lean-FIRE dispatches from the edge of the world

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LetsRetireYoung
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lean-FIRE dispatches from the edge of the world

Post by LetsRetireYoung »

As promised elsewhere, voila - my journal. :)

I'm the proprietor of the Let's Retire Young blog, a huge fan of the ERE blog from way back when (though I'd never realized there was a forum too :lol: ), a Russian-American-Canadian dude (eventually to be Russian-American-Canadian-French once I become a local here in Quebec) who declared lean-FIRE retirement at the ripe old age of 34.

I'm a nomad, entrepreneur, recovering workaholic, and in possession of a wacky improbability field that makes most of the stories I tell sound like completely made-up malarkey. :P I described my personal lean-FIRE journey (from rags to sorta riches) over yonder, in case anyone is curious.

tl;dr - since 2003, after moving from Siberia, I lived in rural Nevada, then Reno, Vegas, Fort Worth, Tampa, Seattle, Toronto, and finally Quebec City. It's so beautiful here... Definitely helps that the all-inclusive rent on a one-bedroom apartment in the middle of the city (with fast Internet and everything) is only $480 USD. 8-) Someday, somehow, I'll turn this into the central destination for the ERE and/or lean-FIRE crowd.

It's been almost 2 months since I moved here... Learning French is an interesting new challenge: the grammar is somewhat easy (especially after having studied Russian, English, German, Spanish, and Japanese) but the pronunciation borders on music appreciation. Slowly but surely, eh? At this point, I'm only mildly amused by ornate storefront signs advertising "PAIN" (that's French for "bread" :lol: ) in the tourist section, and I can slooowly express myself using the handful of prompts that I know. It'll get better.

For now, it's the Halloween week. My homemade golden mask (total cost: ~$4) with my black suit will make for an excellent Squid Game VIP costume mwahahaha

To be continued...

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Re: lean-FIRE dispatches from the edge of the world

Post by thrifty++ »

I will be interested in following your journal - Quebec City has been on my radar for some time.

In particular I am interested to hear how the cold goes.
a
IIm curious to know what your lean fire digits are if you are comfortable to share them?

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LetsRetireYoung
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Re: lean-FIRE dispatches from the edge of the world

Post by LetsRetireYoung »

thrifty++ wrote:
Thu Oct 28, 2021 1:13 am
I will be interested in following your journal - Quebec City has been on my radar for some time.

In particular I am interested to hear how the cold goes.
a
IIm curious to know what your lean fire digits are if you are comfortable to share them?
Sure thing! The cold won't be a huge deal, seeing as I'm originally from Siberia and all. :lol: I can handle it, I just don't really like it. From what the locals said, the city deals with the snow well: the sidewalks get salted (or sanded?), the roads get cleared, etc. Should be interesting...

As for my lean-FIRE digits, I use a multi-stage approach with multiple safeties:
1. My taxable account with a couple hundred thousand - more than enough to withdraw $12K USD a year or even a bit more.
2. 5 years ago, I bought a condo in Shoreline (a plucky little town that declared independence from Seattle in the 90s LOL) simply because mortgage + HOA was a lot cheaper than actually renting in Seattle. That 20% downpayment on the cheapest condo in all the land had used up all my savings at the time. I also knew that in 2024, they'd build a subway (aka Link) station just a few blocks away. Either everyone else thought that wouldn't actually happen, or people are really short-sighted, because now the construction is still on schedule, and the condo's value jumped from $175K to $268K. :mrgreen: (It's currently a rental that nets me ~$100 a month, and a lot more than that in tax deductions haha) I have no idea just how high it'll fly by 2024, but once that subway is finished, I'll gently say goodbye to the tenant, fly into town for a month to spruce the place up, and then sell it. Even without the primary residence exclusion (meaning I'd have to pay the capital gains tax), it'll be at least another $100K net in my pocket, and likely a lot more.
3. My Roth IRA and 401k from my US adventures each has about $100K in it. They'll compound for another 25 years, which means a) a nice chunk of change!, and b) my taxable stash only needs to last me for 25 years. I'm playing for a draw, not for a win.
4. I reeeally don't expect Social Security to still be around in 30 years - they'll probably raise the eligibility age to 72 or some such. Nonetheless, I'd paid enough into the system that I'm eligible for the full Social Security payout when the time comes.

