A Journey of Mindfulness--the Remaking of Life in Midstream.

Where are you and where are you going?
RockyMtnLiving
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Re: A Journey of Mindfulness--the Remaking of Life in Midstream.

Post by RockyMtnLiving »

IlliniDave:

I've been off the boards for a while, but just peeked back and endeavored to catch up here and there. I'm glad you are still posting. I'm 57, so just a little bit ahead of you, but toiling with similar considerations on a variety of fronts. Anyway, I find your posts to be thoughtful, inspiring, philosophical and analytical. So thank you for writing.

Married2aSwabian
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Re: A Journey of Mindfulness--the Remaking of Life in Midstream.

Post by Married2aSwabian »

Hang in there! Yes, it does get a little harder to summon up the energy with each year. Seems true what they say about the body changing every seven years. After 8 of those time spans, I agree! Regardless of age or fitness level, it’s amazing how the body responds to any form of training: yard work, walking, swimming, whatever. I started from “zero” fitness with regards to backpacking last year and was able to readily complete a pretty challenging trip in Glacier with 3000 ft vertical climb and 40 lb pack. That after three months of local shorter training hikes with increasing weight.

Right now, I’m happy to be able to drag my ass up one flight of stairs carrying zilch. Exhausted after second Moderna shot late yesterday! ;)

IlliniDave
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Re: A Journey of Mindfulness--the Remaking of Life in Midstream.

Post by IlliniDave »

RockyMtnLiving wrote:
Wed May 05, 2021 1:43 pm
... Anyway, I find your posts...
Thanks, RockyMtnLiving, it's always a pleasant surprise when someone finds my ramblings here of some benefit.

IlliniDave
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Re: A Journey of Mindfulness--the Remaking of Life in Midstream.

Post by IlliniDave »

Married2aSwabian wrote:
Wed May 05, 2021 3:49 pm
... Regardless of age or fitness level, it’s amazing how the body responds to any form of training: ...

Right now, I’m happy to be able to drag my ass up one flight of stairs carrying zilch. Exhausted after second Moderna shot late yesterday! ;)
Just jumping to a higher activity level both around the house and out in the yard over the last week or two has had a big positive impact on how I feel.

I was pretty run down my second day after the second shot too. Fortunately it was just the one day. Hope you've bounced back.

IlliniDave
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Re: A Journey of Mindfulness--the Remaking of Life in Midstream.

Post by IlliniDave »

Lately I've had spells where I will feel a little like what I imagine a waking dream would feel like.

Yesterday I had a decorating consultant and her "project lead" along with the woman who will probably be the listing agent over to my house to evaluate the situation.

I mentioned before that in my initial consultation with the agent, she made a swag at what she thought the house might sell for. I thought at the time the guess was laughably high. Her informal reappraisal was even higher. A few years back I had a different agent look at it and I felt I'd be lucky to sell it for what I bought it for. Now I'm looking at a probable listing price 80% above what I paid and in a market where most homes are selling above list. The potential of that large an unexpected influx of cash during the transition changes a lot. The plan was if I had a positive net in selling the old house and buying a new one I'd use it for some upgrades at the cabin. I'll probably have so much in the kitty I could theoretically tear it down and rebuild it with money to spare. An amazing change of fortune compared to what I was expecting as late as last calendar year.

Getting ready for them to come over meant I finally turned the corner on the sorting/packing/discarding effort. Plenty to go still, but until last weekend I was in the early stages and it looked like the more I did the further backward I went. Progress outside with the landscaping/spring cleanup activity has progressed similarly.

Suddenly a lot of things about the house that were weighing on my morale have lightened.

Investing also seems like a dream world. Granted it included an optimally-timed starting point during the covid dipsy-doodle, but over the last 12 months my invested assets have increased by more than my entire net worth when this journal started. And the last three years have totally outstripped even my most optimistic planning scenario.

I'm walking my path through life while the universe stuffs money in my pocket.

