Re: m741's ERE Journal
Posted: Thu Jan 31, 2019 6:56 pm
January 2019
An interesting month - the first (and only, for now) month without working, traveling, or moving. It still ended up being pretty busy, picking up lots of different furniture on craigslist, and so on. But we've basically filled out the entire house and I don't anticipate any more furniture purchases, unless we do a "swap" and buy/trade something to replace something crappy we got initially got. We're also stocked up with a lot of Costco bulk food, spices, toiletries, etc. The house is very cozy now and I'd estimate that we spent a total of about $10,000 on the move, the only expensive purchases of which were the car ($5500), mattress ($250), and sofa ($700).
Finance
I now have two consecutive months of actual net worth (rather than interpolations). With the market recovery, I've seen my net worth increase by 4%. This is more than half the dip since July, and it's a relief. That said, more than the dip/gain, what is weirdest at this level of savings is that you don't really have "X amount" saved, since the market fluctuates so much. There's no baseline. Tiny changes also dwarf any kind of expenses or (most) income.
Although I have as clear a picture as possible of net worth, I'm not in a good position to understand my expenses right now. February I will be tracking all expenses, and hope to continue that for March and April at least. This should give me a baseline for "Seattle expenses". It's also an opportunity to trim out unnecessary expenses. My lack of understanding expenses makes me fundamentally nervous.
Probably the biggest thing of all, was that I sat down with my girlfriend and we had a very open, honest and productive discussion of finances. I'd put this off for so long, with lots of excuses both valid and not, but now we're 100% of the same page. I really should have done this 2+ years ago, but she's fully up to speed on the FIRE community and everything.
Finally, I will begin work in mid-February. I'm both looking forward to it and dreading it. Maybe a little more of the latter.
Goals
I'll run through the goals I listed in my megapost, and my progress:
* I've spent 28 hours playing guitar, 8 hours more than necessary. This is with a goal of 200 hours per year.
* I created 6 "creative works," 4 less than my goal. More on this later.
* I studied Spanish for 35 hours, when my goal was 30. These hours were not nearly as structured as I'd like, but I feel like I have a good routine.
* I ran 29 miles, when my target was 40. I'm OK letting this lag a little, since I plan on running to/from work most days once I start working.
* Embarrassingly, I've done only 220 pushups from a goal of 1320. This is weird, because they're so quick to do, but I was able to procrastinate an awful lot.
* My weight is basically unchanged. I think my diet is getting healthier though, I've begun intermittent fasting (for a week now), I drink lots of water and I take vitamins. I'm going to slowly cut quantity of food eaten, but I expect to see progress catch up to my habits in February.
* I read 6 graphic novels when my target was 2. This is way ahead of the curve. I've actually read a lot more than this, since a few of the longer series I'm reading are almost complete.
* I watched 4 influential movies (Battleship Potemkin, Nosferatu, Duck Soup, Bicycle Thieves), when my goal was 5.
* I completed 3 video games (Sniper Elite 4, Brothers, Pyre) when my target was 1.5.
* I am ahead on my Kiva loans.
These are all my tracked goals. I think I will be altering a few of them. I realized that (A) I'm spreading myself too thin, and (B) I need to have concrete things to aspire to. To that end, I wrote out some of the things I'd like to do this year. These include: record a blues album (nothing fancy, but I'd like to have 5-8 songs recorded and mixed at the end of the year); write a (bad) novel (during NaNoWriMo); weigh 160 pounds; take and (hopefully) pass the DELE B2 exam for Spanish; run a 45 minute 10k; donate/loan/save various amounts of money; publish an Android app; complete 2x Ludum Dares (game hackathons). If at the end of the year I've done all that I'll be pretty proud of myself.
With this in mind, I will not be pushing myself on woodworking or the art stuff and cutting the "Creative Works" goal. Guitar (and programming) is my primary creative focus right now. Trying to get better at visual arts and woodworking basically triples the amount of disciplines I need to study.
Thoughts
With all this stuff going on, I've actually been very lazy. I'm a bit lethargic and unmotived many days though I sometimes power through. I asked in another thread about personal mission, something that becomes a noticeable void when you stop working. My fundamental problem is one of meaninglessness - I'm not driven to complete any particular project, and as a result my days don't feel urgent and I don't really want to do a whole lot. I'm still thinking about how to deal with this. I think it comes down to two things: first, I didn't have concrete goals. Now that I think about playing guitar in order to record an album, I have some motivation. I'm happy with my goals for guitar, Spanish, weight, NaNoWriMo, Android and my financial goals. I've had these formulated for 2 weeks to a month. But I've been blocked by the next step, which is that I'm *so far* from accomplishing my goals. I'm plunking away at guitar, but don't have a clear map to follow; the same goes for basically every goal except for NaNoWriMo and the financial goals. I don't have a clear picture of what to study for Spanish; I don't know how to publish an Android app; and I haven't made progress on my weight. So immediately in the next 2-3 days I *need* to figure out what the next few months look like.
That's about it. I won't list out monthly goals for February since I haven't figured them out (beyond those generated automatically, like the bullets above).
