Lurker's journal

[Demosthenes]

Slog's journal inspired me to finally come out of my lurking state with the quote

So many of the forum threads engage the same names that the whole environment seems intimate. Shoving myself into the conversations without providing more background feels like walking into a strangers house and trying to chat them up about the weather.

I've been reading forums, Jacob's posts and much more for the last year while redefining my life. I always knew I was different than other people/parents and friends but I never had a label to put on it. My whole family spends every dollar they get their hands on and make fun of me for holding on to it. At first I thought it was because there was nothing worth buying, but slowly realized that spending money is like releasing all of your potential energy. Spending money on something now means I have fewer choices in the future.

A bit about me:
Mid 20s male living in Ontario. Engaged (soon to be married) with my live in fiance of 4 years. Avid home brewer. Software developer. I own my house with 75% of the mortgage paid. Have ~25,000 in savings. No debt other than mortgage.

I'm definitely off to a good start from a net worth standpoint but it still feels like I'm crawling along from an ERE standpoint. Every time I run the FI numbers it comes to about 10 years to FIRE. Fiance really enjoys living in the house so moving is out of the question. I have been trying to get the utilities down over the last year with some success but compared to some of your numbers I feel like I'm living in a pretty high cost area.

Here is a standard utilities month:
Hydro (electricity)
$156.08
Water
$139.49 (bi monthly)
Internet
$56.44
Gas
$96.14
Property taxes
$1400 (bi yearly)

Which adds up to ~$611 a month. That seems crazy to me considering this doesn't even include mortgage (quite small in comparison). I have gotten the electricity bill down to 90 dollars before but recently acquired a room mate who brought it back up to ~150.

My inspiration for financial independence right now is that I want to bring up my own kids. Fiance and I have it in the plans in the shorter rather than longer term future (4 years or so). That's a pretty short time frame to get enough equity up for FI, but I figure I could at least get a decent nest egg up while I'm being a stay at home dad. Work is okay (not my motivation for ERE), but pays fairly well considering it's my first job out of university.

I'm not sure if I want to share more financials here, but it would be nice to get critiquing eyes scanning over my purchases. Sometimes the only way to fix thins is to show others your dirty laundry. My current savings rate 60-70% depending on the month so there isn't too much room for improvement.

TL;DR: Happy to be here and finally start giving back! (are journals really giving back, or is it more self serving?).

PS. I really appreciate how dedicated some of the other journal writers are here. I draw a lot of inspiration from C40, Pedal to petal, ffj, etc.

[Demosthenes]

Since finding ERE, I have learned how to:
* Invest in the stock market https://www.amazon.ca/Intelligent-Asset ... 0071362363
* Make bread http://fivegallonideas.com/bread
* Make lentil soup http://earlyretirementextreme.com/cooki ... han-4.html
* Make wine and moonshine
* Make toothpaste http://wellnessmama.com/2500/remineralizing-toothpaste/
* Cut my own hair ($60 a year savings)
* Bike through the winter ($300 a year savings)
* Top up engine oil in car ($60 a year savings)
* Use https://www.freecycle.org/
* Spend my monthly 5% allocated fun money on risky investments instead of bars and alcohol.
* Just say no to going out to dinner
* Eat cheaply at a restaurant when forced to go
* Make every single lunch rather than buying out
* Fix dryers
* Fix canoes
* Properly grease bike parts

To learn:
* Make dishwasher detergent
* Make washing machine detergent
* Make soap
* Change car oil
* Replace break pads
* Woodworking
* ETF investments (almost there)
* Build up more social capital viewtopic.php?f=9&t=6863&hilit=pedal&start=25#p110409
* Find a butcher / get cheaper meat
* Render lard/tallow

[Demosthenes]

Jacob's book describes the ideal of the renaissance man as someone who is a master "do it yourself"er to such a degree that they can generate enough income off of their skills that they don't need an employer. This sounds great to anyone seeking ERE since it makes the graduation between paid income and retirement a gradual curve rather than a sudden and irreversible change in their life.