Part of me feels guilty about that, but it took a lifetime of effort, very focused over the last 10 years, to prepare the ground. So just a little guilty. And tomorrow the universe might be pulling big fistfuls back out of my pocket. Investing is a weird thing, and it's hard not to redefine prudent when the gains are steady and easy.

Riggerjack
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Re: A Journey of Mindfulness--the Remaking of Life in Midstream.

Post by Riggerjack »

and it's hard not to redefine prudent when the gains are steady and easy.
So, since gains are high, have you considered how to lock in those gains? When the universe is looking to pull money out of your pocket, how do you plan to prevent it?

Or is potential gains offsetting losses more important than capital preservation?

IlliniDave
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Re: A Journey of Mindfulness--the Remaking of Life in Midstream.

Post by IlliniDave »

Riggerjack wrote:
Sat May 08, 2021 1:13 pm
So, since gains are high, have you considered how to lock in those gains? When the universe is looking to pull money out of your pocket, how do you plan to prevent it?

Or is potential gains offsetting losses more important than capital preservation?
I don't really think about it in those terms, but things that could be considered locking in gains would be my paring back of equity holdings, upping bonds and cash as % of total, over the last 4 years. Also, I'm likely to add more real estate in the next few years.

I'll probably always have a significant stake in the stock market. I can't say when or if I'll be a buyer again, but I won't sell out completely. I'm fortunate in that I probably have more than I need, so I can afford some risk.

It's corny, but I use a sports analogy. Taking football as an example, any one who is interested has seen games where a team gets a lead then gets very conservative trying to run out the clock. Some would call it playing not to lose. It's usually better if a team keeps playing to win. And that mirrors my attitude/approach. I want to keep playing to win. I fear if I play not to lose I might choke and fumble everything away.

Riggerjack
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Re: A Journey of Mindfulness--the Remaking of Life in Midstream.

Post by Riggerjack »

Fair enough. Thanks.

I'm playing not to lose. You give lots of thought to your stash. I just wanted to know if now that your situation has changed, if that caused change of strategy.

FWIW, I cashed out in 2018. Markets have skyrocketed since. I am not without regrets, but still comfortable with my choice. SWAN and all that...

IlliniDave
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Re: A Journey of Mindfulness--the Remaking of Life in Midstream.

Post by IlliniDave »

Riggerjack wrote:
Sun May 09, 2021 10:49 am

FWIW, I cashed out in 2018. Markets have skyrocketed since. I am not without regrets, but still comfortable with my choice. SWAN and all that...
I've thought about it--some among the bogleheads have a mantra of sorts. "If you've won the game, why keep playing?" That's actually the root of my sports analogy. But quitting doesn't fit my investing personality/temperament (also keep in mind, unlike most here, I have explicit legacy goals that influence my decisions).

You are wise IMO to keep SWAN front-and-center. Spending ones retirement sick with worry over stash matters seems to defeat the point of it. Another boglehead mantra: "Many roads lead to Dublin." While it is interesting and valuable to compare approaches, gotta go with what's right for you. Many ways to win that have nothing to do with achieving maximum returns and accumulating the most possible.

Gilberto de Piento
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Re: A Journey of Mindfulness--the Remaking of Life in Midstream.

Post by Gilberto de Piento »

IlliniDave wrote:
Sat May 08, 2021 10:23 am
I mentioned before that in my initial consultation with the agent, she made a swag at what she thought the house might sell for. I thought at the time the guess was laughably high. Her informal reappraisal was even higher. A few years back I had a different agent look at it and I felt I'd be lucky to sell it for what I bought it for. Now I'm looking at a probable listing price 80% above what I paid and in a market where most homes are selling above list.
If you make an account with redfin and mark a house as owned by you they will send you the occasional email with the estimated value of the house. This only works if your area is covered by that service (zillow and other competitors probably offer something similar though). There are some caveats of course (it's built on a statistical model rather than coming from an agent, it is only based on available data about the house, etc.) but I find it to be a useful way to keep up on a rough estimate the house value with almost no effort.

