Western Red Cedar's Journal

[Western Red Cedar]

November Update:

Financial:

NW 440,110 (Increase of 23,386)

A great month for us financially. I just continue plugging away at work and try to appreciate the professional and financial position I'm in. I had checked some of my accounts about halfway through the month, but was surprised to see how well the market performed when updating my spreadsheet this morning. DW still isn't working, but is interested in finding a new job and has started looking again. If that happens, it should add a little fuel to the fire.

Professional:

I had a productive month at work and continue having success with my big project. I've closed out a couple smaller projects and have been pretty assertive about saying no (politely) to colleagues and supervisors when they try to pass work off to me. I've also started delegating a bit more and trying to hold people accountable when they are falling behind on deadlines that affect the project.

I had a full week off work last week which was marvelous. We've been wanting to get out of town for a proper vacation for a long time now. DW challenged me to stay present on our trip and not think about work. It was a good way to frame things and it worked. I only thought about work a couple of times, and it was along the lines of "I don't miss it and I'm not worried about it." I resisted a temptation today to check in and get caught up on email. I'm going to have a four day weekend over Veteran's day and will be taking a full week off over the Thanksgiving holiday. I'll probably take another week off near the end of December. I've needed to take all of this leave so I don't forfeit vacation by the end of the year. Setting some hard deadlines made me really focus on wrapping things up and performing efficiently.

Physical:

I'm still doing 5-6 workouts per week and continue making progress. I dropped a couple pounds this month, and I'm putting on more lean muscle. I've tried focusing on controlling stress and making sure I get a good night's sleep to support my new fitness routine. I opted to take almost a full week off from lifting while on vacation after learning about the benefits of this kind of break.

*ETA - It looks like I actually dropped 4.5 pounds this month. I started tracking my food and macros on my fitness pal which is quite helpful.

Vacation:

We took a road trip to Boise as we had never been there before. I had a couple of free Marriott hotel nights to use before the end of the year, and we got an AirBnB for another three nights. We had pretty solid weather considering the major storms that rolled through the west coast in the last week. This was a very WL5 type of trip. Optimized with points and cards, but decadent with a lot of restaurant meals and touristy activities. We both had a blast, but it was a good reminder that we need to adjust our approach to travel when we implement our slow-travel, SemiERE plans.

I talked with quite a few locals, and we spent the last night hanging out with our Airbnb hosts and their friends for a few hours. It was interesting hearing from some of the long-term residents about how the City has changed over the last 5-10 years. Saw some great art, enjoyed walks though the City's park system, as well as a nice hike in the foothills outside of Boise. As is usually the case on these types of trips, our meals focus heavily on ethnic food. We met a really nice Iraqi family and had some amazing middle eastern food, along with some Argentinian, and the best poutine we'd ever had.

Our focus over the last few years is to try and travel regionally via car because we know we'll be traveling internationally later. It was great driving along some new highways and seeing new sights.

[Jiimmy]

Nice photos WRC. I’ve been through Idaho just once or twice. It’s a beautiful state, and one that I want to spend more time exploring.

This is the time of year that seems to fly by, as a 9-5er, with all the holidays being stacked up right next to each other. You’ll wake up soon and it’ll be 2022.

How close do you think you are to the semi ere / slow travel phase?

[mountainFrugal]

Your road sunset photo is representative of the landscape in that part of Idaho (in my mind). Beautiful. Remaining present on the vacation sounds like a great way to recharge maximally. Great update overall.

[Western Red Cedar]

@mf - thanks!

How close do you think you are to the semi ere / slow travel phase?

This is a timely question. I actually thought about addressing it in my monthly update but didn't have the energy to go into it. So...

FI, Semi ERE, and Future Plans:

When I started this journal a little over a year ago I was considering leaving work at 75-80% of our household FI goal. We are currently at 73% of that goal. I didn't think we would get there so quickly, particularly with DW not working for much of the year.

