spoonman's Journal

[spoonman]

#078 09/27/2014 -- 30 Day Notice

A couple of days ago we gave our landlord our 30 day notice to move out. The following day we got a written note (24 hour notice) from our landlord that they would be showing our apartment to prospective tenants twice this weekend. That’s right, they didn’t waste a microsecond in advertising the place to potential tenants, something that’s totally within their rights but happens to be inconvenient for us because we weren’t given adequate time to prepare our valuables. I say "they" because the building is managed by a father and son team, both of whom are complete morons when it comes to dealing with apartment situations. They are also woefully unaware of the proper way to address problems that are not disruptive to their tenants.

So this morning we actually had to stay home while the Son showed our apartment to prospective tenants. As you may imagine, the experience was exceedingly unpleasant and awkward. After the Son showed the apartment to two couples, we took advantage of a lull to quickly pack some personal items away and leave the apartment. We left some stuff exposed, after all we do still live here, but we were very much motivated to get the hell out before the next person arrived. The Son will show the apartment again tomorrow, but only in a 45 minute window in the afternoon, so we’ll be better prepared.

Going forward, this whole thing will be a thorn on our side until the apartment gets rented out. For working people this is not normally a big deal because they are at work during daylight hours, but we are hanging out at home a lot more now that we pulled the plug. The Son will try to show the apartment in the mornings and give us a 24 hour notice, which should mitigate the pain a bit.

This whole situation has motivated us to start trimming down our possessions in preparation for our move. This inconvenience, coupled with the fact that we will start selling our furniture, will make the first three weeks of October very challenging. I better start getting Stoic-savvy =).

I should note that we’ve enjoyed our apartment these past twelve months. It did have occasional problems, which weren’t terrible, but the manner in which the landlords dealt with the issues was quite aggravating. They only believed in developing "stopgap" solutions to problems that should have been dealt with decisively.

[spoonman]

#079 09/30/2014 -- Lunch and a Movie

Our landlord planned to show our apartment in the morning so we took the opportunity to go catch a morning matinee. We had a couple of movie vouchers left from a batch that we bought many months ago at Costco in order to mitigate the cost of our movie-going hobby.

There were only about ten other people in the theatre, half of which were of traditional retirement age. It was nice having the place mostly to ourselves.

The movie was supposed to start at 11am but the screen was stuck in some sort of calibration mode and was delayed by 25 minutes. The cool thing about that little inconvenience is that the management compensated us with voucher tickets with no restrictions (including IMAX movies). We could have gotten impatient and left right away, but by sticking around we essentially got to watch a movie for free.

Afterward we had an outside patio lunch at a local Italian restaurant. It was a bit pricey but we didn’t mind because it will be our last expensive restaurant meal in long while.

[m741]

Matinee movies are the way to go. I hate going to crowded movies - there's always someone who ruins the experience. Of course, I'm rarely able to attend weekday matinees, but even on weekends they're pretty good compared to evening shows.

[spoonman]

For the longest time I liked going to crowded movie theaters because I figured "the more the merrier". But these days I dislike crowds because 1) there's a higher chance that we'll sit next to someone that smells, 2) there might be someone that talks or otherwise ruins the experience, 3) sit behind a very tall SOB (no offense to tall dudes) that blocks my view in a threater without stadium seating. I could go on.

[spoonman]

#080 10/03/2014 -- Digitization Update

Way back at the end of last year (after we moved into our current apartment) I began to digitize paperwork we had been lugging around for years for record keeping. I made great progress and managed to digitize about 80% of our stuff, but after a point I got a bit lazy and ended up taking a 10 month break from the task. Now that we are getting ready to sell all of our furniture and enter a new phase of decluttering, we are back at the task again.

In between apartment showings by our landlord, we spent something like 7-8 hours scanning docs. Spoongirl did prep work prior to our last move and didn’t have too much to scan, so she’s off the hook now. It feels great to remove that load from our lives. I hope to finish digitizing the rest of my things by the end of the weekend.

[anomie]

Hey spoonman!

I found your post you mentioned:

#022 12/07/2013 -- Digitization Task Update


I wanted to check it before asking you about digital storage options. What are you saving all these scanned documents on? External portable hard drives? Have you explored cloud storage? Redundant backups? I have had a storage hard drive fail recently, and am looking into learning about hard drive repair.

I remember reading your post last year and telling my wife about your project. It is inspiring.

[spoonman]

@Anomie: Good to see you!

We have two saving mechanisms right now: 1) the cloud (google drive), 2) a portable hard drive. The latter we also use to backup other computer files and whatnot.

I totally hear you about failing hard drives. Our portable hard drive is very healthy right now (no bad sectors or anything), but that will innevitably change as time goes on. Right now I am witnessing my desktop computer's hard drive having its first signs of aging, which is no surprise because it's a 6 year old machine.

Last night I also uploaded my entire music library (less than 3,000 songs) to Google's Play Music, which can handle up to 20,000 songs for free. Although I keep entrenching myself in their ecosystem, I see it as worthwhile because it's incredibly convenient. I will also keep using Android quite a bit in the years to come.

