Nomadic-ERE Year 5 - Wanderlust Prevails

[ertyu]

Congratulations on beginning this new stage! Enjoy strawberries and cherries!

[2Birds1Stone]

@ertyu, thank you. We are harvesting more than enough for two people to get their fill every day. My wife figured out how to pick the ones from higher in the tree using a rake. We have a ladder but it's not very tall and very unsteady (wooden and 60+ years old).

@bigato, we are excited to see what the future brings. Right now we arw are getting acclimated to the colder climate and rural living.

Musings

I'm annoyed at the forum limitations for pictures. I spent a good while uploading 20+ photos on IMGUR only to have the forum software block them because width exceeded 800 pixels. I don't have an easy way to resize them on my phone.

Anyway, we are on day 7 of quarantine. Aside from the occasional car we hear in the distance, it's been pure audio bliss of birds, frogs, crackling fire, whistling kettle, and the occasional mammel scurrying somewhere beyond the fence. The orchard is technically within the city limits now, but feels like a different planet. I picked the driest day (Saturday) and mowed most of the grass using a non-assist push mower. It was a workout since the grass was very tall and still wet near the ground. My wife helped me rake the cut grass and we added it to the compost pile. We are tending to the vegetables in the hot house, fixed the rain catch system, continue cleaning and decluttering stuff from the house, and are propagating some plants. Our neighbor picked up some fresh bread and beer for us on Saturday, and we continue to eat through the food we purchased last monday. On Saturday the police showed up for our first quarantine control. They tried calling but the Portuguese Vodafone simcards were not working despite being connected and having internet. They managed to find the orchard after some time and we explained the phone situation, provided the new numbers and swapped in Polish simcards immediately. Yesterday they called successfully but again had difficulty finding the address (it doesn't exist!), so they had me walk to the main road to meet them. Very friendly fellas who asked how we were doing and to call if we needed help. I'm glad I purchased two Simcard/Starters for us before leaving the city center last week. Cell phone service is far better here than in the USA. The starters were $1.50 and include 6 gb of high speed data for 10 days, and a $1.50 credit for calls ($.10/minute) and texts ($.05/msg). After that we have to "top up" the accounts with $8/month to receive unlimited talk/text/data (speed throttled after 15gb), which includes tethering our laptop/tablet!

Food here has gotten more expensive since even a year ago, but is still very affordable when compared to back in NY. Our $80 grocery run will last us ~10 days and we did not particularly have time to shop the best deals when scrambling to provision last week. Our housing costs will be whatever our portion of utilities is going to cost for the apartment and orchard, likely under $100/month. Once we have bikes purchased transportation will be very cheap, until then we will have to rely a bit on Uber and bus, due to inclement weather. The only other fixed costs we will have will be our travel/health insurance, and two gym memberships (dying to get back into the gym, pun intended).

Overall I project our cost of living here <$1,200 USD/month for two people, with some fat in the budget for occasional meals out with family and friends, and some entertainment/lifestyle spending. The only thing not included in that budget will be some side trips we plan on taking to explore other parts of Poland. We are planning 3 nights in a house rental with my cousins and their kids in early July, and 8 days 7 nights in Zakopane (google it!) for hiking and mountaineering at the end of July. This travel will likely add an extra $500/month to our budget, so our total cost of living should end up ~$1,700/month or $850 per person! We will be more budget conscious if our portfolio takes a large haircut in the coming weeks/months.

[Frugalchicos]

Pretty awesome you guys are settled and enjoying the house. It sounds like a beautiful place.

I agree with the price of the groceries. We eat like kings for a week for 60E. I can buy two full Ikea style bags at the veggie and fruit shop and only spend about 20E. I never understood why US groceries are so expensive when they have so much land to grow anything.

[plantingtheseed]

I agree about how the forum handles the pictures. It is not easy and the latest forum policy seems to be that photos in posts are generally being discouraged. I use an outside link now, as it's just easier not to deal with the restrictions.

I think flickr provides photo sharing of up to 1000 photos free. It would be great to see what the post ERE adventure is like in Poland , maybe you can give flickr a try.