I like the idea of Semi ERE as a trial run. An opportunity to see how I adjust to and manage freedom. An opportunity to see how I perform without external structure or schedules. An opportunity to simply change things up, break free from my routine, slow down, and experience new cultures.

I chose a goal of 75-80% because I wanted a strong financial foundation before taking a break. I wanted to leverage the power of compounding interest. I wanted to move to low-cost countries and take advantage of geo-arbitrage without depleting the stash. I still want these things, but I've adjusted my initial plans a bit.

I have great coworkers and managers. I'm a high-performer and good at what I do. My career meshes well with my natural, INTJ disposition. I can now work full time from home, and relocate anywhere in my state. My medical benefits have been a huge relief as DW deals with some issues. Right now, I'm thinking about staying at my job through June or July of 2022 and requesting a sabbatical for a year. I would be wrapping up my big project, getting a small bonus in July, along with a small raise. This would also represent a little over a decade in my field, not counting 18 months of graduate school and research assistant positions. I could use 6-8 weeks of vacation to start off the sabbatical to maximize my pension contributions and hold onto health insurance so we could travel and camp throughout the western US or Canada.

I would probably be pretty close to the household FI target by that point, but it is a relatively lean budget to support us for the next 40-50 years. I know myself pretty well, and living on a lean budget could potentially lead to some conflict with DW as I may get concerned with expenses and small luxuries.

I recognize that just cutting the cord could potentially open the door for all kinds of new opportunities, but I'm leaning towards hedging my bet by holding onto the job and seeing how we adjust during a year of slow-travel.

At that point, we could return and work for a year or two to save up funds for property or a homestead in the US. Having a steady job would certainly make getting a mortgage easier. Or...we might decide we want to purchase a small apartment in an international destination to use as a home base. Or, perhaps we just decide to rent, pad the stash for a year or two, and then transition to a nomadic lifestyle for the foreseeable future.

I guess the freedom to and freedom from dichotomy has been weighing on me for a long time. Probably at least a few years. Even though I vent here about work, I'm realizing that I do quite well with the structure and purpose it provides. I want to make sure I have the self-discipline and intrinsic motivation to create a meaningful life.

[thedollar]

@Western Red Cedar

Beautiful photos! What camera are you using?

[Western Red Cedar]

What camera are you using?

I'm using an Iphone 12 pro and a Canon Rebel T3i. Most of the photos before this summer are from an Iphone 6s. I was using this trip to see whether it is worth it to bring the Canon when I travel. Probably going to stick to the 12 pro from here on out.

[thedollar]

I'm using an Iphone 12 pro and a Canon Rebel T3i. Most of the photos before this summer are from an Iphone 6s. I was using this trip to see whether it is worth it to bring the Canon when I travel. Probably going to stick to the 12 pro from here on out.

The ones you just posted in the November update, were they taken with the iPhone? Because they look incedible!

[Western Red Cedar]

@the dollar - Thanks! I think the first and third were with the Canon. The rest are with the iPhone. The new camera and the telephoto lens on the 12 pro are pretty amazing. The image quality in low light settings is much better than what I'm used to with older phones.

There was also a pretty large storm system moving through the western US and I covered quite a bit of territory, so I had some pretty epic vistas and cloud formations to work with. DW is a good sport about letting me stop the car or take a few extra minutes while we are walking around to let me take photos.

[Frugalchicos]

Oh Boise…I always wanted to go there. Did you get to visit the Basque Block? Boise has one of the largest population of Basque out of the Basque Country.

I heard it is beautiful and a heaven for outdoorsy people. Beautiful pictures and glad you are doing good by the way

[Western Red Cedar]

Did you get to visit the Basque Block? Boise has one of the largest population of Basque out of the Basque Country.

You know it. Probably walked by it or through it at least a dozen times. It is right in the heart of downtown. I thought of you almost every time. DW was asking why I was taking this photo, and I told her it was for my ERE friend from the Basque region.



Here is another photo that the ERE crowd might appreciate:

[Frugalchicos]

Amazing, love it. Thank you so much Eskerrik Asko nire lagun!

