercise that require no equipment, or equipment that can be DIYed. As someone who has spent all of my life uninterested in the gym bro mentality, Ross' focus on body weight exercise, or exercise with inexpensive or DIYable equipment is a better fit with my personality and interests.

[CDR]

Re-reading my post - I suppose my April savings rate is not 'cheating', as I could have blown the return on any number of things, and instead I am choosing to save it, so I should include that as a win!

Obligatory plug for Tiddlywiki - it's organized in a wiki style format so it is incredibly easy to crosslink notes to link shared concepts, alternative interpretations, hierarchies of concepts, sources, reference quotes, etc.

A throw back to thank @basuragomi for mentioning Tiddly Wiki, I've been using it at my new job to document processes and procedures I need to do.

What kind of sewing machine do you have and what are you trying to make?...

For some reason, I never answered @Western Red Cedar's second question here. Sorry! When I purchased the sewing machine from the thrift shop, it was simply a general interest in the skill that made me want to pick it up. I had no particular goals or projects in mind. I guess I was ignoring the ERE book's advice on sewing . Since then, I've used the machine to make a few fixes for products DW's online thrift store. I also made a few bad practice patches on clothing with holes. I thrifted a Star Wars bed sheet, which ONE DAY I plan to make pj bottoms out of. I also thrifted some pj pants I planned to turn into pj shorts. However, I got too gung ho on trying to repair the waist band, and ruined the stretch on the elastic itself. It seems that while the machine has a zig-zag stitch option, it doesn't seem to work. I will have to revisit that to confirm. The machine might need some TLC.

Ah, I also made a pin cuhsion, using foam from shoulder pads I removed from a 'thrift flip' for DW's store.

I only have one project that I think I can complete at the moment, which is to sew a cover for the sewing machine (it didn't come with one). Otherwise in the future I would like to get good at repairs, alterations, curtains, upholstery, and utilitarian stuff like covers for items, machines, etc.

Future Sewing Projects:
Drawstring Backpack ( I use to have one, it broke . Looking to recreate, but bigger, stronger, made out of synthetic material so it is water resistant)
Improve the Moneybelt I already own so it doesn't fall apart mid travel
Clothing for DW
Learn to make items that would make good gifts
Face masks
Edit 5/4/2021 - basuragomi's ideas
DIY Sandbags and medicine balls

My main concern with taking on sewing projects is that many of the projects I can find online, or think of, seem like projects for the sake of projects. Practice makes perfect, but much like with electronics, I don't want to create a bunch of things I will not use. I was hoping to practice a bunch of different stitches on scrap, do a few projects above, and then volunteer for a local theatre. Would get to meet new people, practice sewing, and etc. COVID ruined that last year, and maybe this year as well.

[basuragomi]

Tiddlywiki is pretty great, I've been using it for over a year now and it's become indispensable for me.

The most productive use case for sewing is IMO tailoring good-quality thrifted clothes. Making from scratch is crazy expensive and time-intensive, and as you said anything else of equivalent complexity tends to be of no practical use. Maybe you could also make canvas sandbags/medicine balls for exercising?

A really great bodyweight technique is to use someone else's bodyweight - e.g. pick up your partner and walk a hundred metres with them or have them sit on your shoulders while you do push-ups. Not sure if that's covered in many books.

[ertyu]

Not just thrifted clothes. One could reupholster old furniture with thrifted curtains, make house slippers from an old coat (someone on the forum made this!), make pillows and pillowcases, resize/adapt bedsheets that are of nice material but wrong size (e.g. convert a too-small duvet case into a flat or fitted sheet).

A new zipper is 3-5 euro; an otherwise crap item of clothing you can gut for zippers and buttons can be as cheap as 0.25 euro on final sale day at my second hand store. Quality shirt that's missing buttons and is now cheap? Excellent, buy another shirt and change the buttons. Etc.

Thrifted/trashed textile is a very cheap raw material. I have made toiletry bags, a laptop case, a water bottle sleeve so my water bottle won't get scratched. A pouch for my earphones whose cord always gets tangled up if they're just dropped in a pocket or my backpack. And so on. Sewing can be an excellent skill when it comes to creating household items from scratch. Now considering a phone sleeve, let's see how that turns out.

[How-DoesThisSound]

Tiddlywiki is pretty great, I've been using it for over a year now and it's become indispensable for me.

The most productive use case for sewing is IMO tailoring good-quality thrifted clothes. Making from scratch is crazy expensive and time-intensive, and as you said anything else of equivalent complexity tends to be of no practical use. Maybe you could also make canvas sandbags/medicine balls for exercising?

