Early Retirement Extreme Forums

That's a lot of gigs! As a musician who did things on the side with a full time job, I've always been impressed by people who play with that intensity level. You've mentioned that you are able to cover your expenses with playing music. If comfortable sharing, what would you estimate your hourly wage to be, just factoring in the time performing? Do you have any rules on accepting gigs based on pay?

delay wrote: ↑

Fri Mar 28, 2025 11:21 am

Congratulations! Why not be happy?

Oh I am happy, but I still want to improve. I guess it's sort of the difference between "not being good enough" and "wants to become better." I want to be in the second camp and stay there probably forever. As long as the drive to improve (at something) isn't coming from insecurity and isn't unwantedly muscling out other priorities I think it's just pretty good.

bookworm wrote: ↑

Sun Mar 30, 2025 7:13 am

If comfortable sharing, what would you estimate your hourly wage to be, just factoring in the time performing? Do you have any rules on accepting gigs based on pay?

Super comfortable! First I'll note I don't actually track this anywhere, so these numbers will just be my best guesses. I'll split them up into two categories: Orchestral and Non-orchestral.

My orchestral gigs are ones where we have multiple scheduled rehearsals before the performances, and we get paid for the rehearsals as well as the performances. Usually stuff like orchestra concerts, pit orchestra for musicals/operas/ballet, etc. These probably average in the $25-35 per hour range, including the rehearsal time.

Non-orchestral work is everything else, and its pretty varied. The one wedding I've done so far was $200 for me, for definitely under 3.5 hours of time commitment including getting dressed and driving to/from the place, and we didn't have a rehearsal beforehand so that was a real ≈$60/hour. For jazz stuff it's usually like $80-100 for an hour-hour-and-a-half of playing. If I include unpaid rehearsals and set-up/tear-down time they're usually the worst from a time-to-money perspective but are generally pretty fun. My church piano playing is pretty good because it pays $80+the IRS mileage rate (The church is out in the country a bit, about a 35 mile drive), comes out to around $30/hour including my time driving, not including IRS mileage. It's also worth noting that the total number of non-orchestral gigs I've done (not including church piano) is probably under 10, so it's hard for me to know if figures for what I've done so far will be consistent or not.

I don't really have rules accepting gigs based on pay, I do have a vague "inconvenience factor" where if that is too high for whatever combination of reasons I'll say no but that's rare. Honestly, a fair amount of the time I don't even ask how much the gig is paying and I just find out at the end (only if I've been asked to play by someone I know though). If I was doing this more and was trying to organize my own gigs I'd surely have some stricter rules, but as it is I just get to show up and play stuff and it's quite rare that different potential gigs would conflict.

March Roundup

Money:
Spending: 796 dollars, Income: 6147 dollars. Savings rate of 87%, nice. As mentioned in my previous monthly recap, I got 500 bucks from my parents as a birthday gift to roughly cover my flights for travel to Japan later this year, so a little higher than what I earned, but I expect April and May to be relatively high-income months as well. I applied for my passport this month ($165) and purchased a Worldpackers subscription ($49), so those were the out-of-the-ordinary spending areas this month, which I feel totally fine about. NW took a HIT recently, it'll likely be around 76k after the trade day today. Feels bad to be negative from a month ago. Feels good in that this loss isn't really affecting me in any way.

Japan Travel Updates:
My plans begin to get more concrete. Through the Worldpackers app I applied to and was accepted for a workaway in Niseko in the Hokkaido region, which I'll be at for about a month. This is good because it seems the Non-Hokkaido parts of Japan will generally be hot/wet as balls in July-August. The place I'll be staying at leans more hostel than WWOOF, but it has many amenities, free bikes available, etc., so it seems like a good place to be. Maybe I'll make another post about it sometime. After that I'll be back in Tokyo with a couple of my friends, visiting Mt Fuji at some point, and then I'll have another couple of weeks that are as of yet unplanned up to September 5th. Another bit of news is that one of my favorite fictional works, Umineko no naku koro ni (When the Seagulls Cry) is having a stageplay adaptation, and it's 6th episode* will have its opening night on the last free night I have in Japan, so I'll see if I can get a ticket to that.

*The story is split up into 8 sections called episodes, although each episode is easily book-length. I should make a post about it sometime, it's awesome.

