Hristo's FI Journal

[Hristo Botev]

I think the new plan is going to be to save up about $200K over the next 3 or so years, about half of which we will probably put into 3-year CDs, for the purpose of covering the kids' education costs from 2021 to 2031, when the youngest graduates high school (college is already being saved for). That way, we'll have taken care of what will be by far our biggest expense for the next 10 years. And if we want to consider pivoting away from full-time, salaried employment in 4-5 years or so, we won't have to worry about how we'll cover the kids' educations.

So, for the time being, no Airstream, and no rural land.

[horsewoman]

I thought of you when I saw this article
https://www.frugalwoods.com/2020/07/06/ ... -consider/

[Hristo Botev]

I thought of you when I saw this article
https://www.frugalwoods.com/2020/07/06/ ... -consider/

Ha! I'd seen that as well: viewtopic.php?f=14&t=11521&p=223224&hil ... ds#p223224

[Hristo Botev]

An update, prompted by a post in another forum from Jacob.

Reading list:

- Eggers, The Circle (just finished)
- Emerson, Self-Reliance (just finished)
- Fisker, Early Retirement Extreme (just finished; re-read)
- Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow (currently reading)
- Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning (currently reading; personal accounts of the Holocaust remind me to be grateful)
- Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces (currently reading; been on the to-read list for a long time)
- Greer, The Long Descent (currently reading)
- Accounting and Finance for Lawyers [i.e., Dummies]
- Tim Soerens, Everywhere You Look: Discovering the Church Right Where You Are (book club selection)
- Nakamoto, Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System
- Heinlein, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
- Larson, The Splendid and the Vile
- Galbraith, The Great Crash 1929
- Graham, The Intelligent Investor
- Slavin, One Million in the Bank

Also, very excited that I'm bottling beer tomorrow from my first attempt at home brewing.

[Hristo Botev]

Yesterday, we cleaned the house (best silver lining of COVID, we've gotten used to not paying for a house cleaner), and I got the family's laundry done. I bottled my very first batch of homebrew (a West-coast IPA); still have 2 more weeks to wait as it bottle conditions. I finished reading Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning, which I wish I'd read earlier in life; probably should be required reading for high schoolers. After Mass we had a neighborhood birthday party, and then DW and I watched about half of The Godfather (DW's first time watching it).

Today, I watched some Championship League soccer while reading Greer's Long Descent, and then I spent about an hour cleaning the labels off of old beer bottles to reuse for the homebrew hobby (next batch will be a high ABV Scottish Ale; DW's favorite). Then I took an old metal trash can the prior owner left and turned it into a back patio compost bin; hopefully that will reduce our trash output (we get taxed on trash bags here, which I think is a great policy--naturally, as a conservative I love a consumption tax--but it can get expensive if you get lazy). I shaved my head (and face) for the first time using Dr. Bronner's soap, which worked better than I'd thought, and better than even my Barbasol shaving cream. I'm looking forward to the idea of replacing as many household soaps and cleaners with Bronner's; it makes sense. The kids have spent almost the entire day running around the neighborhood playing with the neighbors--the difference in terms of time commitment on DW and me of managing the kids now vs. a couple years ago is night and day. Tonight it's fajitas on the grill and probably a family Wiffle Ball (r) game; and hopefully DW and I will finish The Godfather.

I'm definitely still enjoying having mostly quiet, activity-free weekends.

[AxelHeyst]

Sounds like a relaxing *and* productive Sunday, nice! I've found coconut oil to be an excellent "shaving cream" if you find you're getting any irritation. Ideally mixed with shea butter, but even coconut oil by itself will do in a pinch. That stuff is fantastic for all sorts of uses around the house.