Hristo Botev
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Re: A Journey of Mindfulness--the Remaking of Life in Midstream.

Post by Hristo Botev »

Gilberto de Piento wrote:
Mon May 10, 2021 8:36 am
FWIW, my own process for attempting to roughly track home value for purposes of tracking our net worth is to take the average of the estimate for our house from Zillow (always insanely high for us), realtor.com (tends to be about right), and redfin (generally quite a bit low). Our home is actually pretty easy to track because we live in a relatively large townhome development and so we always have pretty spot-on recent comps to look at, and the average I get from the 3 sites always strikes me as being pretty consistent with what we know from the comps.

Riggerjack
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Re: A Journey of Mindfulness--the Remaking of Life in Midstream.

Post by Riggerjack »

BTW, I sold a place with redfin last year. By far the best and easiest real estate transaction I have had. They did far more than a typical agent in this area, for far less.

Professional photographers and photoshopping, everything set up on day 1. Well negotiated by agent. Listed Thursday, sold Tuesday, after 5 buyers submitted a total of 9 offers. All for a 1% listing fee (1/3 of local brokerage rate).

IlliniDave
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Re: A Journey of Mindfulness--the Remaking of Life in Midstream.

Post by IlliniDave »

Typically I don't worry too much about what a piece of real estate is worth on an ongoing basis, I just use the lower of what I bought it for less transaction costs, or any other indication of value less transaction costs, when calculating net worth. In other words a lowball estimate.

Married2aSwabian
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Re: A Journey of Mindfulness--the Remaking of Life in Midstream.

Post by Married2aSwabian »

IlliniDave wrote:
Sat May 08, 2021 10:23 am
Lately I've had spells where I will feel a little like what I imagine a waking dream would feel like.
Good for you! Why not have a few things go right all in a row?!

I must’ve missed the part of your journal where you wrote about buying the dip last year in March? If so, that qualifies as a Buffett-in-his-prime type move. :)

My feet got a little colder than that, which is why I’m happy to let Vanguard manage the bulk of our IRA. The stash would likely be at least 30% more, if I had stayed the course through the financial crisis also ... hindsight’s 20/20, right?

Heck, you could probably make a bundle by telling your realtor to just auction the place off to the highest bidder as is!
...and they could have the fancy decorator person stay home.

IlliniDave
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Re: A Journey of Mindfulness--the Remaking of Life in Midstream.

Post by IlliniDave »

Married2aSwabian wrote:
Mon May 10, 2021 9:02 pm
... I must’ve missed the part of your journal where you wrote about buying the dip last year in March? If so, that qualifies as a Buffett-in-his-prime type move. :) ...
That might have been in the Trade Log thread, or in my now defunct interim journal. I'm pretty sure I mentioned it in passing somewhere. My motivation wasn't to buy the dip per se, but maintaining an asset allocation puts you in that position every now and again, and between the pre-retirement downward glide path and then the covid plunge, I got to, or below, my minimum. That I picked a couple of the exceptionally bad days to instigate the transactions is pure coincidence. ;)

But the buys were pretty small, without checking I want to remember something on the order of 4% of the stash total. In the big picture the timing bonus was pretty small (but will buy lots of dozens of worms). The bigger payoff came from sticking to my plan and luck that the markets mostly bounced back. I probably got another small bonus from having done most of my selling from large-cap dominated funds and buying in small- and value-tilted funds. But again, in the noise when looking at the overall bottom line.

Yeah, with 20/20 hindsight over even the last 10 years I could be, er, well, a very robustly established man. :mrgreen:

The seller's agent's job right now is, among other things, to give me a guesstimate for what it might sell for as-is, then what it might sell for if the decorator's recommendations are implemented. I'll pretty much be able to tell from those estimates plus the estimate for the upgrades whether selling as-is might produce nearly equivalent results with much less hassle. The brokerage she works for even has a program where they'll buy the house for what they think it's worth less their commission. Likely that will be a lowball offer, but if not and I judge it fair, that would be the ultimate convenience. No more contracting, no more ongoing upgrades, no listing, no showing, no open house: just trade the keys for a check and walk away.

