Early Retirement Extreme Forums

I did some research on annuities last, but the payout is really bad. I just did the calculations again (with one provider) and if I pay in 60.000€ I'd get a guaranteed 97€ per month, forever. That means I'll get my principal back in ~50 years (age 83). With inflation added on top that's a really bad deal :/

I might have to do some more research on different providers, but it doesn't look all that great.

A quick update on what's going on right now:

Wedding aftermath
The wedding is 2 weeks past now and we managed to visit most of the people we couldn't invite. This was mostly visiting our parents over a few days and celebrating with them. We also invited over a few friends that couldn't come ot the "party", though. Overall this was very stressful, as I'm not a people person, so I'm recuperating now.

We also managed to see the notary regarding our prenup and had a very exciting 90 minute talk. I had researched most talking points beforehand, but it was great to be talked through once more by someone who does this for a living. We already received the first draft and it's including everything we imagined. This was quite surprising, because we basically excluded any kind of (forced) mutual support during or after our marriage. I'm not saying we won't help each other out, but having to is not our way of doing things.

In addition to the prenup we also set up an inheritance contract and a document (german: Vollmacht) to give each other power of attorney in case of sickness/incarceration/etc. Overall this will cost us ~3.000€, but I feel like it's worth it to have all our stuff figured out.

As far as money goes, we received a lot of gifts, as mentioned. I'm not quite sure whether and how to include all of this in my calculations, which is giving me headaches right now. But I guess I have another 2 weeks to figure that out until the monthly bookkeeping session.

Work
Work has been pretty stressful for the few weeks before the wedding and my vacation. My system is used in 3 different projects now and new requirements just keep coming in. This is in addition to all the wrinkles the system still has. I did however manage to get ahead on most problems and automated away a few common failure cases this last week, so it's pretty chill now. We'll see how things develop now that a 4th project is on the horizon.

What was really stunning about this week was how effective I can be while developing new software modules in the home office. I'm a big fan of coming together in person if necessary, but that was not required this week. So I managed to make leaps and bounds without being disturbed by anyone, which is great.

Unfortunately it seems like we'll be forced to "repopulate" the offices in September/October. I've tried to feel out a few coworkers and apparently noone is especially stoked about this. So we'll most likely keep sneaking in copious amounts of home office, since the boss is almost always absent. Not sure how I feel about this, but it's to early to tell how the boss will handle this issue.

Strength Training
I've made some good progress on my self-made routine for working up to my previous weights. The routine was mostly a thorough warmup with a single top set for as many repetitions as possible (up to 12). However, it seems like my approach is too strenuous, as my recent deadlifting session cut into recovery quite hard. Consequently, yesterday's workout was a complete mess strength-wise and left my elbows hurting once more.

I've thus decided to scale the effort back and go with a submaximal approach (Jim Wendler's 5/3/1) from here on. This calls for doing a squatting movement, too, which I've avoided until now because of knee issues. Those issues have lessened over time, though, so I'm excited to get back to squatting soon. I'm hoping that this approach is a bit more sustainable and more gentle on my joints.

Mycology
After a few unfruitful mushroom-hikes earlier this year, I had decided to let things rest until the summer comes around. Since it should be the start of the Bolete/Chanterelle season now, we decided to go out on a mushroom-hike while visiting the parents last week. We managed to find 9 different varieties of mostly inedible mushrooms, but still had a lot of fun. A few specimen are still unidentified as of yet, but I'm frustrated by their same-ness and might not be able to identify them conclusively. Nevertheless, it looks like I've caught the mushroom-fever once more.

Alright, this was a busy month, but I think I figured it out:

Finances
This month was far from normal as far as money movements go. With the wedding we had a lot of abnormal expenses, but also some income from what was left of the money gifts we received. I had to make a few choices on how to resolve the bookkeeping hell, but I'm mostly happy with how I handled that. Overall I managed a 74% savings rate, even though I had to put some money aside for our impending vacation



With all this done, I still have ~1.400€ left for the notary, with another ~400€ put aside for our vacation. Both of these will likely be more expensive, but the payments will hopefully not be due until next month.

Wedding aftermath
We still need to sign our prenup, which is delayed by my wife not having her official ID with the new name yet. She's getting it right now, though, so we should be able to make the final appointment soon. We've already received the first draft and had very little that needed to be changed. This should all be over next month. I also managed to book all the expenses and money gifts now, so there's not much more to do as this whole thing draws to a close.

Fitness
I changed up my routine towards a submaximal approach, but might have overdone it with the volume. I still need to figure this out, so there's not much to say right now. I did, however, start squatting again and my knee doesn't seem to mind, so I take that as a small win.

---

Other than that there's not much left to say. I'll be doing a whole raving post about my investments in the next few days, but right now I'm exhausted from my adventures in bookkeeping

I'm unable to move much right now, so why not bitch about it on my journal?

