Early Retirement Extreme Forums

27 books in three months = 9 books a month = approx. 2 books per week. Yeah, I know. I got mad fuckin math skills.

I struggle to read four per month. So far this year I am exactly on schedule - 28 read through July. They vary in fiction/non-fiction, each year usually has one topic that dominates.

Obviously Jacob has pre-natural focus. Some people read faster than others. It also requires the ability to remain in extreme solitude without ending up with notebooks filled with "All Work and No Play makes Jack a dull boy."

Any way you cut it, that's extreme monasticism shit right there.

Taleb's practice is 30 hours of not-easy-crap reading/week.

That's a good suggestion. I'll start with his books.

That Taleb looks like one formidable Mofo. It's like he's just deciding whether he's going to beat your ass in a debate or in the parking lot.

Uh-HUH. Now that Sam Shepard is no longer with us, he is like #19 on my list of Men I'd Like To Lose At Wresslin With.

jacob wrote: ↑

Sun Nov 27, 2016 12:03 pm

In the past several months I've been working on a new writing/research project (no comments) which has essentially taken over my focus. I'm turning into a total hermit. My neighbors are beginning to inquire "where I've been?" (Answer: In my room with a stack of books. 27 books read in the past 3 months, 90% nonfiction).

Speaking of focus, I'm beginning to change my mind on home-ownership because all the maintenance takes away from what I consider more interesting projects.

I feel like I could have written this, as I'm in the exact same boat. Well, maybe not in the book count but definitely on the research project / hermit / inquiring neighbors / house fatigue front. At some point I decided it was time to take active steps to break that cycle. Everybody is different, though.

7Wannabe5 wrote: ↑

Thu Aug 03, 2017 8:45 am

Uh-HUH. Now that Sam Shepard is no longer with us, he is like #19 on my list of Men I'd Like To Lose At Wresslin With.

As I've tried to best understand it, when God created Sam Shepard He said "Let me make a man. A tall, handsome, man. A man that every man wants to be, and which every woman wants to lie. A man who will forever be the coolest man into which every room he walks. A man who will succeed in everything he endeavors to. A man who will find fortune and fame without seeking it. A literary man. A man who will be known for playing men equally as cool as he in movies. And as this man needs a woman, I will provide one. And I will name her Jessica Lange. And he shall lie with this woman while she is in the prime of her life."

My wife and I were discussing him the day he died. We are big fans of Bloodlines. I read through most of his plays last year. She essentially admitted that she would have left me for him until the moment he died of ALS, maybe even for a while after that.

The only person I can think of who warrants a comparison is Kris Kristofferson.

How was 2017 at ERE HQ? Are you still considering relocation?

jacob wrote: ↑

Wed Feb 15, 2017 6:28 pm

Yes, we're really eyeing moving moving west of the Biggest River to get out of the financial cluster@#$@#$ over here on the east side.

Happy belated 10th birthday to ERE! The nonexistent celebration was the frugalest!

Would love to get an update on what's been going on with you lately Jacob!

Ugh! Journaling ... Okay, here we go.

Home ownership still feels like a drag. It would be very different if I enjoyed it, but I don't. My personality tends to lean towards enjoying results rather than the process and maintenance is more of a process. My parents have always been of the "buy something new, because then you don't have to worry about something breaking for the following X years". As a consequence, I have... or rather had literally zero home-owner skills beyond being able to hang a picture on the wall so that it was level.

However, ERE is very much about doing things yourself. This has meant there has been a steep learning curve for pretty much every single project and being a "light fixer-upper", this house came with many many projects. Likely the previous owner did nothing/little in terms of upkeep. The pressure is somewhat compounded by the fact that we also live here. This means that when I rip out something, we can't use it until I figure out how to put in a replacement.

Recently, we finished renovating the upstairs bathroom. (yeah, there's a downstairs one too. This house is really too big but they don't come much smaller around here ) I built a vanity (reused the old sink) from scratch (using scrap plywood) and a medicine cabinet (ditto). Our previous bathroom used the cheapest cabinets from Home Depot. After I realized that, I now see those cabinets everywhere (every home I visit ) ... Same way I started seeing cracks in people's drywalling everywhere after I fixed my own When I ripped out the medicine cabinet, it turned out there was a big hole in the wall. Brilliant! Solution: Build a cabinet to specs and put it in there. But it delayed the project by a couple of weeks and we ran the bathroom with one of these https://www.truepowertools.com/products ... 4464185347 hanging off the blinds. I also managed to install a fixture. Turns out nobody bothered to ground the previous fixture. I discover these previous homeowner snafus often enough. Overall, we spent about $50 on the whole thing. $20 went to an Ikea mirror after I failed to cut my own, $15 to the new light fixture, and $5 for the plumbing supplies and hinges. We already had the scrap wood + I used leftover paint from when we did our outside window frames, so I don't count that. The sink was reused and DW's sister gave us the armature (hubby is a plumber). Our neighbor was impressed ("I always wanted a vanity like that"(*)).