Frustrations:
I thought I'd add this section to make sure I don't only post about things that are going well. I don't want to be presenting an image like everything's great (although I do think things are generally quite good for me), since that may cause difficulties both for people who may read this in the future wanting to learn from me who see an inaccurate version of my self and also for me, since I want to improve in areas where I'm frustrated, and people can't give me advice on what they don't know about. It'll also just be a good reminder to me. With that in mind here are two:

1) My IRL friends aren't people I want to be more like. They're like fine people and I like them, but they're not doing particularly interesting things, they don't have particularly good healthy habits, it feels like they want to spend the majority of their free time playing video games and I'm not that sort of person (only a little of my free time!) I want to have some new ones who inspire me and I can work on things with them (to some extent).

2) My job is pretty boring and I don't like sitting in front of a computer all day unless I have a really good reason for it. I do already have a time I'm planning to leave it (probably June 20th), so I don't really want to try to branch into new and different responsibilities, and it doesn't make sense for them to put significant effort in training me for new things either. It's not particularly difficult, but I just don't particularly care about the company on like a company-mission-level (yay we are a pretty generic law firm) and don't care much about the day-to-day either.

Quick Hits:
Cooking for friends continues to go well. I also made green mashed potatoes and baked chicken thighs w/ chimichurri sauce for a St Patrick's day potluck at work where many people liked my food and at least one person voted me for "dish that best incorporated the color green". It felt good when I was asked how much food coloring I put in my mashed potatoes and I could respond that I just mixed in a puree of parsley, green onions, and some spinach to make it that color, how very cool and natural of me.

While the weather here has been, uh, variable to say the least, I got my bike up and running and have been riding it to/from things as I'm able. I mixed together my own chain degreaser from stuff I already had on hand (Water, Isopropyl alcohol, Dish soap, Baking Soda), and cleaning and lubing it definitely made it feel a little nicer to ride.

I cut my own hair for the first time! I have officially joined the Wahl club, and it turned out pretty well. While I definitely am feeling this sentence from recent conversation in Hristo's journal,

jacob wrote: ↑

Mon Mar 31, 2025 8:47 am

Ha! One of the downsides of DIY is that all your mistakes are visible to you even if others don't notice them at all.

I still feel satisfied that it broadly looks good enough, I can do better next time, and other people have complimented me on the haircut without knowing I did it myself.

Weight loss competition ended! I won, down 24.5 pounds in 10 weeks, although I only actually lost maybe 15 pounds, the rest was manipulating water weight/natural fluctuations a bit. Even if I hadn't done any of that our team would still have won. That'll be an extra ≈120 bucks when it gets paid out.

I've also gotten around to reading Augie March, and am around midway through. Am enjoying it. One thing I'm really appreciative of is Augie's/the author's way of really giving detail to these people he's talking about. I find that I don't really notice enough about people/things to be able to describe them the way he does, and this could be something I want to work on in the future.

Last update is that my dad is retiring! He's 65, his college was offering a voluntary separation thing where he'd get an extra year's pay upon retiring, so he thought it made sense and was a good time to do it. I just learned about this on Sunday, although I know he'd been thinking about it for a while beforehand. He'll be working through the end of the school semester, and then they'll have a trip to Alaska which they had planned already, and past that I'll be very interested in seeing what they do.

Re both frustrations: welcome to adulting. You’ll be dealing with that shit for the rest of your life. Do your best. Keep at it. Don’t get too down. It’ll work out over time with occasional peaks, occasional valleys and lots of meadows.

April Roundup
Good month!

Money:
Spending: 725 dollars, Income: 6262 dollars, Savings rate: 88%. As foretold, it was a busy month music-wise and that corresponds to extra income. Only kind of interesting thing spending-wise is that there was an insurance adjustment from when I broke my arm half a year ago which made me owe another 50 bucks, which was annoying but of no consequence. NW is up near 86K, the market has been good recently.

May should be an even higher-income month, as I'll receive three work paychecks in it, and will still be receiving above-average music income from things I played in April that I haven't been paid for yet. If the market doesn't do anything crazy I'll probably reach 100K by the time I stop working at my current job, (or rather when I get my final paycheck/PTO paid out)which is a fun number. It's funny that when I started this job a bit under a year ago with about 10k in savings, I was thinking "Hmm, it would probably be pretty good of me if I could save 30k before I start law school, that's a big number." Between then and now I did also get 17k from my parents that had been held in an UTMA account, so a more accurate comparison would be for imaginary-law-school-Philip (ILSP) to have 50k. I think it's likely that ILSP would have saved more than my goal anyway, but it's completely plausible to me that ERE has saved me over 30 thousand dollars already. I don't think I'm missing out by not spending on what ILSP would have spent on.