An interesting month - the first (and only, for now) month without working, traveling, or moving. It still ended up being pretty busy, picking up lots of different furniture on craigslist, and so on. But we've basically filled out the entire house and I don't anticipate any more furniture purchases, unless we do a "swap" and buy/trade something to replace something crappy we got initially got. We're also stocked up with a lot of Costco bulk food, spices, toiletries, etc. The house is very cozy now and I'd estimate that we spent a total of about $10,000 on the move, the only expensive purchases of which were the car ($5500), mattress ($250), and sofa ($700).
Finance
I now have two consecutive months of actual net worth (rather than interpolations). With the market recovery, I've seen my net worth increase by 4%. This is more than half the dip since July, and it's a relief. That said, more than the dip/gain, what is weirdest at this level of savings is that you don't really have "X amount" saved, since the market fluctuates so much. There's no baseline. Tiny changes also dwarf any kind of expenses or (most) income.
Although I have as clear a picture as possible of net worth, I'm not in a good position to understand my expenses right now. February I will be tracking all expenses, and hope to continue that for March and April at least. This should give me a baseline for "Seattle expenses". It's also an opportunity to trim out unnecessary expenses. My lack of understanding expenses makes me fundamentally nervous.
Probably the biggest thing of all, was that I sat down with my girlfriend and we had a very open, honest and productive discussion of finances. I'd put this off for so long, with lots of excuses both valid and not, but now we're 100% of the same page. I really should have done this 2+ years ago, but she's fully up to speed on the FIRE community and everything.
Finally, I will begin work in mid-February. I'm both looking forward to it and dreading it. Maybe a little more of the latter.
Goals
I'll run through the goals I listed in my megapost, and my progress:
* I've spent 28 hours playing guitar, 8 hours more than necessary. This is with a goal of 200 hours per year.
* I created 6 "creative works," 4 less than my goal. More on this later.
* I studied Spanish for 35 hours, when my goal was 30. These hours were not nearly as structured as I'd like, but I feel like I have a good routine.
* I ran 29 miles, when my target was 40. I'm OK letting this lag a little, since I plan on running to/from work most days once I start working.
* Embarrassingly, I've done only 220 pushups from a goal of 1320. This is weird, because they're so quick to do, but I was able to procrastinate an awful lot.
* My weight is basically unchanged. I think my diet is getting healthier though, I've begun intermittent fasting (for a week now), I drink lots of water and I take vitamins. I'm going to slowly cut quantity of food eaten, but I expect to see progress catch up to my habits in February.
* I read 6 graphic novels when my target was 2. This is way ahead of the curve. I've actually read a lot more than this, since a few of the longer series I'm reading are almost complete.
* I watched 4 influential movies (Battleship Potemkin, Nosferatu, Duck Soup, Bicycle Thieves), when my goal was 5.
* I completed 3 video games (Sniper Elite 4, Brothers, Pyre) when my target was 1.5.
* I am ahead on my Kiva loans.
These are all my tracked goals. I think I will be altering a few of them. I realized that (A) I'm spreading myself too thin, and (B) I need to have concrete things to aspire to. To that end, I wrote out some of the things I'd like to do this year. These include: record a blues album (nothing fancy, but I'd like to have 5-8 songs recorded and mixed at the end of the year); write a (bad) novel (during NaNoWriMo); weigh 160 pounds; take and (hopefully) pass the DELE B2 exam for Spanish; run a 45 minute 10k; donate/loan/save various amounts of money; publish an Android app; complete 2x Ludum Dares (game hackathons). If at the end of the year I've done all that I'll be pretty proud of myself.
With this in mind, I will not be pushing myself on woodworking or the art stuff and cutting the "Creative Works" goal. Guitar (and programming) is my primary creative focus right now. Trying to get better at visual arts and woodworking basically triples the amount of disciplines I need to study.
Thoughts
With all this stuff going on, I've actually been very lazy. I'm a bit lethargic and unmotived many days though I sometimes power through. I asked in another thread about personal mission, something that becomes a noticeable void when you stop working. My fundamental problem is one of meaninglessness - I'm not driven to complete any particular project, and as a result my days don't feel urgent and I don't really want to do a whole lot. I'm still thinking about how to deal with this. I think it comes down to two things: first, I didn't have concrete goals. Now that I think about playing guitar in order to record an album, I have some motivation. I'm happy with my goals for guitar, Spanish, weight, NaNoWriMo, Android and my financial goals. I've had these formulated for 2 weeks to a month. But I've been blocked by the next step, which is that I'm *so far* from accomplishing my goals. I'm plunking away at guitar, but don't have a clear map to follow; the same goes for basically every goal except for NaNoWriMo and the financial goals. I don't have a clear picture of what to study for Spanish; I don't know how to publish an Android app; and I haven't made progress on my weight. So immediately in the next 2-3 days I *need* to figure out what the next few months look like.
That's about it. I won't list out monthly goals for February since I haven't figured them out (beyond those generated automatically, like the bullets above).