The weekend
I didn't really do much walking (nevermind hiking) over the last few weeks as I was focusing on my strength training programm. Last week, however, I decided to just go and walk for a bit. This "bit" turned into 4 hours (18km) as I lost track of time. What's more, I felt really good afterwards as I figured a few things out while walking for hours without any music or podcasts.

The next day I went out again for another 3 hours, while also looking for mushrooms whenever a forested patch would pop up. I managed to find some "barely edible" mushrooms (says my book) and came in at around 13km. Again, I felt great after having so much time to myself.

As I track all of my longer walks/hikes, I noticed that I was standing at 31km for the weekend and set an arbitrary goal to hike the marathon distance (~42km) this weekend. This is where it all fell apart, though. I noticed a bit of stiffness and tingling in one of my toes, but chose to ignore it. While this is normally best practice as the pain leaves after a while, this time it stayed with me for the whole 12km I did that day.

The aftermath
So, I managed my goal of doing "a marathon" this weekend, but it left me unable to walk for the last few days. Apparently I managed to aggravate a nerve in my front foot which is now resulting in a sharp pain shooting down my 2nd toe. I avoided walking for the most part for the last 5 days, but the healing process is taking forever. I tried to roll around on a lacrosse ball, but that made everything worse and might have set me back a day or two. It's now day 6 and if I really watch my gait and posture, I can walk for a few minutes at a time without significant pain again. So it looks like everything will be fine again. I only wasted a whole week, lol.

Going forward
What's much more important however, is the psychological effect hiking has on me. I'm not a naturally joyous person as I tend to focus on problems and all the bad stuff. Hiking somehow takes my mind out of that and shifts my focus towards the good things even long after I'm home again. Maybe this is what being happy feels like?

Another important finding from this weekend was that I seem to have cured my bad knee somehow. Either that or it was a huge coincidence that I managed 40+ km in 3 days without any bad knee pain. Not to say that my knees didn't hurt a bit afterwards, but it was... good knee pain? Like the sort that you'd expect, can explain and that actually goes away again. So that's great, and I blame my strength training for that.

Going forward, I'll try to keep up 2 training sessions during the week with a lot of hiking on the weekend. Or maybe I'll space it out more, but that's tricky. We'll see. Anyway, that's my braindump for this week :p

Edit: I'm an idiot. I can still ride my bike with that nerve thing. Just went for 29km after fixing a flat. Life is good again

Fluens Capital - Q2 Report
The term "Fluens Capital" is a working title for my own portfolio. As I might or might not turn this thing into a full-fledged mini-corporation with all the paperwork in the future, I decided to view my investing as a real (side-)business going forward.

The Paradigm Shift
Ever since I started saving up for financial independence I tried to be open about it. The problem with this is that people just don't get it. I'd mostly get the "rice and beans to live off rice and beans" line. This was immensely frustrating, as I felt that with the right wording the idea would be much more accessible for people.

When I started researching how to turn my investing into a full-on corporation, I noticed how I'd think about it differently than before. I started to feel all professional when looking at my investing and added a monthly performance metric to my already quite sophisticated excel sheet. I noticed that I'm actually quite profitable, so I decided to communicate my investing activities as a real business towards the outside world.

This had a profound effect on how people would look at me when I told them about my plan. I was no longer the "rice and beans" weirdo, but an actual small-time investor. I had the numbers to prove that I can make a profit and the whole framework of money making seems to shift people's perception away from the frugality aspect. Suddenly, I was not only successfull on my own terms, but I was winning at their game too. This gave me a whole new identity of the successfull entrepreneur, that I now choose to ride until I don't have to care anymore.

Q2 Report
After retroactively adding performance metric to my excel sheet from the beginning of the year I noticed that I'm actually making a quite sizeable profit. Granted it's 2021 and I only started tracking after the corona-recovery, so all data that I have is during the current bull market. Nevertheless, this has really shifted my perception of how well I'm doing. This is why I've decided to delve into the whole business tracking thing and write this little report on my "corporation".

Overall 2021 was the best year since I started investing 7~8 years ago. I managed to make 5.354€ in the first quarter and another 4.303€ in the second quarter. YTD I made a stunning 9.657€ in profit, which translates to 17,90% of portfolio performance over just six months.
(Disclaimer: I did buy GME in January and it went down rapidly. I choose to not view this as part of "the corporation", so it's not included here. With GME included, I'd still be at +7.900€ this year).

The performance chart for the last 12 months (since I started tracking everything) looks like this (blue line is ETFs, red line is individual stocks):



The capital/profit-ratio has developed similarly well, with next to no gains last August to ~28% gains this July:



If this were to continue (and it probably won't), it would be enough to pay for all of my expenses over the last 12 months, so I'm quite happy with this. It's a nice feeling to be theoretically able to pay all of my expenses from profits, at least right now.