As Jacob says, a sudden and massive change in your life is sometimes the ONLY way to change. If you want to lose weight don't just go for a run once a week, run every day as hard as you can until you can't breath. But the irreversible nature of quitting a career is what spooks everyone away from what could be the best change to your life. I see so many people who could be FI on these forums but choose not to since the job "isn't so bad right now" or "I want a really big buffer". Maybe having a small buffer or no buffer at all will give you enough of a kick in the ass to actually learn something useful and to stop being so specialized.

Anyway that's not the point of this post. What I'm concerned about is the barrier to entry of generating income off of a wide skill set. Sure you could make a website and generate passive ad income but then Amazon or Google is really more of your employer. If they decide to change the way their ad revenue works or how their search software finds your site then you are screwed. What I'm thinking of is controllable and discrete bursts of revenue if and when needed.

Bringing in an example from my skill set: what I would really like is to spend a week or so brewing beer to bolster up the finances one month. Or alternatively, brew for a full month so the rest of the year could be taken off. The big problem with this example specifically is how the laws of my province work. If I want to sell beer I have to have a commercially zoned brewing area that meets a certain code as well as paying ~4000 dollars a year so I don't get thrown in jail. Really brewing beer is no more dangerous than selling vegetables in your spare time (there are problems doing that in my province as well).

Choosing a specific skill set not based on demand but what is legal and has a low barrier to entry seems odd to me. Although this isn't the logic Jacob used I believe (I can't imagine learning about kernels in operating systems would be terribly interesting if there wasn't a reason)

[Demosthenes]

I found this forum indirectly though a local home brewing community called Members of Barleyment. Right when I started brewing I heard of them through word of mouth and joined immediately. They use a pretty low tech email list in order to keep in touch with the ~600 members, but the volume of messages is incredible. The email list is incredibly intimate as everyone knows each other's names and we all post details of our life. It has been a big motivator for me to be more involved in community and has inspired many changes in my life.


I used to be a massive gamer when I was a child. I never got any exercise and my only drive in life was to play games. I joined sports in high school and lost 50 pounds, but I never really felt any community with the sports teams. University kept me so busy that I never really noticed I had little to no meaning in my life. I still gamed a lot and somehow squeezed meaning out of beating every song on guitar hero on expert. When I graduated my masters degree I spent an entire week watching others play video games on Youtube. What a waste of life.

Learning how to brew beer turned everything around for me. Not only is there an incredible amount to learn, but I also had a community that could help me every step of the way. They all love the craft as much as I do and speak about it in such an inspired way. It's kind of like a religion: people with a common goal get together to form a community. They stick together because of their common interest, but they also share everything else in their life with the other members. I think what keeps the MoB together isn't necessarily all the beer talk but instead how well we know each other and all of our off topic conversations about anything (mostly cyclists and dehydrators).

[jacob]

An alternative would be to try to work out some kind of part-time/consulting deal as an employee/volunteer, where the hassle-barrier-of-entry might be lower. Unfortunately, running your own businesses seems to have the biggest non-compete moat of all forms of work. (Alcohol being so profitable to the state has one of the biggest moats possible.)

[vexed87]

I see my renaissance man skill set as a form of resilience rather than just as another form of income, at least in the present. I am able to trade my skills for other forms of capital than hard cash, however, this is harder to manage when I dedicate my will power and energy to earning a salary to accumulate financial capital, I do this because it is the easiest route to FI. While these skills don't necessarily earn me money, they do still save me money! It still makes sense to earn more in a full time job and use comparative advantage to buy the products I need from the industrial machine, this may not always be the case. Regardless, the day that I can make a living from these skills will come when I don't choose to work, or am no longer able to earn more from a salaried position than I can from other income streams (not yet FI).

I don't know what your opinions are about our future prospects as an industrial society, but if you believe that our best days are behind us (dwindling natural resources, stagnating economic growth, upper limits to energy production and collapsing ecosystems) then those skills will eventually increase in value, right about the same time the state's dwindling resource base starts to erode its ability to enforce all but the most important of moats.

