cmonkey's journal

[spoonman]

That's a very beautiful bird, he's almost posing for the photo =). It's cool to see your egg pipeline is operating nicely.

Exploring Possibility Space can be very intoxicating. I remember the thrill of unlocking a new corner of Possibility Space and knowing that, if we really wanted to, we could have just pulled the trigger and gotten "out of dodge" right away. Contemplating Possibility Space really brought solace to me during some dark moments at work. I remember sitting in my cube and looking around and getting a tangible sense that I could make it all disappear if I wanted to. I think you are taking the right approach and taking some perspective instead of the default "I hate work and want to quit" mentality, as you point out.

Those are some awesome savings rate numbers, btw.

[Hankaroundtheworld]

Nice blog, I can learn from your gardening and animal-caring skills (all looks great - nice pictures as well), and as well to say, how you have reduced your living costs. Add your young age, great income and savings-rate, and you can be nominated as the ERE master

[cmonkey]

you can be nominated as the ERE master

Haha! Thanks for the nomination that means a lot. We did accomplish an impressive savings rate this month and level of expenses. I will be updating next week.

[cmonkey]

Monthly Update, August 2015

Expenses/Savings

We set our own personal benchmark in the month of August and I have been super eager to share with everyone. It was by far our best month all year and probably over my entire working career since I starting earning (and spending) more.

Total Expenses - $984.82
Total Savings - $3,873.14 ; 80%

Keep in mind that expense level is for two people.

The truly remarkable thing about it is that I commented to DW at the end of the month about how much we spent and saved in August and she couldn't believe it. Neither of us felt like we sacrificed anything at all (I didn't sit around thinking "I can't buy this, I'll ruin my savings rate!" ) We simply didn't need/want anything outside of what we bought. We didn't even need to think about it. We have filled our lives with so many free activities that our lives are turning into a "no purchase necessary" way of life.

Being happy with this level of expenditure is a truly great thing because now we know how low we can go. We may not be able to do this every month, but that's not the important thing. We know its in the realm of possibilities now and that's something we didn't know previously.

Some items of interest - we had a gas purchase due to the DW traveling to MN for a week which is out of the ordinary. We also didn't eat out for the entire month of August which is probably the first time since we've been married! We have made up for it this week though with the in-laws being in town (but they pay ). We feel like spoiled college students when they are around.

We also never really got around to doing much remodeling work due to being preoccupied with other activities all month. I ended up finishing up the termite damage repair and just cleaning up the basement. It is quite empty now. I did finally get the jackhammering done in my basement this past weekend and also took out a 6 inch thick, 6 ft X 10 ft cement slab by our front door. It took a lot of effort due to welded wire rebar that had been put right in the middle of the slab! 4 hours of jackhammering and pounding apart cement really takes it out of you, I have been sore all week. We are planning to build a greenhouse in this space in the coming few years when we get the time.

One final note on my income - I made a change this month to our withholding to allow for higher paychecks (and hopefully no tax refund) going forward. I think this will bring us another $250/month in income which should help us outpace our projections.




Last month I stated that my FAI increases would be a month delayed, but I have decided I don't like this method since I am in possession of the investment funds at the end of the month, even if they are in limbo. So this month there is a significant jump over last month since it includes 2 months worth.

Lending Club

Deposits - $1,936.57
FAI - $542.77 (+$293.28)

NAR - 13.67% (+0.30%)
Total Charge Offs - 2

Dividend Fund

Deposits - $1,936.57
FAI - $185.84

I initiated a position in T (AT&T) back in April and decided to add to this position early in the month of August with my July deposits. At the end of the month I initiated a position in HP (Helmerich & Payne). I find both companies attractive dividend payers, having payed for 32 years (T) and 40 years (HP). T is down 3% YTD and HP is down a whopping 21% YTD (being an energy company). They also both have strong yields and good 1, 3 & 5 year EPS growth.

Projected FAI - $674.63
Total FAI - $728.61 (+$428.36)


This is a double increase since I am including both July and August deposits. We are sitting $53.98 over our projected level for August 2015. I think we are going to outpace our projections by a substantial amount due to my projecting a lower return at LC than what we are receiving now and projecting smaller bonus payments than what I might receive. Under-promise & over-deliver. You can see our project FI levels have moved up by about 5 months. I hope they keep moving in that direction.



To round off this update, we got 37 eggs in August! They started around the first week with about 1 every day or two but the last week of August we have been getting 2-4 per day. The day after they turned 20 weeks (which is the "expected" start day for egg laying) we got 4 eggs from pullets who hadn't laid previously. Most are still tiny eggs, but a couple have reached full size. We have made two quiches so far.