Future Plans
Most of this is based on a 3-ETF portfolio, which performed roughly as advertised over the last few years. In hopes of getting a bigger piece of the cake, I've decided to buy a few individual stocks on the side however. The current plan is to choose a few big tech-stocks and see how they perform in relation to my ETFs. This is apparently called a Core/Satellite-strategy and I'm aiming to buy individual stocks until I'm at 80% ETFs and 20% individual stocks.

It's an experiment that started at the end of May this year, and it's doing exceptionally well right now. I'll have to see how this goes over the next few months, but if it works out to beat my EFT-portfolio, I might increase the 80/20 ratio some more.

Conclusion
Overall I'm very happy with my investment returns this year. It's of course a wild time right now and a rising tide lifts all boats and all that. It's nice to see how I could in theory be able to pay my expenses from investing alone however, even if my dataset is limited to the best case scenario right now. It's going to be interesting to watch this development, especially during a longer correction.

This whole professionalising of my investment activities had a profoundly positive effect on my mindset however, so I'm very glad to have taken this route. It's a bit early to fully grasp all the changes in my personality/bearing yet, but I've become much more confident in what I'm doing at least. Now let's hope the next bear market won't knock that right out of me.

As reported, I somehow managed to get hiking again without my knee giving me too much trouble. Since I've done quite well financially over the last year, I don't see much that can be improved in that regard anymore. So I'd like to shift the focus of my journal towards "adventuring", as was the inital plan when I started this, anyway.

Finances
The last month went well. Even though I paid ~400€ in hotel costs for our vacation in late September, I managed to save 64% of my income. This puts me well over 70k€ net worth. yey!

Adventuring
In early July I managed to back into hiking and went for 43km over the weekend at the beginning of the month. This led to a nerve-thing in my foot which left me unable to hike for the next 3 weeks. After feeling sorry for myself for a few days I noticed that riding my bike didn't aggravate the issue at all, so I switched over to biking for a few weeks.

The first few rides were not as long as I would have liked. Surprisingly, the problem was my upper body, as my elbows can't really deal with the stress from lying on the handlebars that long. It also wasn't as fun as I would have liked, as I was having difficulties adjusting to the need to be attentive and "on" all the time. Normally, when I hike I'm rummaging around in my head for hours, so this was quite different.

Nevertheless I quickly took a liking to this new activity after a few rides. Consequently, I now have integrated bike riding into my regular schedule. What's more, biking delivers everything that I expected it would. I can get around quickly and without much energy expenditure, so my radius of action (without using the train or a car) has grown quite significantly. The added benefits of cross-training (different stress on joints and muscles) seem to allow for some additional training volume, too.

In the meantime I have regained my ability to hike at least 12km in one go (didn't try more), so everything is well now. Over the cours of July I managed the following mileages:

• Hiking/Walking: 122km (including walks to work/the grocery store)

• Biking: 148km

After all those new impressions over the last month I also managed to create something of a "training plan" for the remaining season. The biggest kicker was the realisation that strength training won't be much of a priority in-season, so I had to let go of any illusions of progressing my working weights for the next few months. Nevertheless I still lift some challenging weights 2x a week to hopefully strengthen my joints and keep what little gains I made. The rest of the week is split up into 2 hikes and 2 bike rides. This was adapted from a Duathlon training book, as what I do is quite duathlon-like. Since I hike instead of run, most of the intensity will have to come from biking, but I'm not there yet condition-wise.

With one eye to the fall and winter season, I'm also evaluating indoor bike training. I have an old indoor trainer, but my new bike just wouldn't fit. After getting an adapter it is now too loud to train on it, even in the basement (I have knobby tires). I'm still evaluating if maybe I want to get another rear wheel and fit that for indoor training or whether I'll buy a direct drive smart trainer that does away with the rear wheel completely. The cost would be ~150€ for a replacement wheel, while the new trainer would be 600€ and a lot less hassle. This is complicated by sudden knee pain that developed during my 20 minutes indoor ride on my old bike. I suspect the saddle height was off, which led to the knee pain, but I can't say for sure. So for next month my goal will be to evaluate the feasibility of indoor training.

In the past when I was training more for biking and I lived in a much colder climate I would use an indoor trainer. The trainer did not wobble side to side like when out on the road/trails. I found it took many micro adjustments to make it more comfortable for longer indoor riding sessions because my position was hardly changing. If I recall there were some videos on youtube to show you how to do this systematically based on the style of bike. Keep after it!

Yeah, there's definitely a lot of wobbling and stabilization missing from indoor training. I have a drop bar, but even with the 3 positions this is giving me, the strain on my upper body feels much harder than when I'm riding outside. Or maybe I just focus on the strain so much because there's not much else to do while riding in the basement. I'll still have a lot of optimizing to do...