Of course, you could just ignore moats in the present... at your own peril of course , they are not all easily enforceable, or the penalties of doing so are too trivial to worry about. Most people who are extremely wealthy these days have found these loopholes, or are exploiting the lack enforcement. Of course, usually these come at a cost to society, so operate within your own moral framework so not to lose any sleep.

[Demosthenes]

Thanks for all the replies, had no idea everyone has also been contemplating the implementation of the Renaissance man as well. To be fair, there are a couple laws and barriers of entry that hinder a Renaissance Man, but part of his definition is creativity and taking advantage of his surroundings. I have previously worked as a landscaper/ horticulturist by just asking around to a bunch of neighbours for a summer job. This is the perfect seasonal type of work that could bolster your finances in the event of a bad year.

Alternatively, the provincial government outlaws all sales of alcohol, but selling myself as a service for teaching people how to brew is an option. I could also brew wort (sugary grain water that is one ingredient away from beer) and sell this to people. I don't believe there would be any problem with this.

Uber is also getting pretty big in my town, and there is a fairly low barrier to entry for this service as well.

I figure anyone who is crafty or intelligent enough could get through some rough financial times with a bit of hard work. Although this is just speculation as I have only ever had a "career" and some summer jobs. I've never been on contract or my own boss etc which is a lot of life experience I'm missing.

[Demosthenes]

Okay so why am I here: I want to retire eventually
When do I want to retire: When I'm financially independent + buffer
When do I want to stop working: When I have kids

There is a bit of a problem here as you can see.

Scenario one: Quit job to have kids, restart career after they are 6-8 years old.

This assumes that I can get an equivalent paying job after they are 6-8 which is unlikely, but lets just follow this plan


Okay this is fine. I'll be retired by 41 (30 years of living expenses) and I get a pretty sweet break from work for a while. But this assumes a couple things as you can see:
1) My wife will be tirelessly working full time for the duration
2) Our living expenses will never go up despite having kids
3) I will be able to get the same paying job once i come back to work
4) The stock market is always awesome.

Scenario two: The world sucks when I'm trying to follow the above plan

So 0.04 interest rate (even this might be optimistic over the time span) and I can't find work after kids

(and so on, the chart is pretty long)

Yikes. I don't retire till I'm 66 (a 25 year difference). So I'm going to have to weigh the pros and cons of raising my own kids with the risk of delaying my retirement approximately 25 years if things go bad.

Both of these scenarios don't factor in any child type expenses as I have no idea what these will be like. Luckily I'm not the only EREer to do this however. Pedal to petal says:

The fact that I can be home indefinitely has really really made things simple for us, we will never have to spend a dime on daycare, although the other new parents we know have had to put their babys on waiting lists already for a chance at having an open spot for when their children are 12 months old and they both will be working again. Then they will pay $1200 a month for the privilege of having someone else raise their kid. Honestly I don't know how anyone can afford to have kids in Vancouver unless one of the parents is at home. ERE makes it a breeze - seriously how can people say "you can never afford kids if you retire early!" Total bullshit.

Anyway, I'm going to hope for "Scenario one" to be realistic and set my retirement goal for 2028!

Charts to come

[Demosthenes]

This has probably been the craziest month that we will have (my fiance and I). We paid for half the cost of the venue for our wedding, our bi yearly property taxes, and our yearly house insurance. Additionally, over the last two months, we have acquired a handsome sum of early wedding presents from friends and family. Somehow we came out ahead as you can see from my first chart!!!



I decided to state my savings as my net worth (includes the house) since it truly is much easier due to the line of credit. Each month DF and I get our monthly salary dumped in there and it's so easy to just leave it. In response we get a guaranteed 3% rate of return compounded each month (our mortgage/LOC interest rate) and I get to do more research on what I want to invest in before actually having to invest. Once our mortgage is paid up (or at least once the main LOC account balance of 45,000 is paid off) I will start investing more heavily in the stock market. Having a positive balance on the LOC only has a 1% rate of return which sucks the big one.



My monthly expenses paint an interesting wild ride of a roller coaster. It certainly feels like one. It will all level out in a couple months. Im expecting to get 0.16 life expenses net a month and it appears that goal is being reached here at least.

