cmonkey's journal

Where are you and where are you going?
cmonkey
Posts: 1814
Joined: Mon Apr 21, 2014 11:56 am

Re: cmonkey's journal

Post by cmonkey »

Thanks everyone. We love them a lot, they are turning into very beautiful birds. I can't believe they still have about 2-3 months of growing yet to do. The roosters will change quite a bit more actually.

@Ydobon, agreed! In reality I doubt this person would ever find me on here, but just the thought of *someone* who would cause problems finding out about our journey is very unsettling, thus the change. We are very private people, and I have learned that keeping your mouth zipped is the better part of ERE.

I expect most people on here could do the math to figure out where we stand. ;)
BlueNote wrote:These are great pictures, I didn't know chickens could be so beautiful. I've wanted to try pasture raised chickens ever since I read a few articles about it. I don't own land but one day I hope to have enough for a great big vegetable garden and hopefully some chickens. My DW may not take kindly to the idea of birds roaming the yard but I bet she'd be on board for the cute little chicks!
Thanks for stopping by BlueNote! There are many varieties of chickens, most of which go unnoticed by the general population. If you do a search for 'heritage chickens' or 'heritage poultry' you will discover dozens of varieties. In fact, there is one called the Sumatran Chicken which is pure black....including the meat and bones! Its pretty incredible. I am pretty sure I could NOT eat those birds. Way too beautiful.

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Last edited by cmonkey on Thu Jul 02, 2015 9:30 am, edited 1 time in total.

Ydobon
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Location: Scotland

Re: cmonkey's journal

Post by Ydobon »

Your experience certainly serves as a valid cautionary tale.

I'm considering starting a blog to chart the journey to FI and I am very torn between wanting to be completely transparent (net worth, investments, data sets etc.) and worries about the loss of privacy experienced as a result.

My current thoughts would be to use one of domain providers who hide your details so that a simple 'whois' request won't give scammers your name and contact details?

cmonkey
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Joined: Mon Apr 21, 2014 11:56 am

Re: cmonkey's journal

Post by cmonkey »

@Ydobon, yea it just depends on the level of privacy you want. More people tend to follow people who are more transparent and show net worth. If you are strong in your resolve to mooching relations I can see it not being a problem. I am pretty sure you can hide your 'whois' information but I have never looked into it. I would think the most problems would come from people you know as opposed to unknown scammers, so the best course would be to avoid telling them and sharing on social media.

Ydobon
Posts: 412
Joined: Fri Aug 29, 2014 9:15 am
Location: Scotland

Re: cmonkey's journal

Post by Ydobon »

I'm lucky in that I don't know any moochers. I can think of one individual who has past 'form' in moochery, but I'm not rich enough to interest them at this point!

vexed87
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Joined: Fri Feb 20, 2015 8:02 am
Location: Yorkshire, UK

Re: cmonkey's journal

Post by vexed87 »

There is usually a small charge for making whois data private. Blue host charges $1.99 a year (IIRC).

Off the back of your concerns I have decided against sharing too much data on the forum too. I realised it was pretty easy to find out who I was in RL with a few searches. (everybody runs off to google vexed87... :roll: ) I'm almost tempted to run off and re-invent myself online ;).

One of the most important things you can do to hide your identity is setup totally new usernames/passwords and e-mail addresses for use on your account and be sure to never use these elsewhere. Using these anywhere else give up your identity so easily as so many websites/companies who hold your data are hacked on a regular basis, it won’t take long for scammers/extortionists to attempt to dupe you if they know your worth something.

cmonkey
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Joined: Mon Apr 21, 2014 11:56 am

Re: cmonkey's journal

Post by cmonkey »

vexed87 wrote: (everybody runs off to google vexed87... :roll: )
Ha, I did just that and looked for images, since I am always interested in what folks look like on this forum.

You have quite a good amount of facial hair, vexed87. ;)

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I agree on not using the same name for each profile. I have several that I use and mix around so hopefully that helps. I also don't do any social media.

vexed87
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Location: Yorkshire, UK

Re: cmonkey's journal

Post by vexed87 »

Hah opps! Dragline's alter ego revealed at last... In all seriousness, it wasn't going to be as easy as just searching usernames, but the more advanced snoopers will seek out details that are occasionally dropped in conversations to help narrow the searches down, i.e. hometowns, age, occupations etc...

I love how some of your chickens appear too! :)

cmonkey
Posts: 1814
Joined: Mon Apr 21, 2014 11:56 am

Re: cmonkey's journal

Post by cmonkey »

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.

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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

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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. :?

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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. :)
Last edited by cmonkey on Fri Jul 10, 2015 9:53 am, edited 1 time in total.

vexed87
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Re: cmonkey's journal

Post by vexed87 »

WRT to diverting cash savings to investments. I’m going to assume you meant you are diverting all your cash savings to investments, rather than just future savings? Something to consider is that during a recession liquid cash came become short in supply, therefore it might be wise retain some despite the returns you could be making now. You could be forced to sell up some assets at fire sale prices in the event of job loss, emergency home repairs etc at the worst possible time. Think stocks/index funds just dropped 25-50% in value due to gloomy economic outlooks, when actually this is the time when you should be buying more, not selling up to cover the bills.