A really great bodyweight technique is to use someone else's bodyweight - e.g. pick up your partner and walk a hundred metres with them or have them sit on your shoulders while you do push-ups. Not sure if that's covered in many books.

Great idea basuragomi, I'll have to do that once I get my machine in. I did a cost-benefit analysis on new sewing machines and settled on the Janome HD3000. My use case is manufacturing hand-made sandals but I very much like the idea of learning to be my own tailor for thrift garments.

[CDR]

Really like the DIY sandbag/medicine ball idea, thank you @basuragomi. Good idea about using some one else's bodyweight. I will keep it in mind for when I can actual lift my own body weight . Part of the reason I want to learn alterations is to alter thrifted clothing .

@ertyu It never occurred to me to thrift clothes for their buttons and/or zippers, but this is excellent. People talk about $1 clothes all the time, but the thrift stores DW and I went to before lockdown never had those kind of deals. Your comment about .25 euro shirts reminded me. I did a little internet sleuthing and found a place just a few minutes from my house with a $1 rack. So you know where I'll be heading once we're free again!

(In fact, I don't think we are still in lockdown, however, the # of cases is much higher than it was when we use to go thrifting, so we are waiting for it to return to those levels before going again. We might get vaccinated before that happens though it just doesn't seem worth it to do physical side hustles right now)

[ertyu]

My second hand store is one of a couple of chains that buy donated clothes from western europe (Germans or Austrians donate clothes to charity, charity bales them up and resells them for cash). Our local chains restock completely once a month, and prices go down as the month progresses. Brand new items or items of good quality obviously go first. Then on "final sale day" their only goal is to clear out inventory. Apart from me and a bunch of retired ladies, on final sale day you get many resellers who want inventory for cheap - e.g. guys with vans who then drive around the countryside setting up temporary stalls in various villages and sleeping in their vans. It's an interesting ecosystem.

[CDR]

Not really related but,

Pretty sure our thrift stores bale up clothes and send to West Africa when they don't sell. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elU32XNj8PM

Some argue (can't remember if they talk about this in the linked program) this system suppresses West Africa's domestic clothing industry from developing, because it cannot compete (on price) with the overwhelming amount of clothing from the US and Canada.

[How-DoesThisSound]

Really like the DIY sandbag/medicine ball idea, thank you @basuragomi. Good idea about using some one else's bodyweight. I will keep it in mind for when I can actual lift my own body weight . Part of the reason I want to learn alterations is to alter thrifted clothing .

@ertyu It never occurred to me to thrift clothes for their buttons and/or zippers, but this is excellent. People talk about $1 clothes all the time, but the thrift stores DW and I went to before lockdown never had those kind of deals. Your comment about .25 euro shirts reminded me. I did a little internet sleuthing and found a place just a few minutes from my house with a $1 rack. So you know where I'll be heading once we're free again!

(In fact, I don't think we are still in lockdown, however, the # of cases is much higher than it was when we use to go thrifting, so we are waiting for it to return to those levels before going again. We might get vaccinated before that happens though it just doesn't seem worth it to do physical side hustles right now)

Keep an eye out for any garments with YKK zippers. I find that not only are YKK zippers very sturdy and hard-wearing but that the clothes they end up on tend to be higher quality as well. You should be able to find images of what they look like online : )

[CDR]

Thanks for the note about YKK Zippers @How-DoesThisSound.

In May, I did a poor job following the goals set for that month, yet I passed another certification at the request of my boss. They covered the cost, so it was great.

June was more of the same. I thought it might be because I set too many goals. My to-do list for the month had more hours of tasks then I had free hours. All-in-all, I passed another certificate at the end of June. This time covered by Microsoft via a program with work.

So for July, I've targeted my goals/tasks based on estimated time of completion and the amount of solo free hours I have in the month. This took no time at all to figure out. But, the benefits haven't panned out. I am still not on task as often as I would like. My main focus for July and August is another Microsoft Certification.

In August, a side-goal is to organize my comic books and list on eBay. The goal is to list and see what happens. If it works out, I thought I could turn it into an eBay store for geek things. Comics would be the initial stock, and I would supplement with geek related items found via thrifting.

Something else I intend to finish is an online course for the certificate I wrote in May. I've created a detailed outline, and wrote scripts for a few of the videos. Before September, I intend to finish all the scripts and slide shows. Then, I've dedicated September to recording and editing the videos and releasing it online.

The course + the eBay store will be my first intentional attempts to create income streams outside my job. I intended 2021 to be a year of output. So, I need to stop theorizing.