[Demosthenes]

As my time of with living with room mates comes to a close, I figure it's time for a bit of reflection.

Living with room mates when you break it's purpose down is exchanging your comfort for money.

Sure you could argue you are more comfortable living with people but when it's not your significant other or blood relatives, the relationship is a bit different. I love living with people for variety and conversation, but these things are really just a bonus on top of the monetary side of the equation. The comfort side of the equation is really what gives people pause when debating the option. If anyone has strange sleeping habits, different choice in music, differences in their work/school schedule etc, it becomes a burden on you. If your cleaning threshold differs from your room mates, you will have a problem. If you have problems communicating or are too confrontational, you will have a problem. It's hard to enumerate all of the sacrifices you take when you have room mates, but the point is that there are always trade offs.

The other side of things is the monetary benefit. Here is where things really turn around. Sure you could be less than comfortable in your living situation, but this comfort has incredible value. I have been saving ~1500 dollars a month for the last eight years by living with room mates. That's approximately $144,000 or $18,000 a year. When you weigh this side of this equation it seems like a no brainer from an ERE standpoint. That's basically a Jacobian savings level.

I've been slowly dropping room mates off from 4 to 1 now due to the wedding coming up and DW staking her claim of the household (she deserves it). But despite all of my friends choosing to live alone much before myself, I am so glad that I stuck through the comfort detriment to put myself way above the net worth level I could have ever expected at this point in my life.

The landlording life skill will never disappear either. I could confidently purchase another property and say that I could always find tenants. I've never had an empty room for more than a month over the 8 year period. That could just be luck but after such a long period of time the sample size must be reaching normal distribution.

I recently just lost my 2nd last room mate (my best friend) who was living here as a temporary job hunting hedge. Now that he has a job he's kicking out his existing subletter of his more expensive apartment and moving back in there. It's pretty sad to see him go, but considering he basically came as a two part package (him and his GF), there should be a considerable increase in comfort here.

In the next couple months my last room mate will be moving out and that will be it! What am I going to do with all this space? Five bedroom house with two people (living in the same room). It's going to be echoy here...

[Demosthenes]

It has been a fairly normal month from an expenses standpoint, here's the net worth status

And the monthly expenses report


In terms of life goals, it's been a bit hectic. I attempted to do my first oil change without success. I either misunderstood this diagram or my car wasn't designed to be jacked as high as my car stands require. The piece of metal there bent under the weight of the car.


I will be focusing more on life goals after the wedding, but for the moment it's really only wedding mode for me. I'll report a more detailed update starting in September.

[Demosthenes]

Ahhh getting married!
Okay now that that's out of my system. Here's my monthly update.

Spending (in yearly expenses)


Savings (in yearly expenses)


Expenses Vs Income


As you can see from the expenses breakdown, most of our spending is currently on the wedding. This will all change soon and I can get a better grasp as to what normal spending looks like.

More after I spend a Jacob on the honeymoon...

[Demosthenes]

Wedding is over!
Phew what a month too. Six days of high stress and familial torture, followed by two weeks of traveling, followed by saying goodbye to our last room mate. We spent 15% of a Jacob this month, but also somehow managed to make 40% of a Jacob in a single month. Turns out guests at weddings can be incredibly generous!

Anyway, too much wedding talk, not enough charts!

Monthly Expenses (in yearly expenses)


Net Worth (in yearly expenses)


Monthly Net (in yearly expenses)


Since we got back from the honeymoon, I've been on a flurry of fixing stuff that I've been putting off for months. I fixed the car, my bike, my plants (they were dying), and soon to fix the chimney. I also just finished up a double batch of beer. Feels good to get back into my renaissance man boots again!

My tomatoes are going nuts, so I've been trying to figure out what to do with them all. I made some pseudo hot sauce today by blending a bunch of tomatoes with cayenne pepper spice. It definitely doesn't taste like hot sauce but its really the hot that I'm going after.