[horsewoman]

Regarding the kids laundry - it really helps to get them involved permanently. My daughter changes outfits 3 times a day, and throws everything on the floor. When she was ordered to clean up, everything got thrown into the laundry hamper for me to deal with it.
A few months ago I started the habit of having her doing all the laundry on her floor directly, start to finish (washing, hanging up, putting it away).
I still need to direct/nag her when to do each step, but the mess has decreased considerably. It seems to have occurred to her that that putting back clean-ish clothes is significantly less work than doing laundry

[Hristo Botev]

Regarding the kids laundry -

As with any chores with elementary-school age kids, it's a balancing act between wanting (a) to make sure the kids learn responsibility, and to not spoil them; (b) to actually get some help; and (c) to actually get the work done, and not have to spend more time playing supervisor than it would take for you to just do the work yourself. That said, the kids currently are responsible for bringing their dirty clothes to the laundry room and putting their clothes away once I finish folding them. Our daughter helps with the folding, sometimes. But to your point, our son's version of cleaning his room often involves him throwing all of the clothes from his floor--which include his clothes that are actually dirty, those that he wore for no more than an hour as he was acting out some scene in his head, and lots of clean clothes he hasn't worn in years that ended up on the floor as he was rummaging through his drawer. It's infuriating. My stack of folded laundry on Saturday consisted of 7 pairs of underwear, 4 sets of workout clothes and socks, 5 dress shirts, and 2 t-shirts. Only the t-shirts and my workout socks had been dried in the dryer. My son's stack was actually 3 stacks, all of which towered over my own single stack, even though he is of course the smallest person in the family.

We're working on it.

[horsewoman]

I feel you! Actually, I'm really bad at making my daughter do chores, because I'm terrible impatient and rather do it myself. But I was really amazed how fast she learned the lesson with the laundry.

[Hristo Botev]

Put Dr. Bronner's soap in a used, empty handsoap dispenser, for use in the shower, and it's replaced both my bar soap and my shaving cream. Score one for efficiency. Next will be to refill the handsoap dispensers when they go empty. Not sure yet about whether it'll work for replacing 409 et al.

Glad to be back in a school routine with the kids. Their school is currently open for in-person learning, though I fully suspect at least a couple temporary and partial closures along the way. So it's up at 5:30 for exercise; then 30-45 minutes or so of reading the newspaper, coffee, and walking the dog; then shower and dress before walking the kids to school; and then walking to work. I'd missed my routine, for sure. DW has settled on a routine as well, as she's still working from home, and it seems to be working for her: up at about 6 and then an hour or so of work before getting the kids up; then she walks with me and the kids to school; and then she goes for her run after dropping the kids off. I hope this lasts.

In other news, I hope to forever be done with auto-renew streaming subscription services. I absolutely despise the subscription payment model that is more and more prevalent. For a long time DW and I thought we were playing the system by signing up for various free trials, under different email accounts and with different service providers, etc. Now we've realized that we were getting played all along, because we'd used so many different email addresses that we'd get charged for a service that we'd thought we cancelled, because it was on some account we'd forgotten about. And of course you can do everything via the relevant phone or TV app, EXCEPT cancel the membership. It's like newspapers that require you to call an 800 number to cancel. It's stupid, and I hate it. I love having live baseball and soccer on in the background, but honestly, it's just not worth it anymore. Especially because no matter how hard we try, we can't really keep the kids from watching that civilization-destroying trash they put on Disney Channel, et al. It's sad when we can tell exactly when our daughter or son binge-watched an hour or so of Disney Channel crap based entirely on the not-so-subtle changes in the way they talk to us, and the words they use. I'm done with it! DW and I agreed to cancel the "cable"/tv streaming service completely, as well as the music streaming service. From now on, it's pure analog (sort of): any TV will be via the antenna or DVDs from the library, and music will be through our large selection of vinyl and CDs (as well as the radio). I can listen to baseball games on the radio. I'm not interested in, "have you checked out X" or "Y?"; I want to decouple from the streaming entertainment model entirely, and there's absolutely NO reason I can't do exactly that.

[Hristo Botev]

Apologies that my mind is particular scattered today, so I've got the journal open on one screen as I'm simultaneously drafting pleadings on another screen. Also, the rant below is arguably implicitly political, so fair warning.

Re streaming TV, it's not a money thing, really at all. We pulled our kids out of government school because of all the soulless, wishy-washy moral relativism preached there, with all its baseless and disingenuous wokeness and virtue signaling nonsense: "No Place for Hate" and "In this House We Believe No Human Is Illegal, Science Is Real, Love Is Love, and Kindness Is Everything"--give me a break. "Refugees are welcome in this house"--really? Let's test that out.