Mentioning output, 4 certificates was not my goal this year but it is what is happening. So October will be Execution Month. I will take everything I've learned in my certificates this year and finish off my goal of releasing 5 small open source software projects. I've released three so far, and I've selected 3 more to push out during October. I also intend to make 2-3 small contributions to open source projects. Finally, I will attend 1 or 2 tech related meetups to start meeting people. I will try to keep attending meetups for the rest of the year.

Then, it will be head down until April 2022 to do:

• Two more IT Certificates

• 2 Cybersecurity courses with 'certificates of participation'

• And a set of free cybersecurity courses that people have strung together into a curriculum

Writing it all down, this makes the rest of the year (until April 2022, I started my year late hehe) seem stuffed . I can already imagine a few probable events happening that will interrupt these goals. Oh well, I'll continue with my lofty aspirations. At least there is enough that if I only complete 25%-50%, I still got a lot done.

[Salathor]

People talk about $1 clothes all the time, but the thrift stores DW and I went to before lockdown never had those kind of deals.

I don't know if you're still looking, but the place to go in the US is the Goodwill Outlet centers (these are different from regular goodwills). Everything in the store is listed for $1.79 a pound (at least in the super HCOL area where I live), so you can regularly get kids' clothing for under a quarter, and grown up shirts for a buck or less. Heavy things are usually sold for a low, flat rate. I bought a beat up old card table and fabric to refinish it for I think $6 total, compared to $55 for a new one at the store, and it came out perfectly.

[CDR]

I don't know if you're still looking, but the place to go in the US is the Goodwill Outlet centers (these are different from regular goodwills). Everything in the store is listed for $1.79 a pound (at least in the super HCOL area where I live), so you can regularly get kids' clothing for under a quarter, and grown up shirts for a buck or less. Heavy things are usually sold for a low, flat rate. I bought a beat up old card table and fabric to refinish it for I think $6 total, compared to $55 for a new one at the store, and it came out perfectly.

Had no idea these existed! It seems there is exactly one in Ontario, so we might have to make the trek out one day to check it out. There are a few 'close by' across the boarder as well, but it's a much longer drive. Thanks for letting me know about this!

[Salathor]

Hope it works out for you! It's quite the experience. Everything is dumped in bins, roughly sorted between clothes and home goods. It's kind of like a treasure hunt.

You will probably want to bring gloves and a mask though (even before COVID it was a wear-gloves kind of place, at least the ones near us).

[CDR]

I am still alive and kicking. I put the journal on pause because living at home, saving most of my money, and spending most of my time studying IT and programming is a boring log.

But that is going to change. DW got a new job in a new city, so we're moving out. Free from the constraints of living with parents, but free from an easy 90% savings rate. The next few months will test how much I learned from reading PF/FIRE/ERE literature and posts. We are searching for a place close to the essentials like work, the grocery store, etc.

My work is temporarily remote, but the office is located in another city. I would love to stay another year or two, but I have no interest in getting a car for a commute. So, I applied for a job at the local university in the new town.

If I get it, the benefits are:
1. Much better pay and benefits, a union job
2. Able to bike to work - exercise is done!
3. If I take public transit instead - free time to read, listen to audiobooks, do flashcards
4. The uni library = free access to academic books, and I will always be on campus, so it won't be an extra stop
5. It's my alma mater, so I would be taking the money back I paid in tuition

The new city, which we both have lots of previous experience with, is better for ERE in many ways. Good public transit, lots of bike lanes, and the people are generally pro-bike, pro-environment and a bit more hippy in general. You meet many more people supportive of ERE-like lifestyles.

My focus will be to establish PF/MMM/ERE systems and enhance relevant skills. Some systems I would like to focus on:

A system that handles money management seamlessly with little effort.
I want to have a system that makes it as frictionless as possible to see "solving my problems with money" issues, so I can investigate and then learn the relevant skills/find alternatives to keep costs down. (At the simplest level, this would just be looking at the monthly budget and thinking "what do I currently pay for that I could learn to do myself?" and similar questions "how could I reduce my grocery cost next month? What is the most expensive item on my grocery bill, can I remove it, can I find a cheaper substitute, can I get it another way" I am thinking that creating a system that forces me to stop and reflect will over time lead to significant improvements)

2+ systems that handle my physical health:
1. Cost and time-efficient grocery shopping, cooking, and healthy eating
2. Embedding exercise into my lifestyle (biking to work, groceries etc).

