The Path to Freedom

[detect_148]

Lately, I have been torn, fully undecided and often brooding.

I know that I have enough wealth to stop working, that is clear. My tax strategy post FI is optimal and robust. My ability to invest effectively is questionable.

But my job is easy AF and I mean that. I am a master at figuring out how to do the bare minimum. The money is good. I am highly motivated by greed. I don’t know if I will ever have it this good again.

The mountains call. I want to snowboard every day that I possibly can next season and that means I only will be able to work until December. This is non negotiable. I feel it in my soul. I think about it every moment of every day.

I do not know if I will be able to stay retired forever if I leave now. ERE is a virtuous life and I am a man of vice and riotous living. I have had to dial back substantially to make it this far, but temptations are always clouding my mind. I do not know if I can hold them back forever. There is no dignity in labor. If I run out of money I will perhaps have to be ok with being a slave again or instead, with wrapping a cheap rental car around a telephone pole.

I was not meant for this dilemma. My parents were supposed to be wealthy aristocrats and my life, one of endless leisure. God has erred.

[Biscuits and Gravy]

I was not meant for this dilemma. My parents were supposed to be wealthy aristocrats and my life, one of endless leisure. God has erred.

Amen, brother.

[detect_148]

I'm learning that I don't seem to have the stomach for market volatility that I thought I did. My earnings from earned income this year are working out to be higher than they ever have before, but in spite of that, my net worth is still down 6.5% to date which is about 6 months worth of earned income. If I had been unemployed during this time I would have been shitting my pants. It would have been a huge drag on my mental health. The stakes are higher for me now than ever before so the swings in numeric terms every time the market takes a leg down represent years of savings. I've increased my cash position gradually while still dollar cost averaging the rest of my savings into index funds. I now have over a year of expenses saved in cash, not including expected dividends in the taxable portfolio which gives me a little more comfort.

My current spending is just under a 3% withdrawal rate and I should feel comfortable stepping away from work based on that, but I have this nagging financial insecurity that I just can't shake. I have a desire to see inflation and the markets settle down a bit before I stop working. I'm also feeling like remorse for what I perceive as crucial strategic mistakes. When I first learned about ERE I made a deliberate decision to rent hack instead of buying a house and trying to rent out the rooms. Home ownership didn't fit with my long term goals and tax strategy and still doesn't, but with how much home prices have surged and how sticky the prices have been in my local market this year, I'm thinking that I made a big mistake. I also don't like the idea of using debt. It just feels like a trap and an unacceptable risk and I haven't been able to change that mindset. If I had a longer term outlook on my current job I might feel differently. I am a compulsive tax optimizer so the thought of selling my equities to buy a house and paying those capital gain taxes is untenable.

My angst this year has caused me to question whether or not I belong in this community at all. What drew me to ERE in the first place is primarily that I don't like to fail. I am a perfectionist. I wanted to be financially successful and in control so I chose a strategy with a 100% success rate, provided that I didn't fuck it up by not sticking to the program. I didn't take big risks financially or with my career and I don't know if that was the best strategy. I wonder what I could have achieved had I invested in myself more. Also, I have found hard limits on how low I can push my spending. When I get below 2.5 JAFI I start to get depressed. The truth is, I really do want to consume more than I currently am. Primarily, I want to living in a spacious domicile by myself with architecturally pleasing features with tasteful decor, house plants, and adjacent green space, but I haven't figured out how to do that without paying $2k+/mo. I want to spend 6 months out of the year snowboarding as much as I can. Decreasing my spending feels both liberating and painful at the same time. Finally, I want to go to a reputable physician for a hair transplant, probably by the time I turn 40. I am quite vain and cannot accept the fact that my hair is thinning. This is probably the most non-ERE pursuit imaginable to me, but I stand by it. I used to take personal responsibility for protecting the environment and I still care deeply about it, but I genuinely believe that it is doomed. Humanity's propensity to consume is insatiable and the incentives to deplete our natural resources are just too strong.

I want to apologize for being negative and bitchy. I am not looking for sympathy or advice or anything. This is the only outlet I really have to vent about this stuff now that RFS is gone. We had been chillin for awhile earlier this year. He is a cool dude. Also, I did not sleep well last night so I will probably be well rested and happy tomorrow.