IlliniDave
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Re: A Journey of Mindfulness--the Remaking of Life in Midstream.

Post by IlliniDave »

Yesterday someone in my chain of command called me to see what I thought about forgoing retirement in August and transitioning to part-time status, in a 100% remote position until the end of next January. The idea has been loosely kicked around, but this time it was someone who was looking for the go ahead from me to make it happen. Nothing was decided and we agreed to talk again next week.

Assuming I work at least 60% time (24 hr/wk) the advantages are:

-continued access to medical insurance at the employee rate (about $125/mo), which will mean 6 months less of the retiree health plan (currently > $800/mo) so about $5,600 in savings there.
-60% of my current pay is 80% higher than my retirement annuity and at this point I'd look at the delta as "fun money" which for me would be money put towards hideout renovations and/or undeveloped land purchase.
-Gives a more gradual transition, something people I know who have done it recommend (although people who didn't do it don't lament having not done it).

The negative:

-The nature of the position itself. When this idea was casually floated a few months ago, I envisioned joining the legions of people who spend most of the day calling into Skype meetings and maybe lending an experienced voice to planning activities and such. Instead it's more of a consultant/SME role and a good bit of the burden to keep myself busy would be on me. The work would be more enjoyable, but I'm afraid my days of showing initiative for things work-related are about all used up.
-It complicates the transition plan. Something peculiar about the conversation was that he had a fair bit of interest in the fate of my residence, and I got the sense maybe he thought the arrangement would be more viable if I had an address of record commensurate with an AL-based employee. I'll have to do some more digging but there may be something there that would make me consider delaying the sale of my house.

In the, "I haven't decided if it's a positive or negative," category:

-The reduction in pay will effectively freeze the wage base portion for me in the annuity calculation formula, but an additional 6 months of service by me another half a percent or so, and taking a later early retirement means a little more per month because actuarial stuff.

At this moment the prudent part of me says give it a try but the Ghost of iDave Future says screw it. Mulling it over, but I think GoiDF will prevail.

I mentioned undeveloped land. I got an online gander at an 80-acre parcel that has a small stream with a huge beaver pond on it (looked like 5+ acres) surrounded by a good bit of wetland surrounded by higher ground. Good wildlife habitat, very iconic in character and probably 30 min from the hideout (but just a few miles per the crow). It's remote even by the standards of the area. Getting the itch, might consider an offer prior to viewing it.

Otherwise, just living the dream.

RockyMtnLiving
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Re: A Journey of Mindfulness--the Remaking of Life in Midstream.

Post by RockyMtnLiving »

It's flattering you would be offered the P/T gig. I'd be tempted to try it as I don't see much of a downside if it doesn't work out.

Anything related to real estate is both anecdotal and highly location specific, of course, but the worst investment we ever made was when we purchased about 60 acres of undeveloped land. It was part of a 1031 exchange, so I had limited time to conduct due diligence. I nonetheless conducted a fair amount of due diligence in that limited amount of time and it still turned out to be a disaster.

It was in a remote area of Virginia, near a fairly small ski resort and about 2 miles from the Appalachian trail. It consisted of one side of a small mountain, plus the top. A cute little stream cut across the base of the mountain, where there was sufficient flat land to build a potential retirement house a little ways up (so as to avoid potential flood plain issues); I enjoy astronomy, so planned to put a small telescope on the top of the mountain in a Jeffersonian-esque move perhaps that I could access with an ATV, as the land at that point was quite steep. Electrical was nearby, but would have had to be extended. Getting internet access would have been a challenge, but we had a solution for that, too. At one point the land had been partially timbered, so there was a rough-cut road winding all the way to the top that, in theory, could have been repurposed to a more durable road. We had a perc test done. We checked for well water. I looked at a conservation easement to sell forestry offset credits. And on and on. We thought we had it all nailed when we pulled the trigger and made the purchase.