We are preparing a generation of snowflakes who are going to get absolutely pulverized by the harsh realities of this world. And it makes absolutely no sense that DW and I would sacrifice to take our kids out of their fancy public school (paid for by our exorbitant property taxes) and put them in Catholic school, just to then let all that same garbage in via Disney, et al. Meanwhile, my local record store is having to shutter because Spotify, et al. My local bookstore is having to rely on charitable donations because their business model has been completely undercut by Bezos. My obese neighbor has (no kidding) a minimum of 5 separate Amazon deliveries today, including groceries; meanwhile our kids almost get run over multiple times a day because delivery drivers have made it dangerous for kids to play outside even on streets that are closed to all but local traffic. So, I guess, just stick them in front of a screen like everyone else--at least they'll be safe!

"But your kids have to learn how to navigate this complicated world of #metoo, BLM, silence is violence, corporate wokeness, everything is on a 'spectrum,' etc.!" No, they really don't. And to the extent they do, the way to do that is to give them a rock-solid foundation that provides the moral compass they need, as opposed to having the rug pulled out from under them every, single, month as we move from one feigned outrage, to the next, to the next, to the next. And as every commonly-shared societal belief gets thrown out the window and replaced with some modern relativistic nonsense; "you be you"--umm, OK. "Follow your passion"--sure. We're all f'd.

End of old man rant; now GET OFF MY LAWN!

[Hristo Botev]

Wanted to get down on paper where we're at and what our plan is, as we've come a long way but have a lot of work left to do. Happy for any comments/bright ideas/criticisms.

Currently
- Retirement: $406,000
- Post-Tax Investment: $0
- Savings: $22,000
- Kids' K-12 Pre-Paid Tuition: $0
- HSA: $11,000
- Kids' 529: $39,000
- Checking: $10,000
- Home Equity (at my purchase price): $162,000

The plan for the next 4 years
- Stop funding retirement accounts, except to get the match
- Stop making extra principal payments toward mortgage
- Continue funding 529s up to the state tax deduction
- Continue funding HSA up to the max
- Get savings account to $30,000 (fully funded by end of September, 2020)
- Then fund a money market account to cover the rest of our kids' K-12 tuition, roughly $200K (fully funded by end of July, 2022).
- Then fund a post-tax investment account

When my youngest finishes 8th grade, in 2027, I hope to be
- Retirement: $807,000
- Post-Tax Investment: $560,000
- Savings: $30,000
- Kids' K-12 Pre-Paid Tuition: $72,000 (remaining balance, will cover rest of high school tuition for both kids)
- HSA: $82,000
- Kids' 529: $138,000
- Checking: $10,000
- Home Equity (at my purchase price): $236,000

$560,000 should be well more than sufficient to provide for a cushy life for DW and me for the 10 years until we can access retirement funds, at which point those funds should be somewhere in the ballpark of $1.5m.

[JenAR]

Hristo, I haven't read your entire journal, but have you ever considered homeschooling your children? In my view, there is very little advantage to most primary and secondary schooling in intellectual terms (an intelligent parent can relatively easily master what parts of the curriculum they've forgotten/never learned themselves), and what a parent might lack in specialized knowledge they can make up for in increased attention and dedication. Peer socialization can be made up for in other ways. Colleges, universities, and employers seem increasingly open to homeschoolers and alternative schooling, especially if those children do well on standardized tests (ugh) and/or can demonstrate some combination of "portfolio" of interesting projects, interview/social skills (often increased by increased socializing with adults and not being institutionalized in schools, in my experience), work history, etc. Plus, I think that the importance of advanced education will continue to decrease, and is already a pretty bad deal (with a few exceptions for careers that require extensive training and credentialing and still pay off sufficiently in increased earning potential relative to less costly educational options).

[Hristo Botev]

have you ever considered homeschooling your children?

Absolutely, and had our school not gone back to in-person learning, we'd be currently doing exactly that. Also, if the liberalizing trend that seems to be spreading in our parish works its way into the parochial school, then I've no doubt we'll pull them from the school and seek out some sort of alternative, whether that's another full-time Catholic school less prone to swaying with the winds of whatever the hot social justice issue is of the time, or homeschool full time, or some sort of hybrid. Honestly, if we were starting over we'd probably seek out some sort of hybrid model that combines homeschooling with some in-person schooling component with a Catholic and classical education curriculum.