[thrifty++]

WOw Cmonkey $984 for two people! You have become so self sufficient. I am still struggling to get $2300 for one lol. But much better than I used to be.

[El Duderino]

yeah, well done on the expenses and also on getting those chickens working for you.

I do not envy the time you spend breaking up the slab, that sounds like hard work. Have you drawn up plans for the greenhouse? It would be cool to do them in Sketchup. I've been looking for an excuse to do a project using that tool.

[vexed87]

Agreed, another great month cmonkey! That food spending for two is impressive! Down to the fruits of your labour I'm sure! Do you drink alcohol? If the odd beer or bottle of wine is included in the food & drink spending, I'm even more impressed!

I'm right there with you on that 'not needing to buy stuff anymore' vibe. I've noticed that has helped loads with my savings rates the last couple of months. I smashed my smartphone a few weeks back and I have had the odd urge to buy a 'new' budget phone but instead I remained steadfast to my promises not to buy my way out of every problem. With a little patience got my hands on a old iphone 4s for free. It's faulty and the speaker doesn't work, but I guess I could fix it, but for now I'm happy with what I have

[cmonkey]

@thrifty++, thanks! It just sorta happened really. It has come down to our life design being optimized for not spending much of anything.

@El Duderino, yes that was tremendous work . On top of that I was just getting over a slight cold that had spread from the mother-in-law to the wife to me. That work made it come back with a bit more kick....been sniffling all week. It could also have been the dust. I have played with Sketchup and we are planning to use it for the house remodel so we will probably do the same for the greenhouse. We need to get the house done first though, since we are changing out the windows/door on the wall the green house will sit on. It would be hard to do after the fact.

@vexed87, thanks. The food expense level is definitely due to our efforts in the garden and also due to heavy vitamin intake. I attribute the vitamins to our needing to eat less actually, couple with lots of garden veg. Calorie intake is mainly from homemade bread/biscuits and some sweets like cakes and such. I honestly feel like I could do so much more in the garden, even despite our efforts. I haven't planted anything for several months, yet we are still harvesting and preserving like crazy. The 'time spent planting' to 'time spent harvesting' ratio is super high. 10 minutes planting for weeks of harvesting IOW.

We almost exclusively purchase the same things each month, staples like oil, flour, dairy, a small amount of meat (usually sausages from Germany), eggs (until now), and a few cheap snack foods like popcorn.

Also, we generally do not purchase alcohol. I have the odd twinge once in a while to grab some beer, but I just never do it ha. The last alcohol I had was the elderflower champagne we made back in June/July (which I forgot to post about ! ). Next year I'll have to do a post about it. I haven't purchased any alcohol since probably last year...I can't even remember.

Nice find on the free iPhone. Even with its faults, it probably is still a lot more functional/fun than something from a decade ago.

[spoonman]

Ahhh, no alcohol, welllllll...that's why your expenses are so darn low . That ain't fair man, you need to succumb to your thirst! =)

I just found a local discount store that sells cheap, strong beer for less than $1 for a 500ml can. There's no way I'm gonna pass that up. And wine is super cheap too.

[vexed87]

@spoonman, do you have Aldi nearby? Their Steinheiser German Pilsner is dirt cheap but great!

[spoonman]

@vexed87: I don't know if we have an Aldi nearby, but I'll be on the lookout for it and for that Pilsner you mentioned. To my great delight, Heineken is not absurdly expensive to buy either, it's actually quite affordable here.

You know, if I knew applying peer pressure (on cmonkey or anyone) was this much fun, I would have done it all the time in high school =).

[cmonkey]

Ahahaha! Yes perhaps I should indulge a little. We have an Aldi nearby maybe I should take up vexed's suggestion.

That is a heck of a deal for beer! However, I think I beat that cost when I made my elderflower champagne, it came out to less than 50 cents for a 16 ounce bottle.

[cmonkey]

A Mid-Month Mixup & Weekend Adventures

I have spent the past week or two deciding on some changes to my income. For the past few years I have contributed 0% to my work 401K simply because I wanted the money to put toward our homestead (mortgage). Now that that is paid off and we are investing I have decided to begin contributing again so I can maximize my income by taking advantage of my company's 401K match. They match 300% on the first 2% saved and 100% on the next 4% saved. So I am contributing 6% now.


Another reason I wasn't contributing was simply due to ignorance and not knowing how I could access those funds pre-59.5. Learning about SEPP plans has completely changed that and now I am comfortable putting money into my 401K now. In fact, I would be stupid not too! The company contribution alone is nearly $1200 / month. That would be a lot of wasted income.