Also getting back into reading. DW and I read a full volume of Sherlock together on our down time during the honeymoon, and it really inspired me to keep the momentum going. Put a bunch of books on hold at the local library and got most of the way through french Harry Potter book 4 (something I've been meaning to do for years). Anyway, this all to say that I'm taking control of my life again instead of being a slave to the wedding chores.

I've been able to accomplish so much because I gave up watching youtube (another thing I should have done years ago). I just hope I can continue with this momentum, and get some real stuff done with my life! The big goal is to start working on my websites again and perhaps start thinking about making some passive income. I really have no idea how to monetize anything, but I'm a web developer by trade so this is something I should really figure out.

[Demosthenes]

I figured I would share my experience here about my recent bike tinkering.

I saved a bicycle last year from the brink of destruction from the bottom of my office building. It was in pieces, chain and tires on the floor, an inch of dust on it, etc. I put it all back together because I was curious, and to my surprise it actually moves! The tires hold pressure and the brakes even work. Now the problems:

• 1) None of the gears work. The rear shifter has been disconnected and the front derailleur appears to be frozen.
  2) Once I reconnect the rear shifter, it was also frozen into a fairly hard to pedal gear.
  3) There's a terrible noise coming from the rear brake.
  4) The seat keeps slipping down slowly, and I'm unable to tighten it
  5) There is a spoke missing in the rear tire.
  6) There are several aesthetic problems with it. The handlebars are fashioned out of duct tape, the rear bike rack is duct taped in place (and rattles against the seat post), the cable housing is split in several places and shows signs of rust.

So, I suppose going back in time, I'm not sure I would have taken on this project, but I really wanted a spare bike in case my current one is stolen or takes severe damage. Free is a price I understand well.

Problems I fixed first:

• I really wanted to have the ability to go up hills, so fixing either the front or rear derailleurs was my top priority. I first looked at the front, but it was so stuck that I gave up pretty quickly. The rear did indeed move, but I could tell it needed a new cable. I swapped it out, gave everything a good clean, sprayed WD40 everywhere, and got everything shifting pretty well. I also learned what a barrel adjuster was! Very useful.
  https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/File:Bicy ... juster.JPG
  
  Big problem here and still a persistent problem: two of the most useful gears are unusable. They skip like crazy, and it feels dangerous to pedal.
  
  While the rear gear shifter work was in progress, I took the opportunity to replace all of the shifter and brake cables. They were pretty rough, and cables came to ~$2
  
  I really wanted to fix the missing spoke, and I'm no stranger for replacement in this department. It didn't appear to be affecting the trueness of the wheel, but it will be a weak spot if I leave the wheel in it's current state. Upon inspection, the missing spoke is on the gear box side of the wheel. To replace the spoke, the gear box needs to be removed. I've done this before, but the wheel is of a different composition than I'm used to. I have a translator nut that allows you to use a wrench to remove the gear box, but it doesn't fit on this type of wheel. I'll need something like this to get it off
  

A year later
Wow, looking back on it, I felt like I put a lot of work into this bike in 2015, but I only fixed one of the 6 problems mentioned above. I only rode the bike occasionally and thus it wasn't necessary to fix most problems, but five problems makes the bike in pretty rough shape. I've spent the last two weeks really tackling this problem again though, as I think I'm going to use this bike as a winter bike. So here's my story:

• The first big thing I wanted to tackle was the front derailleur. I had been able to shift it slightly in the past to stop the chain scraping noise, but it appeared that it was so clogged and dirty that the spring action was entirely non functional. It took about an hour of continuous cleaning, oiling and forcing movement to get all the moving parts working freely again. I kept having to remove the derailleur off of the frame to apply oil and scrape at dirt, and screwing it back on to the frame so I had the leverage to move the parts again. It was really stiff.
  
  Now that damn scraping sound at the back. I'm not sure when this started, but when I first got the bike everything was working properly. Sometime during my spoke replacement attempt I think something shifted and then a constant scraping noise started to occur. One big thing about this bike that I'm not used to: it has disc brakes. It turns out that the rotor is scraping against the caliper (both of which are metal). At first glance it appeared to be an adjustment problem. Just adjust the distance between the brake pads and the rotor and everything will shift into place. But the problem persisted regardless of adjustments made.
  