(*) I was trying to approximate an $800 designer piece---it was $800 when I looked at it the first time, now it's apparently $1045. Mine is a bit cruder than that, less curves (I need a draw knife) and single door---doubles wouldn't have worked since our bathtub is right on the right side... but it's somewhere along these lines.

But I often wonder ... maybe I should just bite the bullet and pay some contractor $3000+ and have them do it so I don't have to spend weeks of my life energy learning and building this stuff. After all, it does take my focus away from other stuff.

This was just one example.

Most of the energy comes from the fact that I'm learning as I'm doing. Doing stuff for the second time is much much faster! So here's a less frustrating illustration of when ERE principles + home ownership + experience works right. When we moved in the @#$@#$ previous homeowner had started putting in some illegal apartment in the basement (apparently that's common around here) w/o bothering to make the basement dry. We tore the shit out again and kept the two fluorescent 48" lamps from the "man cave"-to be. Those sat on the floor for a few years. This year, inspired by ffj's indoor vegetable growing, I built two stands out of 2x2s, 2x4s, and 1x4s to hang them from. This took <10 hours combined. Tools used: handsaw, #5 plane, powerdrill, kreg joints. Having lights over our starter-plants worked out much better than previous year. Now we grow rocket salad under all of them. That's about 1x8 sqft of constant growing space. I'm thinking about wheat grass.

Overall though, I find that I spend way too much time managing and maintaining this place to my liking and I think me doing interesting [to me] things is suffering. I suppose if you're into home-ownership, what I'm doing is very interesting. Our neighbors seem to think so. We're still a novelty around here and the place is looking better and better, but alas, it's not doing so much for me... The ROI is low in every dimension but the Zillow estimate. Those of you pursuing homeownership, I wish you the best of luck.

It's kinda funny that there's current(*) trend towards homesteading amongst FIRE-bloggers. If I hadn't gone to work in finance in 2011, I would surely have bought a homestead in Oregon or New York. Now, it's hard to overstate how lucky I (and my mental stability) was not to have done that. This house+garden is already beyond how much pleasure I can stand from living authentically close to nature.

(*) Maybe it's not current. Maybe it's more that homesteading aspirations are the next step after FIRE and that there's just a lot more FIREs now? Maybe we'll see more mea culpas when it comes to homesteading 5-10 years from now. Next step for us will be a 1bd/1ba apartment with a feking HOA so I can stop shoveling snow and moving lawns and maybe do more important stuff(?)

In other ERE-relevant news ... literally.

This spring, I've talked to more TV journalists than I can keep track off. So somewhere around 5-7 Most of them Danish and one US based. This has meant doing 0-2 skype sessions per week. I used to have a no-TV policy, but the climate on that front has definitely changed from "looking for freaks for our freak show" to "lots of people are talking about this as a solution to stress, sustainability, ...". Yeah, no shit. For 10 years already, ...

So everybody contacted me within the same month or two. As a result I've done two pitches which involves me recording/uploading 45-90 mins of video worth of a house-tour + my ranting about consumerism and sustainability .. and them cutting it into something they might sell (yes, I see the irony) to a TV station. And diverted some successfully to other bloggers. Results so far is that I'll definitely be part of one Danish program and possibly the US one too if they can raise more money (it seems to be going more in the "frugality is for the rich" direction lately?).

There's more stuff and some pertinent conclusion, but I grow tired of journaling, so I'll end it for now ...

Thanks so much Jacob for taking the time to update, I get a lot out of your experiences.

I agree with DIY major house projects...its the amount of time it will take for one to learn from scratch (vs. other higher value things you could be doing). Especially if you are like me and not too handy. Also, one has to have an interest and enjoyment in remodeling. And its one thing to put a lot of effort into learning something you will do multiple times or relatively frequently (fixing one's bike, gardening)...but if it takes a month to learn some house renovation or fix you may only do once every decade, if that, that is harder are sell.