And, of course, I'm always experimenting with the notion of finding people who would pay me for the things I love to do. :) Right now, it's writing about personal finance and playing video games, but I'm also experimenting with kalimba music and photography with my trusty old Nikon D5100. I have infinite time... <3

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LetsRetireYoung
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Re: lean-FIRE dispatches from the edge of the world

Post by LetsRetireYoung »

Last night was the first house party I've been to in at least two years. It was lovely. Fun costumes (I went as a VIP from the Squid Game hahaha), 10 beautiful women doing a dance-off, some alcohol, etc. Even without the long stretch of covid loneliness, that was an above-average party. :)

I like Fridays... Yesterday, I sold some same-day-expiration covered calls on some of my stocks ($22 USD net - not enough to retire on :P but $22 more than I would've had otherwise), got out of bed :P , did my thrice-weekly power hour (30 minutes of upper-body workout + 30 minutes of French lessons), had a protein-rich brunch, and wrote 3 posts for my blog, scheduled to drop on Friday/Monday/Wednesday. And then the Halloween party.

I love that mix of simple joy and zero deadlines or shitty bosses. Life is pretty sweet. :)

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Re: lean-FIRE dispatches from the edge of the world

Post by LetsRetireYoung »

A friend gave me an idea... I'm expanding my little blog to Medium now! :) It's an interesting compromise - there are millions of readers hanging out there already, so there is a viable platform (as opposed to competing with other blogs for Google search results placement), and I just need to come up with good headlines and images. (And the content too, I suppose. :P )

And so, behold! https://letsretireyoung.medium.com/ (For the record, my name rhymes with "story" and "sin" when pronounced correctly. Yes, it's very Russian. No, you probably didn't pronounce it right, but that's okay. :) )

Now the new goal is to climb my way up to 100 followers. If any of y'all want to click that "Follow" button, it'd be very appreciated. :) I'll keep feeding the main blog's content into Medium until they synchronize, and then update them both three times a week in unison. This should be fun... The end goal is getting an offer to write a weekly financial column in some syndicated publication. Barring that, I figure that after I publish 100 posts (3 times a week; 1,000+ words per post), I might be able to find an agent and get it published as a real-life book. Dreams and aspirations! :lol:

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Re: lean-FIRE dispatches from the edge of the world

Post by thrifty++ »

Interesting. Thanks for sharing the stash digits. Its actually less learn FIRE than I thought. I was thinking maybe it was more like $300k USD for your NW but looks more like $500k USD. Sounds like quite a large safety margin.

Gosh, look at your social life already. Sound like a local!

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LetsRetireYoung
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Re: lean-FIRE dispatches from the edge of the world

Post by LetsRetireYoung »

Nah, it was an Anglo party - we're the minority here in Quebec City. Everyone there was a fellow wanderer, with their own story as to how they ended up here, at the edge of the world. Sort of like Canterbury Tales or the first Hyperion book. :)

It was so very, very strange to be almost the oldest and definitely the least educated person there, with my measly BA in political science. :lol:

And hey - happy to help with my lean-FIRE figures. :) I'm always looking for ways to monetize my hobbies, possibly because I got slightly too obsessed with money during my 16 years in the States. I'm pretty sure the stash will eventually start growing instead of remaining stable haha

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LetsRetireYoung
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Re: lean-FIRE dispatches from the edge of the world

Post by LetsRetireYoung »

This is an amazing hour-long podcast with the world's top expert on procrastination. He brings up an interesting point: as a society, we punish those who are late, but we never reward those who are early. What a fascinating incentive structure that would be...