Music
I played everything as described in the earlier post and a bit more, as I also got asked to play piano for a funeral midway through the month (not someone I knew), and did that. It was very busy and not a pace I think I would want to keep up long-term. but quite fine for the short-term. It seems like wedding gigs are consistently the best-paying and are also quite fun. I feel more confident that putting more focused time/effort into music is something I want to do and will have good and fun returns.

Reading
I finished up a big project at work this month which left me with some free time for a little, which helped get me back into reading books some, which in turn spawned a little virtuous cycle that helped me read some more. Maybe if I have a reason to I'll expand on some of these but here are the books I finished/read and brief reactions:

Augie March - What a funny guy. How much should you plan and how much should you leave it up to serendipity? Definitely more planning than what Augie did, but there's a lot you will never be aware of if you stick too rigidly to your own plans and what you already know.
The Courage to be Disliked - Really awesome framework. Things that help me strengthen my internal locus of control are generally good, and I've made multiple positive changes in my life already that are to some extent because of this book. I think I'll try to find and read it in the original Japanese at some point, it seemed like it wouldn't be too difficult and I'd like to go through it again.
The Courage to be Happy - by the same authors. If you read the first book I think you get most of the benefit of this one, although I still thought it was valuable.
Flow - I started and then dropped this fairly early on. I feel like I've heard enough about flow states through cultural osmosis that what's said here wasn't seeming new or interesting. If anyone feels like something in it has been very valuable to them perhaps I'll give it another look but otherwise I'm good.
Entropia - I don't have much to say about it. I did like the twist near the end, without it I would have thought it wasn't that interesting. It's easy to imagine an enjoyable deindustrial society, hard to make it work. You could say there's value in imagining it and providing a hypothetically-possible vision, something that could be organized around.
The City and the City - I've seen this mentioned all around and thought I should take a look. Enjoyed it, really fun setting.
Nonviolent Communication - It was interesting to me how much this book is similar to the Courage to be Disliked in some of its ideas/prescriptions. Will hope to practice with this to take its ideas and use them (while being careful to not come off as scripted/robotic/whatever the different failure-modes of it are)
Gaia's Garden - I started reading this but then stopped since I'm not going to start any permaculture or even really normal gardening projects soon, although it is definitely something I'm interested and want to learn more about.

I'll hope to be taking a look back at the books that were recommended to me earlier in this journal when I broke my arm as time goes on, I didn't really get around to those then, and I'll have some more time to read especially once I'm travelling but also beforehand since I've been doing a better job of managing distractions recently.

Distractions
In relation to reading the Courage to be Disliked and being like "yeah that's so true, I'm choosing to continue having every bad habit that I have," I started doing some things to change them. I blocked youtube and twitter on my laptop and disabled youtube on my phone, and have made some discord servers I'm in more inconvenient to access. This has already prompted some significant returns in time and focus that I'm very happy about, but it's far from perfect, it's still not uncommon for me to go down the path to the next-most-accessible distraction. I will continue figuring out what I need to completely block myself from and how to more generally avoid being distracted. The bigger test will be how I use my time this month, as I will have a lot more time that is not already booked with music gigs/rehearsals.

Biking, Maintenance
As the weather improved, I started biking more, and not only have I not broken my arm so far, instead of biking to work just on Fridays, I drive one day a week, taking/leaving clothes for the rest of the week at the office. I even went as far as biking 30 miles in a day last Friday, which is the most I've ever biked in one day by about 8 miles, beating out the 22-mile bike ride I did to earn my Boy Scouts cycling merit badge around the end of middle school. This was much easier, although I also didn't do it all at once, I simply had different places to go that day that led me to bike 30 miles between them. However, I've realized this morning (and I should have realized earlier, but I am completely new to bicycle care/maintenance) that I have a couple broken spokes on my back wheel, so I need to fix that (and possibly fix other things about the bike too maybe?) It's also about time for my car to get an oil change, I need to replace at least one tire sometime, and I would like to make sure my car is in good condition, ideally with a working AC before I take it for my trip in the beginning of July. Fixing/maintaining these things properly is probably my main ERE goal for May/June.

Other

While I expressed interest in the minimalist challenge early, I hadn't been doing anything for it until last weekend, where I got rid of (mostly donated) 65 articles of clothing, sold my graduation gown/cap/tassel and Oculus Rift S VR headset/controllers/cable online, and cleaned up some. I'll probably post over there once I'm caught up with the challenge or reach some other notable amount. Getting rid of as much unnecessary stuff as I can by the end of May is my other main ERE goal for the month.