Another example of this is my car. My car has only had two problems that required mechanics in the last 7 years. To learn how to fix these things from scratch myself would have taken a ton of time, and I may only have to use engine fixing skills a few times in a decade since cars break so much less these days.

I have owned a number of town home rental properties and I have really liked the low amount of maintenance. The HOA handles everything outside the walls. I go against the herd on this, as most do not like town homes due to the HOA issues and high dues. And rightly so, some condos are nightmares. But I found if you research the HOA's financial stability and history, you can find good ones. And I would ONLY buy town homes with no one above or below (i.e no multiple story apt style condos on top of each other). No pools, no elevators, nothing fancy...and thus HOA dues can be low. And HOA covers water, sewer, garbage, landscape, pest control. Of course these are rentals I don't live in them (I rent a 1 bed apt). As rentals, I also like how the HOA polices noise and doesn't allow people to put junk in yard, tons of cars on blocks, noise, aggressive dog breeds, etc... This all really helps from a absentee landlord perspective with the fact HOA is keeping an eye on things.

Are you planning to stay in Chicago?

I agree on renting a 1 bed apt vs. house owning...its what I do. But I do think about moving to a area outside of a smaller city, and would like to have a house on some land & space. But don't want the maintenance. Maybe I can figure out a low maint manufactured type home with native landscaping that needs little effort.

I definitely understand your slight frustration with home ownership.
My personal ideal of it is a new, super small place (which we are in the process of purchasing in our hometwon now) to be used as a backup in case SHTF work wise for some reason.
Other than that, it's always been (and always will be) rent of small places in the city center.

small = less cleaning to do, less space to stock stuff
in the city center = comfortable car free life

Since no one else is asking it... how is your research going?

@Fish - *Smack!* (I've literally been in that exact situation as the postdoc)

@Seppia - When we were buying, there were a few apartments down on Lake Shore for about the price we paid here. They were listed as vintage which I at that point (living in a vintage apartment rental) already knew was an euphemism for squeaky floors, steam-heated, and sound insulation standards concordant with an earlier and more civilized time. My preferred location is in the perimeter of the actual city because you have "nature" (farms close enough to smell the manure) on one side and the city on the other. Of course here, instead of nature, we have 30+ miles of suburbs. So I think I'd add non-metropolitan to the list of criteria.

@Allagash - The recent bathroom renovation was a trial run for the kitchen renovation which seems like a bigger project. The city requires a building permit for this one. Fortunately, permits for homeowners are free as long as you don't exceed $800 in parts and labor. Ha! No problem. Now the fun is in sourcing materials. We got a free sink (top picture), I think exactly like this. It's a cast iron monster that weighs 150+ lbs. I'll have to build the cabinet to support it---but I've already done that for the bathroom---so that's the easy part. Since these sinks go for $1000 and attract .. uh ... people like me when it comes to selling which would otherwise make up for the complete lack of granite counter tops and faux oak cabinets that attracts people like .. everyone else, I want to put it in if at all possible. It also fits the original 1950s design of the house. (Our house was built in 1948.)

The fun challenge ( ) is that the faucets are mounted on a surface that's slanted 45 degrees back. After some research (this is a google-hard problem), I found that it's called a "slant back" mount and that "they" apparently don't make them anymore(?!) or at least it's not something that you can just pick up for $50-100 at a random building center. So far I've found an "olde faucet shoppe" in Chicago, so I'll head over there to see if they can assist.

At one point our neighbor gave me a stack of "This Old House". It was pretty clear that there are some people ... many people .. who do this for fun, looking to upgrade stuff just because they like doing these projects, tearing down one room after another, moving walls. I don't like such doing, but I do like it when they're done and knowing that I did them.

However, working on a house kinda breaks one of the cardinal ERE rules of value production. While it's net-neutral/sweat-equity, it's not scalable. DW and I are literally the only people who find any use or value in this work. It's not like blogging or inventing some product that can be sold to multiple people. IOW, I'm exchanging human-time one-to-one. What I learn here benefits no-one else. It does not seem wise.

We do not plan to stay in Chicago forever.

jacob wrote: ↑

Wed May 23, 2018 4:53 pm

Next step for us will be a 1bd/1ba apartment with a feking HOA so I can stop shoveling snow and moving lawns and maybe do more important stuff(?)