[Pronoid]

Hey spoon. I'm going through the same type of digitizing project myself although on a much smaller scale. Mine just consist of memorabilia, old pictures, and tax documents. It's terribly boring scanning them and I look for every possible excuse to procrastinate at it - like replying to your Journal

I too am using a portable hard dive in addition to various cloud storage sites. I always sign up for all the free promotions from dropbox, copy, box, google drive, etc just so I have additional space. I have a ton of movies that I'm not sure how I going to redundantly store, though. The portable drive works fine but they are too big for the cloud. I don't really feel like lugging 2 drives around either.

[spoonman]

@IwantLess: Yeah, movies are the real challenge because they take up hundreds of gigabytes, far beyond the capacity of free cloud services. It'll be a bit of a pain, but we'll just have to bring our hard drive along wherever we go. Maybe at one point we'll deem it too heavy and just do without our movies.

[BPA]

Hey there, Spoonman! I just spent part of my day reading your journal and I wanted to say thanks for the inspiration! Wishing you and Spoongirl and safe and relatively unharried move. So very exciting.

[spoonman]

@BPA: Glad to hear you're enjoying the journal. We're just giving back to a great community!

We're about to enter the most harrowing part of the process: selling our furniture. It'll be challenging, to say the least.

[spoonman]

#081 10/06/2014 -- Finished Digitization

After a weekend tour de force, we have finished digitizing all of our paperwork. Scanning my schoolwork was a pain in the neck because I had to unbind some notebooks. Immediately after finishing my schoolwork, we began to tackle our dreaded file cabinet. It’s only a two drawer cabinet, but when we moved from our condo to our current apartment a year ago it was one of heaviest things (I know, because the movers told us so).

Spoongirl and I teamed up to create an assembly line of sorts. It consisted of filtering out paperwork into three piles: one for scanning, one for shredding, and one safe to recycle. We efficiently processed the scanning pile by first getting it ready, i.e. removing paperclips and staples, and then putting it through the scanner (Brother ADS 2000, the best money we've ever spent). The most challenging part of the scanning was associated with tax returns because we had lots of old receipts of different sizes.

The file cabinet is nice and empty now, something I’ve been waiting to see for a year.

I also went through a briefcase I've been lugging around for decades. The stuff inside went as far back as high school! It was an exhausting trip down memory lane, I felt a bit down afterward. Thankfully, Spoongirl had the sense to facepunch me and remind me that I’m better off Looking Forward, Not back. To anyone looking to digitize their old paperwork, be warned that you may get hit by the past.

Needless to say, it feels great to have this weight off our lives.

[spoonman]

#082 10/07/2014 -- Taking it Easy

Since we pulled the plug back in August we have been very busy traveling and taking care of business, such as digitizing our paperwork. So yesterday evening and today we took it easy.

These days we have been spending our Monday evenings watching Monday Night Football and going to bed at around 10 pm, but last night we stayed up late. We decided to live a little and spontaneously went out to get some french fries and beer at a local pizza joint. It was neat walking through our neighborhood at midnight. We got back home at around 1am and felt like college students again.

Aside from doing a couple of loads of laundry this morning, we've been napping and watching nature shows on Netflix most of the day. Sometimes it's good to veg out and take it easy.

[George the original one]

So what's your neighborhood like at midnight?

Mine, at 8pm, had a howling chorus of coyote pups as mom/dad brought something interesting to the den.

[spoonman]

@GTOO: It's mostly quiet, and not very well lit, but the bigger streets are still very active with people out and about. Wish we had howling coyotes!

[mxlr650]

Thanks for your updates. I find your post-FI updates very helpful (looking for apartments without regular job etc). I hope you keep this forum posted or write a book -- that sounds like work or what?

[spoonman]

@mxlr650:Glad you're enjoying the practical aspects of the journal.

Yeah, I suppose writing a book would be like having a job, but far far better. I'm not sure if I'll ever write a book because achieving FI is no longer all that novel. I might start a blog though.

[jacob]

A blog gets more feedback (if it's popular enough). A book is more permanent though and there aren't that many of them. FWIW, writing the book is "easy". Publishing it is a pain.

[spoonman]

@jacob: Thanks for the advice, hopefully publishing gets easier as time goes on. I may end up writing a little book that captures our instantiation of reaching financial independence, something that wouldn't give me grief if nobody bought it.

[spoonman]

#083 10/12/2014 -- Hustling

We've been very busy selling all of our furniture. I could write many paragraphs about all of our experiences, most of which have been very positive, but I'll just say that we've been getting a good workout helping people move our furniture to their cars. So far things have worked out great for us, so we are a bit "ahead of schedule".

On average we've recovered about 25% of the original cost of the furniture, with the IKEA stuff averaging more like 60%. Another thing worthy of note is that we've been able to score free moving boxes from Craigslist, saving ourselves around $50.

After a successful selling session yesterday, we hung out with some some friends one last time. We spent the rest of the day with them playing games and drinking wine. Leaving our friends behind will be hard, but we will visit each other in the future.

Today we are watching football and taking it easy, we are enjoying our large screen TV while we still have it.