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JUNE 2018
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JUNE SPENDING: $716
- Bought a pen for $260 (one I’ve wanted for a long time and that is hard to find)
- 6 months of van insurance: $189
- Food spending is pretty low because mom is buying most of the food while I work on her van.
CHARTS
YTD savings rate is up to 51%. WOO HOOOO.
VAN FOR MOM
It’s coming along. I have a lot of the main design decisions made and and now I’m getting on to building the stuff inside. It’s kind of slow going because nothing is straight, even, or square inside the van so I’ll be making all kinds of custom wood pieces.
You can see the progress here:
https://www.instagram.com/stories/highl ... 066174684/
SOCIAL/~LOVE
I’ve made a couple friends and have a lover with a big ol’ booty. The lover can be annoying when we’re not having sex, so I may look for a replacement.
FITNESS
Going well. I joined a gym and started bulking again. I’m looking and feeling pretty damn good. This second bulking and cutting cycle may get me as big as I want - about 160# when really lean. With my small bone frame, that’s pretty big and strong, looks really good, but doesn’t require a huge amount of maintenance calories.
PROPERTY SEARCHING
I’ve been looking at cities in Arizona lately (mainly in Phoenix and Tucson) since my brother and mom are moving there. Sometimes I also look at Wichita and Topeka. The later two are very cheap and are a good way to compare how expensive other places really are. Houses in Phoenix cost about three times as much as Wichita. And for big cities, Phoenix is fairly cheap.
A big challenge so far with this location analysis is that every place has something big wrong with it. Phoenix is hot in the summer, too expensive, and too dry for a good garden. Wichita is too conservative and square. Portland/Seattle are too grey and crazy expensive. It seems that for the set of characteristics I desire, there will be no “having it all”. So I’ll need to prioritize more.
I still need to do some thinking about whether I want a (relatively) short-term home or a long term one, and whether I want a fixer-upper or not.
In general, I would like to do a good job of optimizing this in at least some ways. Like one or some of these:
- Really inexpensive
- I make money on it when I sell it
- Rent out part of the property while I live there
- It being particularly good for some other kinds of hobby income generation
I did find and get pretty excited about
this property in Topeka . It’s really just a workshop, with half of the building sort of converted into a home, on nearly 3 acres, IN THE CITY. The list price got down to $45k and it sold in May for $36k. I’m not entirely sure whether I’d consider the living quarters good enough, but in general it looks like a property I’d like a lot. (small home, workshop, plenty of land, in a city, cheap). I’d like to find more properties like this. It’s time consuming looking through tons of listings though.
If I want to live in a city, especially one like Phoenix or even one that’s more expensive, I’m thinking that I’d like to find a house on a big lot, build a small home on the back of the property for me to live in, and rent out the house. If the money works out well, I could get the same kind of income that I would’ve gotten as dividends if I’d left the money in stocks (or more), but I will have a home. I think I'll start researching the laws/building codes related to building the second home. If you know of any good references for this kind of thing, or you know about it yourself, please share.
Because I can take my time, I’d like to do this in a good way money-wise.