[Western Red Cedar]

I'm reading Sebastian Junger's Tribe and wanted to post a few ERE relevant quotes to reflect on later:

"The question for Western society isn't so much why tribal life might be so appealing - it seems obvious on the face of it - but why Western society is so unappealing. On a material level it is clearly more comfortable and protected from the hardships of the natural world. But as societies become more affluent they tend to require more, rather than less, time and commitment by the individual, and it's possible that many people feel that affluence and safety simply aren't a good trade for freedom."

"First agriculture, and then industry, changed two fundamental things about the human experience. The accumulation of personal property allowed people to make more and more individualistic choices about their lives, and those choices unavoidably diminished group efforts toward a common good. And as society modernized, people found themselves able to live independently from any communal group. A person living in a modern city or a suburb can, for the first time in history, go through an entire day - or an entire life - mostly encountering complete strangers. They can be surrounded by others and yet feel deeply, dangerously alone.

The evidence that this is hard on us is overwhelming. Although happiness is notoriously subjective and difficult to measure, mental illness is not. Numerous cross-cultural studies have shown that modern society - despite its nearly miraculous advances in medicine, science, and technology - is afflicted with some of the highest rates of depression, schizophrenia, poor health, anxiety, and chronic loneliness in human history. As affluence and urbanization rise in a society, rates of depression and suicide tend to go up rather than down.Rather than buffering people from clinical depression, increased wealth in a society seems to foster it."

"...poor people are forced to share their time and resources more than wealthy people are, and as a result they live in closer communities. Inter-reliant poverty comes with its own stresses...but it's much closer to our evolutionary heritage than affluence. A wealthy person who has never had to rely on help and resources from his community is leading a privileged life that falls way outside more than a million years of human experience. Financial independence can lead to isolation..."

He quotes the Journal of Affective Disorders "The economic and marketing forces of modern society have engineered an environment...that maximizes consumption at the long-term cost of well-being...In effect, humans have dragged a body with a long hominid history into an overfed, malnourished, sedentary, sunlight-deficient, sleep-deprived, competitive, inequitable, and socially-isolating environment with dire consequences."

On his reporting from Sarajevo - "I saw a lot of strange things in that city, the kinds of contortions that only war can bring to a people, but maybe the most startling was this: a middle-aged man in a business suit crouched over some small project in the courtyard of a modern high-rise. The building could have been any bank or insurance company in Europe, except that the windows were blown out and the walls were scarred with shrapnel. I looked closer and saw that the man was arranging dead twigs into a pile. When he was done, he positioned an aluminum pot on top of the pile and lit the twigs with a cigarette lighter. Then he stood up and looked at me. If there's an image of the Apocalypse, I thought, it might be a man in a business suit building a fire in the courtyard of an abandoned high-rise."

[Western Red Cedar]

"To send light into darkness of men's hearts - such is the duty of the artist."

-Robert Schumann

[Western Red Cedar]

The Shire:

DW and I went up to the family homestead for a couple of nights over a long, Veteran's day holiday weekend. There was a small layer of snow as we approached the mountains, and I figured this might be the last chance we have to drive up there this year (without hiking or snowshoeing in). We met my sister and her family briefly, and had a chance to check out their new house and property. They closed a month or two ago, but had an agreement with the old family friend they bought it from that they could stay there until they had a chance to move to their new place. It was quite a shock seeing the inside of the house. The bones of the house are good but there was clutter and stuff everywhere. This was after the owners did multiple dump runs and cleaned a bunch of stuff out. We had stumbled into the remnants of 30+ years of hoarding, but my sister and her husband knew what they were getting into.

DW was fascinated and there were all kinds of interesting things and "treasures" around the house. We hung out with our nieces for about an hour while they were cleaning, then headed up to my parents cabin to stoke the fire and settle in for a couple nights. It was a welcome respite from work and the internet. We have minimal cell reception, and watch movies in the evenings, but most of our activities up there are analog.