  
  I eventually fixed the problem by adding washers between the rotor and the tire to artificially adjust the distance between the rotor and the caliper...
  
  I fixed the slipping seat height (I think) by oiling the crap out of it and unscrewing the whole thing a couple times.
  
  I'm in progress for fixing the aesthetic problems. The rear bike rack looks a lot better now, but it still rattles against my seat post.

All in all, I've spent about 12 hours working on this damn thing. If I were paid the same hourly wage to work on this as my job then I could afford a new one by now, but one of my life goals is to reduce waste, and learn as much as possible. It's hard work, but incredibly satisfying.

[vexed87]

Disc brakes really are a pain in the arse! I had a similar problem with an old mountain bike, and ended up stripping 3 of the screws that held the disc in place, so the wheel is now in eternal slumber in a junk box of bike parts. Maybe I'll dig it out and give it another go. I wonder what exactly causes this misalignment as the discs mount directly to the hub don't they? It always puzzled me.

I've read that sometimes the discs can be bent out of true, but in my case the disc was permanently rubbing rather than being intermittent which implies that it's partially out of true. That lead me to believe the brake itself wasn't mounted correctly, but nothing I tried resolved it, maybe you will have better luck repositioning the brake on the mount as one extra washer behind the disc is a bit of a botch job

Glad you got it sorted though.

[Demosthenes]

@vexed a patchy job for a patchy bike. I don't expect it to last throughout the winter due to the harsh conditions and all the salt we put on our roads. It's also 6 washers on each screw into the hub. It feels fairly secure.

I've also noticed as you mentioned that the rotor is indeed out of true. Not sure if it was all of my mucking around down there or the abuse of all that scraping while biking that did it. It's not out of true enough to cause problems though.

This experience has definitely taught me that disc brakes are NOT worth it... Too difficult to service.

[vexed87]

If you added a washer behind every bolt, maybe one or two of the bolts had worked loose and resulted in the misalignment, and subsequent retightening did the trick!

But yeah, I think they are too fiddly, even if you get them aligned properly, there's still the squealing to contend with

Un-truing is easy to do, particularly if you park your bike against others, bike racks are notorious for people bashing your bike about trying to get to their lock. Luckily the fix for that is simple enough:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHdQkm14JVw

[Demosthenes]

Monthly drop your pants time and show what you got.
Charts!

Monthly expense categories (in yearly expenses)

Monthly expenses vs income(in yearly expenses)

Net worth(in yearly expenses)


So this was a record in terms of expenses this month. It didn't even feel like it as we splurged on some remaining items from the registry, purchased some biking equipment etc. Paying off the principal of the line of credit has really cut our expenses to shreds. Our monthly interest payments are now less than 1% of our yearly expenses. Or probably better put, the interest on our house (if held constant) costs us less than 10% of our yearly expenses.

This will all unfortunately change soon however as I owe my parents one full years worth of expenses, which I intend on paying them in a couple weeks. At which point, I will only have one creditor which is my house mortgage (debtor?). It sucks being so close to paying off the house to have to jump way back up to where we were 6 months ago, but the man's gotta get paid I suppose.

Life goals of DIY and learning are going okay. I just repaired my chimney and I finished "How to stay alive in the woods" (good read would recommend). Making a TON of romesco sauce as many of my tomatoes are coming ripe:

• Fill a pan with tomatoes, garlic, stale bread, peppers, and a thin coat of oil
  Bake for 30 minutes at 375
  Food process
  Fill jars or serve over spaghetti, dipping sauce, on bruschetta etc.

I have made five 1L jars and two bottles of hot sauce so far this month of the stuff. It hasn't lasted unfortunately as I've been putting it on everything. Perhaps next year when I ramp up my square footage of garden area I can start preserving it for later.

It's tasks like these that I realize my renaissance man skills are starting to synergize to provide entirely free (or highly subsidized) sustenance. I have been making bread myself for well over a year now. I have been tending to my garden of tomatoes and peppers. Socializing with my neighbours has provided me with garlic (and beer). Learning how to cook plus all the above has provided with a healthy, tasty, and nearly free sauce that has added life and flavour to every meal for the last month.

