Monthly update, June 2015
Expenses
June was a horrible month for expenses due to two large outflows. The first was a large purchase of chicken feed which will enable greater savings over the long run. I expect the feed to last over a year. The second was an expense for $1,315.00 to plug our old water well. This was required by the county so I couldn't get out of it.
Total Expenses -
$3,242.28
All told, however, without those two large purchases we would have had our second best month all year. We had
$1,313.46 in expenses outside those two large expenses, which is only about $7 more than our best month of January. Much of this occurred in the first half of June. We really started penny-pinching in the second half of the month.
Some interesting notes on the financials, I have played around with the timeline calculations and the savings rates and return expectations and have found that even dropping our savings rate to sub-65% (which I don't think we will do more than once a year, if at all), our timeline for FI only gets pushed off by about 6 months or so. This really doesn't seem so bad. On the flip side, pushing ourselves up to an 80+% savings rate (which would probably make us a little uncomfortable), has the opposite effect of reducing our time to FI by about 4-6 months. Its quite interesting and has made me feel quite a bit better about the small amount we do spend each month. Our target right now is 70%, but anything above or below really doesn't make much difference. So far for July we are sitting at 78% and feel confident we will stay above 70%.
I have also decided (for now) to forgo deposits to any more cash funds simply because I have no use for it anymore. We have a fair amount in cash. I used to follow the mantra of always having an emergency fund with 6 months of expenses in it but I think that money can better serve in investments, especially considering we could just sell some stock or wait for the next paycheck if a tree suddenly collapsed on our house or similar. That frees up another 6% for ERE.
Edit - I should note that I am talking about future cash deposits, not existing. We have about 22K in CDs and are not touching those. In reality that is about 1 year's worth of normal expenses and 2 years worth of core expenses so we could make that last a long time.
Lending Club
Deposits - 0
FAI - 294.08 (+1.88)
NAR - 13.90%
Total Charge Offs - 1
One of the two loans that has been sitting in the 31-120 days late category finally got charged off on the last day of June. They made one payment and then just stopped paying so its likely they took the money and ran. So rather than seeing an increase of ~$3.00 in FAI, I only got $1.88. No big deal.
I have one more that will charge off soon, and now a third has rolled into the 31-120 day late category.
Dividends
Deposits - 0
FAI - $3.96
Not much happening here!
Total FAI - $297.84
Depending on when July's deposits get applied to the accounts, my next update should see the first increase to my FAI values with many more to follow.
In other news, this past week we hosted a garden party at our property for our local horticultural club that we are members of (actually we are co-presidents). In all we probably have over 3000-4000 sq feet of gardens if you count all the flower borders and the fruit bed with hundreds of different varieties of plants. We lost count a while back.
Here are pictures of the sandwich cake the DW made as the main attraction. It was made from a couple of round loaves of bread with chicken salad and cucumbers sandwiched between and covered with a cream cheese "frosting" and garnished with edible garden flowers. It was amazing. She has real talent for these kinds of things, someone even wants to buy one from her. Everyone really loved it and found it incredible that we had made the bread...which we found strange because we make everything from scratch.
We have spent the past 3 months or so keeping everything looking nice and weeded and trimmed and we decided to make a video to show the result of a final week-long push to get everything ready. It was really challenging due to all the rain and storms we have been getting. Over 12 inches of rain in June and just this past weekend we got 3-4 inches in one night. Many of our beds have been under water. Last week we also lost a huge branch (30+ feet long and 12+ inches in diameter) from our apple tree which fell on a 3 year old apple we had planted, completing destroying it.
The last few days in particular were very physically demanding but also very enjoyable and the entire time I had pangings of what life will be like after we have reached FI. I had nothing on my mind all week but weeding, trimming, dead-heading flowers, moving and planting different things, etc.... I was in my own little world and it was fantastic, with no worry of going back to work or what I'd have to do for the boss tomorrow. Watching this video while at work really brings a feeling of being homesick, but also a real drive to achieve FI like never before.
You can
watch the video here.
I look forward to posting more of these in the coming years so folks can see what we are up to. We have big plans.