The one complaint I have on this front is the use of pesticides. I don't know if its a universal issue, but when large swaths of lands are communally owned, aesthetics and costs are prioritized over environment/growing, and management is outsourced, it does seem to be common. If you are sensitive to the chemicals or ideologically opposed, it may be a consideration.

I recently read an article about how the number of bugs have been declining over the past few decades (twice as many flying insects back when I was born---also half the number of humans). Perhaps it's all part of the sixth mass extinction, but if bugs go away, literally everything falls apart; whereas if humans die out, "we" (the proverbial one) will see a return to biological diversity. Roundup is now detectable in people's bloodstreams. It makes it into the water. We then drink the water. Presumable other animals do the same thing.

Another fun fact; some 1000-year old dude was dug out of the ice on Iceland. On examining his stomach contents, researchers found forty (40!!) different plants. He ate 40 different plants the day before he died. Were I to be frozen today, future researchers would find 6 different plants in my stomach.

We have a gaggle of bumble bees moving into our garage. I'm letting them be (ha!) because they're bumble bees. They're otherwise kinda rare around here.

jacob wrote: ↑

Mon May 28, 2018 10:28 am

However, working on a house kinda breaks one of the cardinal ERE rules of value production. While it's net-neutral/sweat-equity, it's not scalable. DW and I are literally the only people who find any use or value in this work. It's not like blogging or inventing some product that can be sold to multiple people. IOW, I'm exchanging human-time one-to-one. What I learn here benefits no-one else. It does not seem wise.

I made last part in Italics, It does not seem ERE-wise is what you mean, I think.
But personally it can be wise to make changes which make you happy.
I think that never a rule/view/philosophy may be so invading that all what you do is ruled by it.
Even when you know that once you will leave this house for another, you have had it some time as you fancied it.

And maybe, is there in the future another couple who will one time decide to buy your house, just because that adapted kitchen!

Maybe it could be designated as a historical site and turned into an ERE museum. When you think of all the stupid places people drag themselves to look at shit whether it's Anne Frank's attic or a stairwell where they hid Hester Prynne or where George Washington allegedly took a dump, what's the difference . "This is the hand made wooden desk upon which JLF wrote his book, these are the cup holders made from JLF's discarded shoe soles, this is the room where JLF instructed his dog to clean his testicles within a web of goals." I've been to worse.

do u still care about low heating expenses in winter?
or with additional/unused 20k USD/yr from investments you simply became mellow and turned thermostat up?

how have ur wife dealt with low temperatures in winter?
I assume she simply also used butcher's suit?

What happened with the wood working?

@stahlmann - Every time I emit CO2, the future dies a little, so I still care. The thermostat is set at 57F/14C except when we have guests in which case they get to choose a setting. I think most of our natgas is burned heating up water, so I've been thinking of switching back to cold showers again. I did become mellow or is that languid on that.

I wear one of these: https://www.refrigiwear.com/product/chi ... 440rnavlar
DW wears these jacket+trousers: https://www.refrigiwear.com/category/coolerwear

Let the internet's FIRE-fashionista outrage begin

@reepicheep - Since the last update above, I made a Nicholson bench and a saw bench to create a real workshop in the basement instead of the "workmate+toolbox" setup I had previously. Initially my goal was to go full neanderthal with handtools only using no technology(*) made after 1750 (that excluded vises too... how to work w/o a vise? Bench dogs and holdfasts). However, I've moved that up to about a 1950 cut-off. I bought a bunch of electric motors so I can run power tools using pulleys and belts. The idea being that belt-driven tools could also be human-powered tools.

This involves playing with electricity that according to the warning labels come with a certain risk of loss of life and/or execution. So far so good. Recently, I managed to rig a DC motor with speed control w/o losing any fingers or heartbeats. I feel somewhat more confident now in terms of the "hows" of line voltage fault protection than I did half a year ago. Plan is to build a reciprocating power hacksaw. I think that's a good beginner project.

No progress on the kitchen sink mentioned above... but I did spend another roughly $40 building a set of kitchen cabinets+countertops. For those who have seen our kitchen at various meetups, the kitchen counter along the window now goes all the way over (wall to wall)---I filled out the gaps.

(*) Except my cheater scroll saw.

@all - General update here: https://www.getrichslowly.org/early-retirement-extreme/ ... doesn't include much recent stuff. I try to avoid writing about things in progress.