Going this route is the most beneficial for us in terms of taxes paid as well. We are making all our contributions pre-tax and so we pay no tax on the contributions while lowering our taxable income now. When we withdraw the money, we will not pay taxes either simply due to having a low income. With all the strategy around lowering your tax burden, the simplest is just living on less. I thought about going with roth contributions, but the company contributions are taxable no matter what and given our future low income it would just complicate things trying to get the money out tax free.

I have also decided to max out our HSA going forward and would like to do that post FI as well. Running the projections only reduces our time to FI by 2 months when we max it out! Certainly worth it.


With these two changes our timeline has moved up substantially. Previously "the date" was sitting around July 2021, but is now sitting at January 2021 so we have moved up by 6 months simply due to the company contributions. This is based on receiving ~3.5% return over the next 5 years. I am investing the money in the S&P 500 index fund so historical return is something like 15% over the last years. I am hopeful that I'm under estimating the returns we'll get. Receiving a 15% return (unlikely at this point) only moves things up another 6 months, so anything is alright with me.

New August FAI



Its amazing how little changes can have huge, long term benefits. Our August FAI is now sitting at $1146.01. We will hit $2,000 by the end of the year and $5,000 next year.


This past weekend we had a fun time making a bunch of apple cider.

Our two huge apple trees. They are massive and produce THOUSANDS of apples each year. Its hard to see but you can't even walk under them without rolling an ankle



We collected 15 gallons/66 LBS of windfalls this weekend and turned them into cider.



Those 15 gallons of apples turned into about 10 Quarts of cider (plus what we drank). It is amazing stuff! No sugar added.

A week ago we collected 10 gallons of apples and turned them into 6 quarts of cider. The ratio is about 3 quarts/5 gallon bucket of apples. So we have produced 16 quarts/4 gallons so far. Much more to come.




Earlier in the summer I talked about foraging for wild foods. We found out that we have wild pecans, butternuts, a forgotten apple tree and a persimmon tree near us. I'm sure there is a lot more we don't know about. But we decided to go on an adventure this weekend to find what we could find. We ended up finding about 20-30 pecans which is a lot more than what we expected. We are going to try eating a few and planting a few to see if we can get some trees growing. We also found a couple of butternuts that might be good, but most of them had been eaten by the squirrels. The persimmon tree is loaded with fruit but its not quite ready yet. We found a few windfalls and they tasted pretty good, but a bit astringent. The apple tree near my bus stop is ripening its fruit and it tastes really good!

All for free.



Finally, I mentioned in my last garden update that our watermelon wasn't doing anything except grow like a weed. Well it decided to produce after all. We have 7 watermelon all of which are over 10 LBs each. This one is the largest, probably over 15 LBs. We finally figured out how to tell when they are ripe too and they are delicious!

[spoonman]

I'm gonna be dreaming about all that cider you got there =). I was gonna suggest you, um, weaponize some of that cider with some rum...but nevermind =).

Congrats on shortening your time horizon to retirement by 6 months. I have to warn you that the effect can be addicting, you might be compelled to keep shortening the horizon =).

[cmonkey]

@spoonman, we are planning to make some hard cider. You can do it without buying rum, but the rum idea sounds so tempting. You gotta stop it, you're stretching my timeline!

I echo the addiction of shorting the timeline. I really enjoy pondering ways to shorten it. I think I'm to the point now where it really depends on expenses and ROI. In the expense department I have pondered doing something with TTM average expenses or something. How much do we really need? Its a good question but I think having a bit more than you think you need is the best route.

@ffj, Thanks! We were planning to invest in a nice hand-powered press this fall but the in-laws decided to just lend us their power juicer instead. I'm not sure if its technically cider or juice since we used a juicer and not a press. It tastes the same to me!

[jacob]

DIY apple press, car jack, google it.

[cmonkey]

DIY apple press, car jack, google it.

That, folks, is how you get more utility out of your dollar. Thanks for the great suggestion. I'm pretty sure this would be faster than using a juicer as well since you don't have to cut it up.

[vexed87]

Was about to suggest hard cider (aka cider in UK)... just add wine yeast and add a bit of sugar before bottling for carbonation

I picked up a 5 liter demijohn and pressure valve/bung and bottle capper for about £15. Apples are ripening up here too. Need to DIY me a press and get involved.

[EdithKeeler]

Have you made any apple butter with all those apples? Super easy crock pot recipe--I've made this and it's yummy, though I cut the sugar back quite a bit Nothing better than homemade apple butter on homemade biscuits or cornbread! (It freezes well--I've not tried canning it).

http://allrecipes.com/recipe/21205/all- ... le-butter/

[cmonkey]

@EdithKeeler, Yep we made a crockpot of that last year. We still haven't made it through more than a couple jars even though its delicious. Too many other things to eat that we have preserved....good problem to have.