I'm making a deliberate effort to change my mindset. I have been volunteering to pick up trash on the roads adjacent to my neighborhood, strength training consistently for the first time in my life, reading more than I have in years, and exploring some entrepreneurship opportunities that can be pursued in parallel to my career. I'm finally starting to realize that with some creativity and skillful maneuvering, it is possible to cast some webs to collect money. If I can just siphon off $10k per year from business pursuits, I will have all I need, in addition to my other passive income, to sustain my current lifestyle.The business idea I am focusing on right now is small. It's a very simple idea/product with few competitors and a customer base that is limited geographically. The problem that I've had in the past with business ideas is that my aspirations were far in excess of my ability and I grew frustrated quickly and gave up. I think attempting micro-business in conjunction with ERE could be quite powerful because it has potential for scaleability and growth that can eventually be decoupled from my direct time investment.

[detect_148]

The past month has been quite pleasant. Work has been winding down quite a bit for the end of the year so I have been able to devote much of my energy to other interests.

I've been continuing to try to justify my decision to continue working and in doing so have been consuming FIRE content from other blogs to get more diverse perspectives. This made me aware of the concept of sequence of return risk which I may have only glanced over previously. The analyses that I have seen show that the risk of portfolio failure is significantly decreased and the maximum successful safe withdrawal rate is significantly increased when poor investment returns don't occur in the early years of a person's retirement. For this reason, I am perfectly fine with hanging onto my job for a little bit longer and continuing with a savings rate of ~70 - 80% while riding out the current bear market/recession/interest rate cycle. It seems like most, if not all of the mainstream FIRE influencers that I follow benefitted from retiring near the bottom of a bear market or in the early stages of a bull market. I'm convinced this is a major factor in their success.

I wanted to give myself permission to do more snowboarding this coming year so I put a lot of effort into travel hacking/planning over the past few months. I organized two snowboarding trips in the winter/spring with very reasonable expenditure by using airline miles/credit card points, cost sharing with friends, identifying public transportation routes between the airport/slopes, and buying an epic pass as early as possible.

I recently moved to a new house with two roommates. Rent is $600/mo. and utilities/internet are working out to be about $150/mo. This is more than I have been paying in recent years, but the house is in one of the nicer areas of my city and the location is a reasonable biking distance from several public parks and the climbing gym that I frequent.

Currently reading short stories by Nikolay Gogol. I sometimes wish that I could motivate myself to read more non-fiction, but I see a lot of instructive value in fiction too, especially when it is high quality.

[detect_148]

Life has been good this year. 2022 was hard on my psyche because I am long past the point where I can out-earn the volatility in my investment portfolio. In spite of that, I've been operating solidly between a 3% and 3.5% withdrawal rate and 76% savings rate for the past year without being too restrictive with spending. My investment returns have been ok this year, but I'm lagging the SP500. I think my portfolio allocation is reasonable, but I intend to find ways to improve where I can.

I took two snowboarding trips out west on the epic pass. The conditions were the best I've ever experienced and the trip gave me some fond memories. I mostly enjoyed the scenery, especially the view from Breckenridge at the top of peak 8. Lodging was the most expensive part of these trips, but I was able to cram 4 dudes into a small hotel room in Park City and stay at a Hostel during my time at Breck. Travel points were used for the flights, so the overall cost worked out to be pretty reasonable. The benefits of what I have been building for the last 9 years are beginning to sink in and I have been feeling a lot of gratitude. There are times when the greed monster possesses my soul and I crave more wealth, but other days I look around me and I know that I have everything that I need. I feel contentment, even joy.

I'm in a long term relationship now. It has mostly been a positive experience, but the SO has been pushing me to address my avoidant attachment style. Sometimes this is not fun, but I think it is a good learning experience for me. It may end up being the case that I am better off being partnered with a reptile, but I'm willing to give vulnerability with a human a try. This woman is not ERE oriented and has a history of making poor decisions with money and being controlled by it. She is actively trying to improve for her own sake. Shortly I after I met her, I noticed course materials on her desk from Dave Ramsey's "Financial Peace" class. As we've talked more about our views on money, it has become apparent that we are not on the same page, ideologically. Fortunately, she has no intention of ever being married, having children, or having joint finances so I'm not necessarily running away at this point. I'm just trying to help her improve any way I can.