A system that embeds Portuguese into my daily life.
My level is sufficient that I should just consume content in the language. Some areas of my life I could do in Portuguese include:
Talking to DW (She is a native speaker and the reason I am learning in the first place)
Learning IT/Programming Skills
Daily news consumption
Planning/Goal Setting can be written in PT
Learning cooking (recipes, cookbooks, cooking videos all in PT with some English supplements to find locally available alternatives)
Budgeting (my spreadsheets, goals, etc)
Going forward, I will take a "Portuguese First" attitude to learn new skills. I will only fall back into English if I cannot find the information I need.

A system that utilizes as much spare time as possible to study Japanese & embedding Japanese into my day as well
My Japanese abilities are modest. I started studying again in the middle of January. I have squeezed an average of 2.4h/day of studying. When I move out, this will be hard to keep up. I will need to make it a priority to keep up the work.

Other than moving, my focus for the month is Japanese. I want to put in as many hours as I can. I hope to bump my abilities up enough to start struggling through native content in April. We'll see what the month brings.

[CDR]

Where does the time go?

It is very amusing to read back this journal and remember the times. It's funny, because I can barely recall writing any of these entries, but I definitely recall the things I was writing about. I don't think my writing captured how depressed I was about my particular job at the time, and the little details of life, but I can remember it now.

Very happy to have gotten out of that job and into a new field.

It's been a year out my of parent's house. I haven't been keeping track of my spending and savings rates since we moved out, or really budgeted at all. The main reason is of course, laziness. The second is that my savings continues to go up, so it was very hard to motivate myself to budget. Also, every week or month my wife and I sit down and total up everything we've spent on shared items and split it up, so I would often get an idea of what I am spending stuff on and make adjustments the next month.

There is a lot of room for improvement.

I am not sure if I mentioned it here, but in 2022 I dropped almost all of my other ambitions to focus on studying Japanese. I got a lot of study hours in and made some new friends. I wrote an in-person test for Japanese at the end of the year for the intermediate level and failed it, so that about sums up my 2022. We could talk about why, but it's kind of a long story.

The goal as I saw it in Jan 2022 was to study Japanese intensely for two years, and then in 2024 take a trip to Japan. I've recently purchased my tickets to Japan, I'm going in April 2024 for a month, very exciting times.

In this new edition of CDR's Journal, I am going to try to control the amount of future thinking and planning I do, as there is a lot of it in this journal, and little of it amounted to much.

"If you spend too much time thinking about a thing, you'll never get it done."
- Bruce Lee

I will only speak about things in the future that I am certain about.

I thought I would pull a bunch of things I spoke about in my log and update ya'll.

As of September 2020, my net worth is around $23k. Given my working patterns, this might be the highest my net worth has ever been.

My own savings is now ~$90k, although it will probably drop down below 90 again as my wife and I have not divided the expenses of our trip to Brazil to visit the family. This is all in a savings account as much of it is supposed to be a down payment for a place, but we are not able to purchase a place at the moment because my wife is on contract, additionally, housing prices are still out of reach.

But, I also have PowerShell on my list [to learn] for Windows System Admin...

Not sure if I ever mentioned, I did learn PowerShell and use it often at work now.

As for the other skills that were often mentioned in my log, not much progress has been made. The skills that have improved the most are:

Japanese Language Ability (from 0 to something)
Portuguese Language Ability (from something to something more)
Catch-All for IT/System Admin Skills
Cooking

...Instead, I've closed a contract to do some freelance web development...

...The product possibilities for IT Training material seem to be numerous, although dangerous...

This was the only contract I closed for freelance web development work, I recently got a contract for some data science work. The money I made from the quoted contract is still sitting saved in my bank account .

About IT Training material, I did attempt to put together course. I wrote out all the scripts required to record a video course for a particular IT certs. Then Microsoft changed the topics required for that cert and left me in the dust. I shelved the idea at that point.

My work is temporarily remote, but the office is located in another city. I would love to stay another year or two, but I have no interest in getting a car for a commute. So, I applied for a job at the local university in the new town...

The new city, which we both have lots of previous experience with, is better for ERE in many ways. Good public transit, lots of bike lanes, and the people are generally pro-bike, pro-environment and a bit more hippy in general. You meet many more people supportive of ERE-like lifestyles.

I didn't get the job, I remain in my old one, which appears to be fully remote, they have never asked us to return to the office and my boss knows I no longer have a car, so could not make it to the office even if they asked me to.

Public transit and my feet have worked well. I took my bike out a handful of times last year for emergency grocery runs. I spent most of my time last year trying to (and sometimes winning at) making friends with Japanese people so I could practice my Japanese. So, my friend circle and/or social capital in this city is very low.