Having all your emergency fund in stocks/funds might not be the best idea, unless you think you can time the markets to just before a crash…

Obviously you need to do the maths, as it could be many years before the next crash, and yes you might lose out in dividends and stock growth in that time and cash holdings will be subject to loss through inflation, but if you don’t have the cash when you need it, it will likely cost you more than you gained by keeping it in investments.

PS, cake looks great :)

cmonkey
Posts: 1814
Joined: Mon Apr 21, 2014 11:56 am

Re: cmonkey's journal

Post by cmonkey »

I was talking about putting all future cash savings into investments and keeping the balance we have now. I had been putting 350/month into cash but feel we have enough for our needs at this point. We have 22K+ sitting in CDs earning 2.5% and could tap that in a real emergency if we needed to. We'd lose the interest earned but still have the principle.

We could also just sell beautiful cakes :)
Last edited by cmonkey on Fri Jul 10, 2015 9:25 am, edited 1 time in total.

vexed87
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Location: Yorkshire, UK

Re: cmonkey's journal

Post by vexed87 »

I was hoping I was mistaken ;)

I'm envious of your position. How long have you been working towards FI out of interest?

cmonkey
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Re: cmonkey's journal

Post by cmonkey »

I think I first learned of the term 'FI' about 2 years ago but never gave it much thought. The period from 2012-2014 was a sort of 'questioning everything around me but not having any alternative to go with' timeframe. I don't really remember the exact process, but one day I suddenly realized where I belonged. The next day I started this journal.

I think my first 'FI' goal (without realizing it) was around 2004-2005, right before leaving high school, when I became determined to own a home and have no mortgage by the time I turned 30. I wanted a homestead but hated debt. I accomplished that about a year and a half ago at age 27. Took about 2.8 years.

I had found Jacob's blog a while before paying off the house, after quickly realizing I didn't like office work. It was essentially right after I signed an equity loan on the home (after paying it off) to put in a geothermal system and new water well (doh!), and taking out the truck loan, that it really 'clicked' that I was meant for the ERE lifestyle, what I had to do, and what my future looked like (and also the big mistake I had made in signing on to more debt). I had inadvertently been drifting toward ERE with no map or definition. It was as if a light had suddenly been lit at the end of a long tunnel I had wandered into and I knew exactly what I had to do to get out of the tunnel.

spoonman
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Re: cmonkey's journal

Post by spoonman »

cmonkey wrote: I wanted a homestead but hated debt. I accomplished that about a year and a half ago at age 27. Took about 2.8 years.
That's friggin awesome! That's very fast by any measure.

About finding ERE and the way forward, I had a similar set of circumstances: I had just bought a house and realized "aww shit, I could be trapped here". And that's almost what happened because soon after we bought around 10 houses (I kid you not) became foreclosures in our immediate vicinity. It took several years for us to sell the house and unlock our equity. I really wish I had discovered ERE (and taken it seriously) before buying the house.

cmonkey
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Re: cmonkey's journal

Post by cmonkey »

Thanks spoonman. Strangely, it really didn't give us a great amount of pleasure paying it off, it was just another thing along the way. Made no difference to everyday life really. I don't even think we celebrated. We still don't get euphoric thinking about it. I don't know if I ever will. The other debts were similar in feeling.

Now, watching the savings start to grow this month.....that is giving us some pleasure!
spoonman wrote:we bought around 10 houses (I kid you not)
I seriously read this as "I bought 10 houses" and couldn't believe it for a second. :o

10 foreclosures in my neighborhood would sure make me nervous, particularly since its mostly senior citizens with older homes.

cmonkey
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Re: cmonkey's journal

Post by cmonkey »

Garden Update

We are having a really great season overall with lots of things going right. The only failure we have had was our potato crop which succumbed to an onslaught of potato beetles (didn't rotate or put down nematodes) and we planted it in a new area we dug over this year and failed to removed all of the runner grass. We are still getting some potatoes but they are smaller and hard to find among all the grass.

I have also been logging the weight of everything and am planning to post a long list of how much we produced and how much money it would have cost us.

Some of the highlights -

We are getting our first ( of hopefully many ) crops of plums this year!

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We are getting a great harvest of pumpkins and squash. We have 6 sugar pumpkins I have counted so far, about 8-10 winter squash all from just a few plants. We may have finally figured out a way to keep the squash vine borer out of our crops!

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We are getting a tremendous tomato crop this year. Last year we lost essentially the entire crop to early blight due to a variety of factors. This year we mulched heavily and did a better job tying them up. The most important thing was learning about how baking soda dissolved in water and sprayed on leaves will raise the pH of the leaf and make it much more difficult for fungi to take hold. Couple this with an aspirin spray for the tomatoes, which mimics a hormone response when the tomato is under attack, and we have ZERO blight on any tomato this year. I can attest to the leathery leaves on our tomatoes and I think this was the key to our success.

