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An interesting Year
I tend to be conservative in my estimates when I forecast, but I had estimated that we would end this year with a net value of about $650k. We just passed $665k by the end of August. Assuming nothing crazy happens (Election!) we might hit almost $700k by the end of the year. This is interesting because it illustrates the disparity between the national/global economy and the individual economy. The US has suffered incredible unemployment this year with so many individuals suffering financial hardship, and small businesses closing and yet our portfolio has grown. Why has it grown? I guess the answer to that is that the S&P 500 etc,…
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Negative Press
I’ve seen a few articles (in pre COVID times), where the subject of the article was FIRE, and in most cases I see a lot of negative reactions to the FIRE principles. Either from the writers of the articles, although not always as there are some positive FIRE articles out there, but the comments … oh the comments! I can’t say I am surprised, as a lot of people have no idea how this works, but I think there are some deeper things going on. The criticism I see leveled at FIRE tend to fall into the following: Its impossible; most people can’t do this you need much more money…
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(Sort Of) Travel hacking
I don’t really like the term hacking. For me its more of a strategy. A strategic decision that I hope will lead to a good outcome. So what am I talking about? Well I am not into the whole travel hacking thing. To me it all too much messing about with credit cards. However, what we have done is moved a lot of our bills onto a Venture card with Capital One that offers travel points. We sit back, pay our bills and let those travel points accumulate. Our largest source of points at the moment is our weekly grocery bill, but we also have DoorDash on there, as well…
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I am excited!
I recently wrote a post about the COVID19 pandemic and the effect it’s having on us. Financially, the downturn in the market has me excited. I was actually concerned when the market did not drop after new year and I’ve been waiting for it to drop. I just wasn’t expecting it to happen this way. A pandemic; who knew? So why am I excited about this? The stock market is on sale right now. With the market as down as far as it is, I see a huge discount. I’m pushing as much money as I can into my investment accounts, and buying index funds. Once the market begins its…
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Corona Virus (COVID19) Bandwagon
Yup, I’m going to write a COVID19 post and why not? It seems like every man, woman and dog under the sun has a pandemic email or blog post. And I guess it is a big deal, but here’s the thing; I work from home. Before the pandemic, my wife and I used to joke about Saturday being my “going out” day. And here we all are, leaving the house maybe one day a week to grab some groceries and some toilet roll. I must be some sort of trend setter. So right in the middle of the lock-down announcements, we moved apartments. Badly timed but we had no way…
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Breaking your Default Programming
As small children and through our teens to adulthood, we learn a lot from our environment, families and friends. Much has been written about this and I’m not going to delve deep into that. However, what I learned as a kid has stayed with me for a long time, some of that to my detriment. An example of this is my drive to clean my plate of food. It didn’t matter of how much food was put in front of me. From a very young age, my parents would encourage me to ‘eat up’ sometimes to the point that I was not allowed to leave the table until all my…
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We are moving again
We moved last year to be close to where Cat works. I can work anywhere as I am a remote worker, but Cat needs to be in the office most of the time. Just recently she accepted a permanent position with a different company. That company is currently a 45-60 minute ride away on the light rail, so including getting to and from train stations, she is spending 2-3 hours a day commuting. We need to fix that. For us, moving is little more than an inconvenience. We have moved quite a bit over the past few years so we are pros at this. The issue for us is the…
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BaristaFI
What is BaristaFI? BaristaFI is that point where your passive income can provide most of your basic needs with only a part time job required to feed yourself and pay your incidental bills. For me, BaristaFI is also a position of security. Its not exactly Fuck You money as you should already have that if you are close to BaristaFI. Rather, it means that if anything happens to your employment, you can at the very least cover rent. That for me is BaristaFi. This is different from other definitions of BaristaFI. In our case, we are pegging Barista FI as our passive income able to pay our rent. Our other…
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That Table – Reprise
A few posts back I wrote about how much the extra square footage costs us just to keep the dining room table. To be honest I was a little unfair to Cat with my analysis, so I am here to make amends. I also wrote a post about systemic spending; how non optimal spending can increase happiness. With increased happiness comes a higher probability that you will achieve your goals. So how do these two posts relate? I suspect some of you see this already: From the dining room table post, Cat and I rent an apartment that at face value is larger than we need. As I detailed in…
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Making Incremental Changes
In order to pursue FIRE, we have to make changes to our lives. There is always a pressure from within to make those changes all at once. However it is better to make incremental changes rather than big changes, as incremental changes tend to stay with you. Making a lot of changes at the same time is often a recipe for failure. Let Me Explain I used to have terrible eating habits; I would overeat, eat junk, eat too many sweets etc. I also had a thing for lemonade although I never did get into soda except as the occasional treat. Several times I tried to change this as it…