[2Birds1Stone]

..

[guitarplayer]

@2b1s I have read most of this journal over the past couple of months, just wanted to say thank you for inspiration!

Sorry for off topic but @bigato, how many languages have you mastered? Programming languages excluded

[classical_Liberal]

@2B1S
Just wanted to let you know I'm still following along. Just don't have much to add because life seems so good for you now-a-days. Keep living the good life, I enjoy all the updates.

[theanimal]

Lovely pictures! What are those purple trees? Those are beautiful. Man the pictures make your experiences come even more to life. I'm glad you guys made the decision to leave at the time you did. Time on the coast and now in Poland with all that food seems like the best way you could have spent your time, especially given the extenuating circumstances.

[2Birds1Stone]

@guitarplayer, I'm glad you were able to get some inspiration from the madness in here

@bigato, I tried uploading pics with the size conversion after your suggestion and it got hung up on the first image. Maybe it has to do with my location and bad data signal here. Thank you, I will try again once I'm on WiFi in a week or so.

@c_L thanks man, I'm trying to make the most of it. Feels a bit like dejavu since I left for Poland last year right around this time. Life is generally good. It's been raining non stop for two days now, and since this is essentially a concrete cabin, there isn't much to do. We did a deep clean of the cupboards and shelves, washed all the dished thoroughly, and threw out some junk (which needs to be hauled away by car). 162 hours of quarantine left, but who's counting.

@theanimal, that is Jacaranda, which the Portuguese brought over from Brazil. It looked magical in person, and we found it in quite a few places around Lisbon. I agree that the timing was serendipitous, while it was far from our planned adventure, getting to know Portugal after 3 months of living there was an experience I wouldn't trade. Once we are allowed to see family and friends here in Poland, it should be just as enjoyable here.

Believe I've mentioned in a previous post, but my wife needs to be in NY for a medical followup for the shoulder tear in November. We will likely stay here till Octoberish and then fly back to the states. Quite possibly doing a roadtrip south to visit family in FL and escape NE for a while. SE Asia still might happen, but it's not looking promising at this time.

While Poland is a nice place to be during the spring-fall seasons....it's grey, wet, polluted, and without much to do in the winter time.

[classical_Liberal]

I went over to MMM to take a look at the pics. Fabulous! Sorry I missed them until now. The cottage looks like a place I could call home. Where was that coastline in portugal?

[AxelHeyst]

When I paste in an image url, the very end of the string is something like “imagewidth=980”. I just manually edit the 980 to 750. Seems to work.

Loving the updates.

[2Birds1Stone]

@Axel, that sounds super simple if I can get it to work!

@bigato, I'm on Android so if you could suggest any specific app that is efficient and safe to DL let me know! Ideally one that can bulk convert the pics for upload. I would love posting more photos here.

I'm enjoying taking pictures quite a bit. Nothing fancy as my camera is my 3 year old cell phone.

@c_L, the pics from the coast are from several spots inbetween Sagres and Vila Milfontes. The secluded beaches were magical. Our friend told us that he's never seen them so empty. Another cool beach, which pics didn't do justice was between Sines and Setubal, it's very wide and over 80km long. Endless beach.

The earlier pics of coastline were near lisbon, from Cascais heading north toward Sintra national park. That's like the Beverly Hills of Lisbon, even Madonna has a house there. Our favorite was a day where there were 15+ foot waves crashing into the rocks, forming what looked like giant geysers. The sound was deafening.

$$$ Ish

Since our spending for the rest of June is going to be very predictable and that brings us to the end of 1H2020, I took a gander at the numbers for spending since Jan 1. I averaged .......*drumroll*....$750/month or $4,500 for the first half of the year. Now part of that is having had prepaid our housing for Jan/Feb in the form of security deposit prior to vacating our apartment, but cool to see nonetheless. We never imagined our spending dropping so low, and it's well below a 3% WR, for now.

