Hey RFS, thanks for the nudge to write an update.
TLDR, it's all going pretty good!
THE MOVE
We moved to this area after we found ourselves driving up from Chicago all the time and really loving it. Well, that coupled with the fact that Chicago just wasn’t clicking.
Living in the city was loud and stressful, but without the accompanying energy and vibrancy I felt while living and working in NYC. It was just flatter, more homogeneous demographically, and less interesting overall. Other than the awesome pickup basketball games I played in (and one fantastic ERE meetup
) I didn’t like the city.
Please take all that with a massive grain of salt. If you read up a few posts you’ll find the dark ramblings of a very depressed person. Depressed people can make even the best situations sound awful. So I don’t know how much of my bad experience was Chi just being a bad fit and how much I was just looking at things through sh*t-colored glasses. Probably much more of the latter.
THE JOB
I think I’ve talked about this before, but holy moly did cutting my income by 50k per year when I switched jobs affect me psychologically. I thought I was ready to take a stand against the man and do something that wasn’t as soul sucking as selling ads, but I wasn't. I got depressed and yearned for my old gig, which was gone forever. I should have figured this might happen, but hey, live and learn I guess.
I enjoyed this thread
this thread , which discusses some of the pros and cons of sprinting to FI. I think I am mostly wired to sprint. I am much more of a sprinter athletically as well, as opposed to a distance athlete. I wonder if those proclivities are correlated at all.
I now have a fully remote job that is going pretty well. I got a raise recently, and I'm currently making 65k plus full benefits. I love the flexibility, and the fact that my dollars go so much farther out where I live now, but there are definitely still times when I question my decision to leave my more lucrative career. Major first world problems over here.
THE HOUSE
We bought a 1900 sq ft 3bed 2bath house in a quiet subdivision, very well maintained, for $245K. We put 60k down and took out a 30 year mortgage at a 4.25% interest rate. I went back and forth on whether to do a 15 or 30 year for a while, and got very stressed out about it.
I ultimately went with the 30 year mostly because I went down some MMM forum rabbit holes with people who are convinced it’s the better choice given my interest rate and investment strategy.
I’m already feeling a little uneasy about it.
On the one hand, there’s this part of me that’s like “damn, all I have to do is come up with $850 (+property taxes and utilities, but whatever) a month and I get this sweet house? Not bad!”
And there’s another part that hates debt with the burning fire of a thousand suns, and wants to pay this thing off as fast as possible.
We aren't saving as much money cause we're buying a bunch of house stuff, but that will settle down soon (I hope.) We are at about a 40k net worth with house debt factored in, and we're still investing in Tyler's Golden Butterfly.
THE AREA
Going from multiple big cities to a 50k person city has been a surprisingly easy transition. There is a great library, several lovely coffee shops, and even a really cool art museum. I have a good friend nearby, which is HUGE.
THE MENTAL HEALTH
On the up and up. Partly because of…
THE COMMITMENT
My goal is to be less like my usual neurotic jewish self and more like Wendell Berry, or at least how he comes off in this New Yorker interview.
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-n ... dell-berry
One of the most significant themes of your recent work is debunking the myth of freedom—correcting the idea that limitless choice and limitless options make us happy.
Yes.
It’s nothing we haven’t all heard before, but for some reason it really resonated with stuff I’ve been thinking about lately. When is it okay to accept that I’ve got a pretty good life? When am I going to stop thinking “I could have had X career, I could have married Y person, I could live in Z city, and everything would have been so awesome!”
I think a big part of my struggle, as pathetic as it probably sounds to people who don’t care about sports, is that I got to a very high level in basketball. I was a stud in my hometown, a sort of stud in college, and a non-stud playing overseas but the few stud moments I had felt incredibly, intoxicatingly good.
I haven’t found something that can replace those highs. And I think I change jobs and geographical areas so much because it gives me that burst of excitement that I so crave.
Then I start my new job, or I start living in my new place, and I find that none of it was a panacea. Then I decide it was actually so much better back where I was. Why didn’t I just stick with that?
Rinse and repeat.
What I’ve been thinking more about lately is the fact that part of the reason I liked basketball so much was that I was so committed to it. I chose something I was good at, I worked very hard at it, and I didn’t give up when times got tough. I pushed through tons of obstacles and always came out stronger. The mere fact that I was so committed made me so much better, and happier. This can get toxic if you try to hold on too long. But the core idea of picking something at a young age and seeing what would happen if I just committed to it was a good one, at least for me.
So while I’m not quite ready to commit to my current job with that same basketball zeal, I am with regards to my wife and my house. My wife and I have a very good relationship, to be clear. I just still, even two years in, can get in my head wondering if there might be someone even more perfect out there. It’s absurd. I feel so much better when I am just enjoying her company in the moment.
Barring some black swan, I want to stay at my place at least five years. I want to do some things in the community. I want to use the energy I normally burn ruminating towards making my current situation as good as it can be. I want to be
Suo, basically.