Why was it a disaster?

1. Turns out that cute little stream was under federal jurisdiction, so a host of complicated federal approvals would have been needed to cross it with a small bridge. And by "little stream," I mean little. It was at most three feet wide about about 4 inches deep. It wasn't the Mississippi River. It was tiny. Still, crossing it was a problem from a permitting perspective. I asked all these questions during due diligence, but the prior owner (a lumber company) plus the local zoning folks weren't exactly forthcoming.

2. An unwritten rule in the local zoning ordinance of this small county was that any bridge had to be able to withstand the weight of a fire truck on the theory that a home on the other side might catch fire one day. Building such a small bridge to cross a cute little stream was outrageously expensive. We looked at alternatives, such as laying down frames from old rail cars, but even that turned out to be impossible. So even accessing the land via a new bridge we would have built quickly became problematic for cost and permitting reasons.

3. Road grading and maintenance also turned out to be very expensive and complicated. It is expensive to put in and maintain a road(s) in undeveloped areas. We needed chain saws to access the land each time we visited it, as lumber was always coming down.

4. Marking and maintaining the boundaries of the acreage was very expensive. It was a constant struggle and worry to keep trespassers off the land. And had we built a home there, those concerns would have been acute as we would not have lived in that house fulltime for several years.

5. Our estimates of home-building turned out to be too low, too. Doing any kind of construction in remote areas was simply hard and expensive.

So anyway, we never did anything with the land, as the investments to improve it would have been too great. We held it for about a decade, then sold it for a 20% loss.

YMMV.

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Bankai
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Re: A Journey of Mindfulness--the Remaking of Life in Midstream.

Post by Bankai »

Money wise you're comfortably set for life, so it only makes sense doing if you feel that non-financial benefits will be worth spending another 6 months working.* It's not obvious from your description that they are, and there's always risk that you get dragged into some projects that drag into next year, so they'll want to keep you for just a bit longer, and you feeling bad about leaving things unfinished agree to stay for just those last 6 months, rinse and repeat few times and you're working till 70.

*Also opportunity cost - no one is getting healthier with age. What is 100 yo iDave more likely to regret? Not working those extra 6+ months or postponing going after his dreams for longer?

Quadalupe
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Re: A Journey of Mindfulness--the Remaking of Life in Midstream.

Post by Quadalupe »

IlliniDave, one thing that you didn't mention as a 'negative' is the fact that you'd have 24 hours less free time per week! Maybe even more, since you'd also need some time to unwind. Furthermore being a SME also sounds energy intensive, so your real free hours could also be somewhat lower quality.

Currently you are leaning towards no (GoiDF thanks you). But are there any knobs on this offer you can turn to make this offer more enticing? Only work 8 hours a week? Double the pay? Only 1 day of SME and 1 day of skype meetings (tbh that sounds like my personal hell, but to each their own :-))

What would be needed to make the offer a Hell Yes instead of an "meh" or "no"? Maybe you can clarify that for yourself and then ask for that! You might just get what you ask for.

IlliniDave
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Re: A Journey of Mindfulness--the Remaking of Life in Midstream.

Post by IlliniDave »

Quadalupe wrote:
Wed May 12, 2021 9:01 am
IlliniDave, one thing that you didn't mention as a 'negative' is the fact that you'd have 24 hours less free time per week! ...

What would be needed to make the offer a Hell Yes instead of an "meh" or "no"? ...
That's an interesting omission on my part. Something I thought about, except didn't when writing here. I judged 24/wk for 6 mos was tolerable.

I'm not sure much about the arrangement itself could make me that enthusiastic about it. Fear of inflation hitting soon and hard is the only thing that makes me want to maintain a lifeline.

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