My dad had cut down quite a few standing dead trees for firewood, as well as some others that had recently fallen. I told him a month or two ago that I'd be happy to split it next time I was up there. He's a smart man and was glad to take me up on the offer. I took advantage of a couple short windows in between rain to split about two chords of wood. It is one of my favorite chores, along with vacuuming, taking out the garbage, and cooking.

I don't spend a lot of time up there in November and December. We spent most of the trip in a heavy mist and mountain storms. The landscape looked completely different from what I'm used to. It made me want to follow through on one of my FI goals of living there for a year so I could experience full seasons as an adult. It was a great opportunity for us to curl up close to their new fireplace, do a bunch of reading, painting, play guitar, and watch movies. It was also strikingly beautiful.

This was my view while splitting firewood:



A landscape as the sun was setting and while there was a break in the storm:



Later that night I wandered around in a mist that is unusual for this area. It was eerie and sublime:




We had plans to meet my sisters family again on Saturday, and my brother-in-law took DW, myself, and his aunt on a hike through his new property. I've been through there before, but it was nice having him as a guide and keeping me oriented. My parents are acquiring another 10 acres, and my sister's family will have 35 acres on their property. We now have 75 acres of family property spread out among three parcels. My dad informed me earlier this week that they've decided to refer to it as The Shire. This came as a pleasant surprise as we've previously called it "the compound" which clearly doesn't sound as appealing.

My sisters new property will be a lot of work to clean up, but it comes with a really large shop (along with all kinds of other things like 5 vintage trailers used for storage, old vehicles, some aging solar panels and batteries, and a variety of other odds and ends). Over Thanksgiving my BIL told me he was digging more into permaculture, which we briefly talked about before. I told him DW studied permaculture in college and interned at a farm for 3 months, and that it's one of my favorite subjects to research and learn about. He also has a colleague who recently purchased a portable sawmill and said it paid for itself with one project. I think the shop would be an ideal place to season wood and establish a carpentry workshop - so I planted that seed. He seemed to grok the concept that taking a year or two to observe the property and the natural systems was necessary before deciding on what or where to plant. This works well as it allows them to focus on cleanup and house renovations while they observe the land.

The setup is great and we now have access to thousands of acres of state and federal land. He showed me some huckleberry patches while we were hiking, and we even found a few soggy fall Morels. I told him to mark the spot as Morels return in the same place. I'm much more excited about foraging in the shire, as I don't really like having to drive into the mountains to forage for berries or mushrooms. Plus, the Morels always pop up in our old orchard and it lets me know when to start looking at similar elevations.

I recently finished Sebastian Junger's Tribe, along with Christopher McDougall's newest book - Running with Sherman. Both emphasized the importance of community and social connections for resiliency and mental health. I'm seriously pondering making a home base in the shire at some point and contributing to the family legacy there. This could include purchasing, perhaps in conjunction with my parents, 40-80 acres of another neighbor's property, purchasing 20 acres from my parents, or just living part-time at my parent's cabin, in their tiny house, or in a seasonal yurt.

DW and I were out hiking today and she seems pretty open to the idea. I've run it by her before as well. I told her, at least initially, we may spend winters (or smoky summers) in Mexico or international urban environments. That could offer a nice balance to a rural, PNW environment. Ultimately I'd like to have animals, perhaps a dog or two, and an abundant garden that would probably tie us to the land.

[Frugalchicos]

All that sounds pretty amazing. It seems like you are looking to a life of plenitude being surrounded by that beautiful nature.

It would be ideal if you could tapper into semi-ERE working from the mountains. That way you could have a better sense of what is like living in the mountains all year round and see all the seasons.

One of the most valuable lessons from our experience during the year we lived in the Basque Country is that now we know what to expect exactly.

Enjoy the long Thanksgiving weekend!

[Western Red Cedar]

@Frugalchicos - I theoretically could work at my current job from the mountains if I had better internet connectivity. I know my state is working on improving broadband access in rural areas so things could improve in the next couple of years. I've worked offline a couple times at my parent's cabin, but part of my push to FI is to get away from screens.