There was less group cooking this month because one of the DND guys was out of town for a bit. Still made some good things though. Last Wednesday was chicken tacos w/ chipotle-lime rice, mango salsa, cabbage slaw, mexican street corn, and chipotle cream sauce. Would have been nice to also have some beans with it but I didn't plan ahead enough.

While I did do a good job biking more, I did less in other exercise than I would have liked, partially due to the busyness. Consistent and balanced exercise will be another priority for the upcoming month.

My brother ran a marathon, his first! I couldn't make it out because it was in Oklahoma and I had a couple concerts the weekend it happened but my parents went. Nice job bro.

I continue to think about the future and feel less like the "RE" part of FIRE is something I really care about, as I continue along with my life I would like to be doing work and play that I care about and that contributes to others. It is really easy for me to meet my needs. It's a pretty good feeling.

Well, great progress on one of these. My bike is completely fixed up and feeling better than ever (at least in any recent memory) to ride. My parents reminded me of a bike ministry associated with their church that I also used to go to that fixes up bikes and donates them. They also provide/teach you how to bike repair if you bring yours in, so I did that. I learned how to patch a tire, true a wheel, put in spokes, and do some other minor bike repairs while fixing my bike and some other bikes all for the low price of free. I was also able to bring it over with a car-attached bike rack that my parents hadn't remembered that they still had, so ultimately the result of having this bike issue was that I'm able and confident in doing some minor repairs now and can take my bike with me while driving places now which could open up some possibilities.

Recommended: viewtopic.php?p=302655#p302655

May Round-up
Yay! I liked it! I think I should make a deeper post where I discuss/formalize some of my future plans/ideas and ERE-related thinking but that won't be this one, mainly object-level details here.

Money:
Spending: 640 dollars, Income: 8203 dollars, savings rate of 92%. A three paycheck month, buttressed from some music income from April arriving late and some sales of household items. I made some larger purchases for lodging with my friends during my trip to Japan in a couple months, but I'm choosing to report that spending when I'm actually there so I didn't include them in this month's total. During the time I'm with my friends it's looking like it won't quite be an ERE-level travel plan, but it won't be too spendy either. As for this month, some notable things were that I only needed to purchase gas one time, utility bills was down as it has warmed up, I spent very little on food as I cleaned out my fridge/kitchen, and I purchased some cheap items towards the trip/future plans off of Facebook Marketplace. I also should make a better spreadsheet for tracking spending, Fidelity Fullview has been good enough so far but won't capture any cash stuff, and I want to be accurate so I can look back at true spending amounts and make yearly averages and such. NW is up near 97k, pretty cool.

Moving:
At the end of the month I moved back into my parents' place. This is great. They're travelling for just about the whole month of June (driving all the way up to Alaska and back) so I get to hold down the fort and take care of the garden and then it's a good place to leave my stuff and not pay rent/storage costs while I'll be away for probably three months. Funnily enough, it was also great for my two roommates, who moved into a Much Better apartment that is also cheaper thanks to one of their family connections. I got rid of a significant amount of stuff during the month but unfortunately I did not count it, sorry minimalism challenge people. After that, the move was pretty simple. In the bit of time I was back with my parents they enjoyed some of my cooking and it got my mom to say that she would have to step up her game, which feels nice.

Biking:
As I mentioned earlier, I got my bike fixed and I've been regularly biking to work at least 3 times a week as practicality/conditions allow, and it's been good. With the move, the 12.5 mile roundtrip has turned into a 21 mile roundtrip, but so far that has still been fine, although I do have to take it a little easier. I'm happy to bike, I have a route where I feel safe enough (and the drivers are generally pretty nice here), and as mentioned I only had one gas fill-up during the month thanks to biking.

Misc:
Not much music this month, just one gig and then church piano, although I've been practicing more piano now that I'm back at my parents' place where there is a real piano that is better to play than my electric keyboard.

My Japanese practice has been going well, I finished watching one anime completely in Japanese and have generally been fairly consistent and have seen improvement. This will continue to be a focus as I get closer to leaving on my trip.

I purchased Elden Ring: Nightreign and have been enjoying it. I've had a decreasing interest in playing video games over the past year+ but it's not the fault of the games and they're still fun. I just often have more important things to do.