I'm going to loosen the purse strings a bit here in Poland. First order of business after quarantine will be getting set up with a solid bike and the associated accessories. We are also going to be doing some camping and need a tent, pads, and sleeping bags. There are a few improvements/replacements we would like to make on the orchard and at the apartment in the city. The last spending category that will increase is giving/charity. I feel like we haven't had the opportunity to deploy these dollars much in 2020, and know there will be opportunities here to make a bigger impact thanks to geo arbitrage.

Even with all of this, estimating spending for 2020 to come in around $12k individually, barring any unforeseen major expenses/emergencies. For comparison a 3% WR using March 23rd trough portfolio value would be $15k.

[plantingtheseed]

Great photos!

[2Birds1Stone]

Testing out the image app/site.

Here are our "new" bicycles. Scored for $25 each.

I also settled on a bluetooth speaker! This thing packs a punch for such a small size, and 15 hour battery.

I signed up for a free 3 month trial of Spotify Premium. I used Pandora for 5+ years in the states, but it doesn't work here in Poland.

[take2]

If those asshats over at MMM hadn't banned me, I would have loved to check out your journal. Can't fight the borg.

I feel like this is a good story. Why did you get banned?

[classical_Liberal]

Nice bikes!

I've been wanting to upgrade mine, but you literally can not find them in the states right now. Even new, they are sold out everywhere.

[2Birds1Stone]

@frugalchicos, it's a cool place for sure. We've moved to the apartment on Thursday afternoon and have been here since. Had a lot of errands to run in the city and family to see in the more central area. Now that we have done laundry, settled in a bit more, we will be splitting our time between the apartment and the orchard, depending primarily on weather and extracurricular activities. It's a 25 minute bike ride between the two (maybe longer with SO who is new to biking, and faster solo on a better bike). I think it's just a matter of high margins, in the USA tons upon tons of perfectly good food goes to waste, both from stores not selling it, to consumers buying and not eating it before it "spoils". Hunger is a cultural/social problem these days, not a resource problem.

@plantingtheseed, are you considering eastern Europe?

@Bigato, thank you! I will have to play around with it more. I was trying to bulk upload/post pictures from my cell. If I have more time and I'm on a computer it's easier to wrap each link with the correct "code" to get the full size image. I did the previous way to test out what it looked like, and it turned out it was just thumbnails as the default.

@ffj, I am on the moderator shitlist over there too, and have been threatened with bans several times. They are a bunch of hyper sensitive snowflakes over there, anything other than ultra left posts on many topics will be reported and subsequently warned/commented on in red by the mod team. I all but stopped posting there besides the journal section.

Thanks, c_L. These are perfect for just getting around the city. They are not super comfortable for rides longer than an hour, but right on the money for what we need here. Mine has a short seatpost that can't go high enough to make my pedaling efficient/good for my knees. I looked at the store today and a new seat/post would cost as much as I spend on the damn bike in the first place 0_o

Musings

Today we got back into the gym! Got a free 24 hour trial pass, which we will use again REALLY early tomorrow morning to get two lifts in within the 24 hour period. Nice gym, very clean, huge with everything someone could want. Very little people in the morning, which is perfect due to Covid. I REALLY missed lifting, as it's been 112 days since my last lift.

Saw a lot of my cousins and friends over the past 4 days. Partied hard on Friday, until the sun was back up in the sky Saturday morning, after which the rest of the day was pretty shot. Spent some quality time with both of my grandparents, and still have a few friends/cousins to see before we can go off and do our own thing in the next few weeks.

My parents were planning on coming to Poland this summer as well, but right now the EU is trying to keep people from America out. We will see if it happens, kind of enjoying having the place to ourselves =D

Tomorrow or Wednesday we will do our monthly wrap up post. Spending was in line with expectations, and investments took a dive due to market underperformance.

[plantingtheseed]

are you considering eastern Europe?

.. Yes, I'm watching your journal with interest for some of these reasons. More for climate and cost of living than bars though.

[2Birds1Stone]

..

[classical_Liberal]

Combined Spending
Trailing Twelve Months - $24,624 (-$1,200!)
Individually @ $13,463

Still spending more than your wife! Get with the program 2B1S!!!!

Awesome financial numbers!