I've actually thought about transitioning to a different type of "work" while living up there, such as intensive gardening or amateur woodworking in terms of SemiERE. I'd like to move away from spending so much time working on screens, and move towards working with my hands. I really enjoy projects where change is visible.

If I buy property up there I wouldn't feel comfortable ever selling it, so I kind of think of that as a sunk cost. That factor makes me very cautious about buying. Of course, there are natural resources (timber) that provide some value, and the potential to grow food, hunt, and forage.

[Western Red Cedar]

December Update

Financial:

NW - 436,940 (Decrease of 3,170)

Nothing too exciting on the financial front. I continue staying the course and plugging away at work.

Life:

I finished a large milestone on my big project at work. I followed that up with nine days off. I usually don't like to stay at home when I take leave, but it was really nice. I did a ton of cooking, read some books, watched a bunch of movies, and continued with my workout routine. Work has been really busy this week, but I've been really productive and trying to not get stressed out.

I started a daily meditation practice again this week, as well as my gratitude journal. I'd let that slip and wanted to renew it in an effort to try establishing habits that support my mental health.

I gained a pound over the last month, likely the result of relaxing on my typical diet over the holidays and my time off. Still lifting weights 5-6 days per week, and trying to get out on hikes and bike rides before the weather gets too cold. I finally had DW take some measurements a couple weeks ago so that I'm not only relying on a scale to look at progress. I wish I would have done this when I started lifting - but better late than never. Even though my weight jumped a little, I've seen some significant changes in my body composition. I'm happy with these habits and they are, for the most part, on autopilot.

I gave up drinking coffee for a couple weeks without really trying. I switched to black or green tea. I've noticed that the amount of caffeine in coffee can affect me pretty strongly at times. It doesn't make me feel great if I haven't slept well, which is ironically the time I want it most. Tea doesn't seem to have the same kind of impact. I had my first cup of coffee a couple days ago and it tasted so good. I really love the flavor of coffee. I doubt I'll give it up permanently, but may continue playing around with limiting it.

The most exciting update is that DW interviewed for a couple jobs and had two offers yesterday. She accepted one of them and will be going back to work soon at 3/4 time. I'm really excited for her and she was stoked about the new opportunity. This will allow us to up our savings rate, but more importantly, it will likely help her lead a more balanced life. She'll have a chance to put away some money into a travel fund, and it offers a strong motivation to stay the course until next summer when she'll be off for the summer.

[Western Red Cedar]

DW starts her new job Monday. She'll be working a week then gets two weeks off for the winter holiday. I want to support her as much as possible, so I'm mentally committing to sticking with my job through the middle of next year. I've been looking at our calendars and trying to structure some time off for us to do some regional travel and fun adventures over the next six months. It is possible that I stay on longer and we keep plowing ahead to full FI. Make hay while the sun shines.

I had a pretty tough day Wednesday at work, but ended the week on a high note. I talked with my big boss about some structural issues with our team. Namely that everyone relies on his expertise and we are rapidly growing as the result of our own success, but it is straining everyone and the most competent people are pulled in a lot of directions. I know he is aware of it, but I don't think many people have frank conversations with him like I do. I left the conversation yesterday with a lot of compassion for him and my immediate supervisor. They both work extremely hard and have a lot of demands on their schedule. He's super sharp and talented, and could be making a lot more money doing other work. I suspect he imagines I'm going to stick around for another 10-20 years, like he did, because I'm passionate about the work.

[Frugalchicos]

Congrats! Happy your wife got a job!

Working is like a roller coaster…sometimes is good, sometimes just bearable and sometimes sucks…

Planning your life next year, vacations, financial and personal goals will help yo cope with the daily struggle.

All the best for you guys

[Western Red Cedar]

Thanks Frugalchicos! I try to keep in mind that work stressors are minor in the grand scheme of things. I'm extremely fortunate to be in the position I'm in.