[anomie]

Hi Lurker!

You mention you and SO reading Sherlock. If you and co are of the gaming ilk, you may consider the fun narrative driven game Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective (1981) if you can find a copy. May be out of print..

It is a cool cooperative narrative adventure. Case props from each case build into the next.. clues from the newpapers provided can apply into the future.

anyhow, good luck in your quest.

[Demosthenes]

Thanks anomie, I'll probably take you up on that as a gift for DW. She loves the board game Scotland Yard so this sounds like the perfect gift!

Now, something that's been mulling around in my head for the last couple days:

ERE Hard-Mode

Got this idea originally from here: http://forum.earlyretirementextreme.com ... php?t=6993
where it really struck me that Arbo finishes his low income post with:

I still do believe ERE is genius, no hate upon it, but I think it may be more applicable to higher income people -- But I respect the non-conformist and out of the box approach that this forum/community/Jacob have, so who knows, maybe ERE can somehow take very low income situations and make it from a 'loss' to a 'win'

This idea that you cannot achieve FI despite low income wasn't stated anywhere in Jacob's book, and wasn't mentioned anywhere in the forums. Back a year ago this intrigued me and I read Arbo's posts religiously inspired by his tenacity in pursuing ERE despite his circumstances. As I read, I realized he is hardly a role model, but Jacob's post in response has stuck with me to this day:

High-income just means playing the game on easy-mode. Someone making $50k or $100k or $150k or worse get to screw up much more than someone making less without adverse consequences. However, that doesn't mean that ERE is impossible for someone making $10k or $15k or $20k. In particular, it means that anyone who makes six-figures could FIRE in two years if they acquired some hard skills. Main thing I've never done (since starting ERE anyway) is unproductive addictions or destructive problems and detours ... but avoiding such is part of the ERE-strategy. If you're playing the ERE-game on hard-mode, you can't win by running around and shooting yourself in the foot. You have to be good.

This idea that ERE is a game, and you can set your difficulty is important to me. Although Arbo's situation isn't similar to mine as our household income is > 100,000, it still pertains to a big persistent problem with my ERE strategy:

My base cannot-be-changed level of expenses.

The ERE dogma is 1) Move 2) Get rid of your car.
I can't do this.

The problem is... I CAN do this. There really is nothing stopping me. Tomorrow, I could call up a real estate agent, and throw my car on Craigslist and be done with it. But the problem is that this doesn't fit in to my core values. After reading YMOYL, I formulated these as:

1) Reduce waste
2) Live a healthy life
3) Be involved in the community

At first glance, moving and getting rid of the car fit right into these values. Mainly, since reduce waste is #1 on the list, getting rid of the car should be the first thing I should do. But after 6 months of soul searching, I realized that my core values are incorrect. They REALLY are:

1) Maintain a healthy family life
2) Reduce waste
Etc...

If my core values are to maintain a healthy family life, then it's my duty to make DW as happy as possible. She has voiced her concerns many times subtly or otherwise that 1) Selling the house to move to a low COL area isn't an option. 2) The car is useful for visiting family and taking trips into the wilderness. DW does keep me grounded when I have crazy ideas like FIREing, but perhaps that's a good thing. Why do I value FIREing so much? How does that fit into my core values?

I realized, my core values right now aren't being fulfilled. Item #4 on the list of being involved in the community isn't even being sought after at the moment. It leaves a whole in me. And that's what I realized is the reason I want to be financially independent. There are of course other more selfish reasons like being able to take the day off to fix a leaky sink, but #4 is the main one. My main reason (potentially erreneous) for this is because I don't have time. I would like to participate in community forums, community events, volunteer, and most of all make a community based forum that focuses on foraging. I don't have time to do these things because I'm working. Simple as that.

So. If I can't speed up my retirement to accomplish goal #4 because #1 comes first, where does that leave me? It puts me smack in the ERE-hard mode.

Game on.