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LetsRetireYoung
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Re: lean-FIRE dispatches from the edge of the world

Post by LetsRetireYoung »

Last week, I've restarted my sourdough starter experiment after 2 failed attempts last year. (I know, I'm 18 months late to this party.) Clint Yeastwood III was born from a few bread crumbs and some grape skin. I figured out my previous mistake: I was using cold chlorinated tap water - after I switched to warm boiled water, things got a lot better!

One other thing that had failed me in the past was not having a good warm place for the starter to grow. (There's only so much you can cuddle that jar. :lol: ) After trying the back of my gaming PC and the top of the fridge, I just heated up the oven to 150 degrees, turned it off, and put the starter inside. It grew so fast! :shock: I'm going to go with the feeding/discarding cycle a few more times, and then I'll get to enjoy my very own homebaked sourdough bread. :D

Between that, and the fact that apparently it's possible to make pancakes with the discarded starter, and the slim possibility of making my own beer if I just add some hops (or barley or wort - or whatever it is), I feel like I've found an actual life hack. So much entertainment and almost-free food, all for the price of a little flour.

Between that, and growing my 2 little air plants, and my guppy fish (his name is Fishmael), I like the direction I'm going as I slowly but surely deconvert myself from being a workaholic Amazombie... It'll take time, but exploring that nature/cooking/crafty part of myself already feels great.

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GandK
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Re: lean-FIRE dispatches from the edge of the world

Post by GandK »

I enjoy your writing style.

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LetsRetireYoung
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Re: lean-FIRE dispatches from the edge of the world

Post by LetsRetireYoung »

GandK wrote:
Tue Nov 02, 2021 10:12 am
I enjoy your writing style.
Thank you - this made my day. :)

There's more where that came from haha - my personal blog that goes back about a decade, my lean-FIRE blog, and the Medium mirror of the lean-FIRE blog that has all the same content but where I'm trying to collect 100 followers. (Hint hint, nudge nudge. ;) )

There will be lots more to come...

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mountainFrugal
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Re: lean-FIRE dispatches from the edge of the world

Post by mountainFrugal »

Hello @LRY. I have been enjoying your journal and other posts so far. Especially the discussions of lesser known Canadian ER cities. Would it be possible to translate/refine some of your blog content using ERE principles and add to the various threads/discussions on this forum, rather than directing people to an externally linked blog? I look forward to following along on here.

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LetsRetireYoung
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Re: lean-FIRE dispatches from the edge of the world

Post by LetsRetireYoung »

mountainFrugal wrote:
Wed Nov 03, 2021 1:40 pm
Hello @LRY. I have been enjoying your journal and other posts so far. Especially the discussions of lesser known Canadian ER cities. Would it be possible to translate/refine some of your blog content using ERE principles and add to the various threads/discussions on this forum, rather than directing people to an externally linked blog? I look forward to following along on here.
Absolutely! I'll see about starting up new discussions here. Thank you for the idea. :)

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Re: lean-FIRE dispatches from the edge of the world

Post by LetsRetireYoung »

Hey, turns out I'm a time traveler! :lol: I had no idea, but the strategy I've been using all these years has an actual name - mental time travel. I routinely set very specific 5-year plans for myself (you can take a boy out of the Soviet Union...) and I got through some of the darkest parts of my life by imagining a future - not very probable, but possible - where I'd be financially independent, and someplace nice and tropical and beautiful, and just enjoying life.

I used to anchor myself in those future moments and then work backwards, trying to figure how I go from A to Z. That came naturally for me (both the planning and the future-anchoring) because I've always been into math, and the sheer mathematical possibility of something (even if only 5%) was already a helluva promise.

Fun concept. Look it up, eh? :)

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LetsRetireYoung
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Re: lean-FIRE dispatches from the edge of the world

Post by LetsRetireYoung »

Well, apparently enough people got sufficiently annoyed by occasional link-dropping (about 5 times out of 48 posts, I think) that I got officially chewed out for that.

Oh well. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I'll show myself out.

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mountainFrugal
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Re: lean-FIRE dispatches from the edge of the world

Post by mountainFrugal »

Rather than leaving, how about you continue contributing your unique perspective and just not link to your blog?

[edit] I do really appreciate your perspective as you can see from my post above.

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