But with our kids halfway through elementary at this point, we don't want to pull them out of their current school unless absolutely necessary. Our parish and their school have been the most consistent things in their lives thus far (apart from the love of their parents, of course!). And we're not in any race to get our net worth as high as possible; if that were our primary motivation we'd obviously either (a) send our kids to public school, or (b) move out of our current town with its high taxes supporting a quality public school system. But we view the Catholic education for our kids as probably our most important "investment," both for them and for DW and me.

Plus, I think that the importance of advanced education will continue to decrease, and is already a pretty bad deal (with a few exceptions for careers that require extensive training and credentialing and still pay off sufficiently in increased earning potential relative to less costly educational options).

I could not agree more. In our house our kids will never hear either DW or me say word one about the importance of a college education. If they end up going to college, fine; but just as fine if they don't.

[Hristo Botev]

FWIW, for ERE aspiring parents out there, I think homeschooling your kids is about the most ERE thing you can do.

[Hristo Botev]

I'm so impressionable. Finally got to the meaty "Facing the Deindustrial Age" chapter of Greer's The Long Descent, where he identifies steps toward sustainability, and now I no longer want to run for the hills. Turns out, per Greer, I'm perfectly situated as is for the coming decline--living in a small under-the-radar home in a relatively dense neighborhood that is walking distance to everything I could ever need, with good neighbors with whom I'm on good terms, and with a back patio large enough to do some productive vegetable gardening, but that is also fenced in so that passers-by can't steal my food source. I've even got a wood-burning fireplace, for when the natural gas gets shut off and we have to start burning books to stay warm. Not sure how we can decouple ourselves from public water, however. Also, the home needs some significant insulation improvements. And the HOA rules probably prohibit us from installing a solar water heater on our roof (which was my perfectly acceptable hot water source when I lived in the Balkans), though perhaps there's some sort of work around.

[jacob]

Not sure how we can decouple ourselves from public water, however.

For independence consider some kind of rain catchment system (@ffj has a picture of something he installed on his drain), but then you said HOA... Decoupling is easier. Buy water bricks (<- google it) and keep them in rotation. Also get some serious filters. We have a Berkey (<- google it). I'd suggest getting one size bigger than they recommend if all you drink is water. We're constantly having to refill ours.

[Hristo Botev]

For independence consider some kind of rain catchment system (@ffj has a picture of something he installed on his drain), but then you said HOA... Decoupling is easier. Buy water bricks (<- google it) and keep them in rotation. Also get some serious filters. We have a Berkey (<- google it). I'd suggest getting one size bigger than they recommend if all you drink is water. We're constantly having to refill ours.

I . . . f'ing . . . LOVE . . . this . . . forum!

Mind blown.

Re HOA, we could totally install a rain catchment system on our back patio, because it's fenced in (HOA rules were amended awhile back to allow for private fences).

So, how does this all work? You (1) install a water catchment system on your drains (we've got 2 on the fenced-in back patio); (2) use that water to fill up the water bricks (also, fill up the water bricks at times when you have free access to a water supply); and (3) use the water from the water bricks to cook and wash clothes, and to drink when filtered (do you also need to treat the water? boil it?)?

Is it really possible to use rain water to completely decouple yourself from the public water supply when living in an urban environment? If so, I'm tackling this project with gusto. Our county water department is infamously corrupt and mismanaged (seriously; I'd love to share some news stories, but will refrain from doing so for anti-doxxing purposes). Our last 2-month water bill was over $400, inexplicably 4x more than the previous bill; and this sort of shit happens ALL THE TIME (lots and lots of anecdotal stories of neighbors with water bills for several thousand dollars, with no explanation).

[take2]

Not sure if this is your problem but just in case it may be worth mentioning that massive month over month increases in water bills are usually linked to running toilets. I have a rental house with water included in the rent and it’s fairly obvious when a toilet is running as the water bill will be 2-3x normal. It’s an easy fix but tenants typically don’t notice or care...

Your water should be metered, no? The cost per gallon shouldn’t vary (at least not doubling without notice?) so in some way it must be linked to usage?

[Hristo Botev]

Of course there's a wikihow page: https://www.wikihow.com/Collect-Rainwater-for-Drinking

And the CDC has an info page: https://www.cdc.gov/healthywater/drinki ... ction.html

This is going to be so much fun!