Re: distractions, some improvement but still not where I'd like it to be. I'm experimenting with tracking my time. I noted my spending markedly improve after I started clearly looking at what I do with my money and thinking that could be applicable to time use as well. I've been doing it for about a week and a half and so far I think it's been at least somewhat informative. Only time will tell.

Thanks for sharing and good to read it's going well! A 21 mile roundtrip (I hope this means it's 10.5 one way) is a great way to exercise. During the ride you can decompress after work and "precompress" before work, so to speak.

A slightly different way to think about money is to ask what you want your money to do for you. "Give every dollar a job" in YNAB speak. I do this with the money I spend every month, and it helps me learn what my priorities really are. What's more important to me, 50 euros of food or 50 euros of holiday? Turns out I don't like travel half as much as I thought.

Moving in with your parents is cheap and convenient, but it's also a step back in "leaving the nest", so to speak. Most humans have around 50 healthy adult years. Like each dollar you have, each of these years can be spent only once.

Well, I'm in the office on my last day of work here. I've finished my last tasks, mostly cleaned off my desk, got my well-wishes. I baked some cookies to bring in, and it does seem like I am getting genuine "we will miss you and are happy for you, good luck" messages rather than just generic courtesies, which feels good. I felt like I did solid work here but I definitely could have been working harder, been more proactive about seeking stuff to do and things to learn. I have broken 100k which is pretty neat. I think when I look forward to future money-making endeavors, I definitely want to be somewhere where I want to be giving consistent, focused effort. Alternatively, I could work somewhere where I don't have to think about it much if I'm putting a lot of effort into my music or other non-job things. I want to be spending my time in valuable ways and for me I think one aspect of that is being either focused or relaxed at a given time rather than some sort of distracted mix.

The easy access to a good piano has resulted in increased time practicing. I've been working on this piece https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQG8IeClBkw, which is very difficult for me (especially trying to bring out the melody anywhere near the amount Lugansky does here). However, I do see the effort on the difficult piece paying off when I move back to some easier ones I know. In the couple weeks before I leave for my trip I'll hope to work it up enough to play the entire thing under tempo but solidly. This seems like a good example of the idea of "friction" involved in doing things you want/don't want to do. Even minor inconveniences can affect (at least my) revealed preferences significantly. If I want to practice piano, I should make sure it's easily available. If I want to bike, I should make sure I have clothes at the office to change into and that the bike is well maintained. If I don't want to get on my phone when you wake up, I should store it somewhere outside of my bedroom.

Axel's posts relating to identity security (and of course the many times it's been mentioned before) have been of interest to me. As I leave my job, I certainly don't feel like I'm losing my identity, but I do feel like I'm losing a little piece, and this piece can matter a lot to some people's perceptions of me. Fortunately, I can play the "I'm young and can do what I want" card, which can smooth some things over, and I do have interesting future prospects.

I'll have a couple weeks to chill out, do some car maintenance, get it ready for traveling/car camping, improve my Japanese to the final extent I can before leaving, finish trying to assemble some camping gear and then it's Japan time->hang with extended family in Washington->EREfest->hopefully EREfest afterparty in BC?->Maybe Vipassana retreat?->Not sure what goes here. I guess this will be the last bit of "normality" I have for a while.

This seems like a good example of the idea of "friction" involved in doing things you want/don't want to do. Even minor inconveniences can affect (at least my) revealed preferences significantly. If I want to practice piano, I should make sure it's easily available. If I want to bike, I should make sure I have clothes at the office to change into and that the bike is well maintained. If I don't want to get on my phone when you wake up, I should store it somewhere outside of my bedroom.

Nice. Now that is systems thinking. Willpower alone is only good for short-term changes but is a limited resource due to cognitive load and decision fatigue. The most effective strategies for behavioral changes are those that focus on changing structure, building habits, and adjusting your environment. Having a clear alignment between your identity and goals is also useful. This applies to a lot of things. Of course it is obvious to most that things you actually enjoy don't require any self-control or willpower at all but things that you don't enjoy will deplete these reserves. This can be managed as well - for instance, in terms of learning, finding the right amount of challenge is key.

The cool thing about following your systems is that over-time you can improve your own executive functioning from neuroplasticity / strengthened neural circuits. Less self-control is required as time moves on as identity is formed and habits are built. Failing (you didn't practice piano today, you ate that cookie when you're trying to cut sugar, you wasted time browsing your phone etc.) should ideally not be taken to heart as a character flaw but as emotionally neutral feedback to update your system(s).