Amish Paste
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Sweet Baby - There are literally thousands of flowers on this plant!
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We are getting a lot of muskmelon this year as well, with over 6 set on and the size of a softball and lots more little ones growing.
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We have also gotten our watermelon to go crazy (by mulching with compost) as you can see in the below photo. The fruit isn't doing much though, just small and puny. :(

North Bed
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South Bed
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Kriegsspiel
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Re: cmonkey's journal

Post by Kriegsspiel »

Your neat and colorful gardens make me want to be a better person.

User avatar
C40
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Re: cmonkey's journal

Post by C40 »

I, too, am very impressed by your gardening. I hope I can garden that well in the future

spoonman
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Re: cmonkey's journal

Post by spoonman »

You are making fantastic progress. Sorry to hear about the potatoes, I'm sure you'll watch out next time. It's interesting to hear that there are specific pitfalls when growing things, it isn't just "put something in the ground and walk away".

I look forward to your breakdown of production versus costs!

cmonkey
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Re: cmonkey's journal

Post by cmonkey »

Thanks everyone. We hope to inspire others through our posts. :) We have been at this for 4.5 years now and so are learning a lot but I think the learning will never end.

Monthly update, July 2015

Expenses/Savings

Overall, July was probably the best month we have had all year with the possible exception being January. I say July is better simply because our savings went to....savings as opposed to debt payments.

Total Expenses - $1,811.97
Total Savings - $3,064.67 ; 63%

We spent nearly the entire month sitting under $1400 in expenses and would have finished out the month at that level if not for the decision to start focusing on getting our basement finished. We purchased about $400-500 worth of supplies the last weekend of July. We would like the house done by the time we have children in a couple of years. We are planning to do all of the work ourselves (well, mostly myself) from this point on and so can do it at our own pace(*). For the month of July we got supplies for running a 100 amp subpanel, installing a sump pump in our basement (we have a moisture issue) and also supplies for tearing out a bunch of termite-damaged sill plates and a few joists.

I spent the second half of July jacking up one side of the house to rip out the sill plate damage and now have that repaired with treated lumber. Also put in foam board insulation around the sill plate and sealed it with spray foam. August will be spent installing the sump pump/trench (I need to rent a jackhammer to tear up the floor) and putting in the subpanel. The electrical in our house is a complete mess since its about 70 years old.

* For the record, we moved our kitchen from one side of the house to the other shortly after moving in and so we are familiar with remodeling and know enough to do a good job and stay within code requirements.

We have decided that our target while during the remodel is $3,000/month savings or 62% savings rate. I think I can beat this target by quite a bit in August.

Outside of remodel expenses we had $1,306.41 in expenses which is in line with where I want to be.

Also, we filled up the truck with gas during the first week in July for the first time since the beginning of May. 2 months between fill-ups is not bad! I haven't filled up my car since February since I've been riding the metro everywhere. Couple that with our semi-annual car insurance payment of $178 and our expenses were actually higher than a typical month.


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A note about FAI increases going forward - I am taking the leftover from each months paychecks and putting them into our investments at the end of the month, generally on the last day of the month. Due to the time it takes to get the money into our investment accounts and actually into securities, our FAI increases will be one month behind. So July will not see any increases since the actual increases will be in August. Beginning with my August update (in Sept) I will be logging regular increases in FAI. I am basing all these numbers on my month end statements which are generally available about 2-3 days after the last day of the month.


Lending Club

Deposits - $1,532.00
FAI - 296.49 (+2.41)

NAR - 13.37%
Total Charge Offs - 2

We had another Lending Club loan charge off right on the last day of July. I expect to settle in the 9-10% range within the next 2 years.

Dividend Income

Deposits - $1,532.67
FAI - $3.96

This will start increasing next month!

Total FAI - $300.25 (+$2.41)

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Looking forward to a similar/better August!

In other news we are still waiting for eggs, thinking about 3 more weeks! They are now 17 weeks old and should start producing around 20 weeks. I haven't posted photos simply because they are not changing as rapidly now since they are about mature.

We have been having some social problems for the past 1-2 weeks now with the roosters reaching near-maturity they are starting to claim the hens and divide them up. The ideal ratio is about 1 rooster/10 hens. We current have 6 roosters and 10 hens total so our balance is WAY off. The hens are essentially hiding in fear from the roosters as the roosters patrol around looking for them at this point. So we are collecting supplies together to cull them this week/weekend. We will take some last photos to share with everyone and so we can remember them. They (were) wonderful birds but have recently become a real pain in the butt with all their crowing and terrorizing the hens! I expected as much. We have decided to keep Humphrey (the small colorful rooster) and Bee (he is very large and gentle) and will see how they go together. That will leave us with 2 roos and 10 hens.

On the topic of chickens, I have found a source of bartered deer meat while talking with my supervisor. He hunts regularly and wants fresh eggs so we are planning to trade does for eggs. At an average of 40 LBs of meat per doe, just one would last us quite a while. Producing 8-10 eggs per day would let us trade eggs for quite a lot of meat. :)

EdithKeeler
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Re: cmonkey's journal

Post by EdithKeeler »

Man, I love looking at the pictures of your garden! What a gorgeous garden. It reminds me so much of my grandparents' garden/farm. Good memories there!

But I feel sad for the unwanted roosters...

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