Well, another month has come and gone and we are now halfway through the year. So far tracking how our our “real” budget numbers compare to our anticipated Fully Funded Lifestyle Change costs we seem to be pretty close. We have been averaging $4035/month spending and that’s assuming no mortgage, which ends up being ~$48420/year needed. We like to add in a little slush/cushion to round up to $55k, which is what we are generally assuming our year to year costs to be and we’re right on track. Heck, we’re even under budget, which I will never complain about. So what were the big hits and little misses that we saw this month?Time to get into some details!
Lately, my brain has been pretty frenetic and it’s hard to get it to calm down enough to focus and write a decent blog post. I think most of the concentrating/focus gets used up during the day, as I’ve been fairly busy at work recently redoing and updating some geomodels. It’s not bad, but there is a lot of tedium involved that takes a lot of focus and thought or you’ll be spending tomorrow redoing the work you spent today doing. This has carried over at home too, as I find I’m more prone to be tired, like really tired, and that leads to a grumpy Mr. SSC which no one enjoys having around. So my question to you is, have you gotten into these “slumps” and what did you do to get out of them? Here’s what I’ve been trying and isn’t working so far.
Hey guys, welcome back Lois from Living Dubois back for another guest post on how their financial situation has changed 1 year into FIRE. Her last guest post discussed what overall life was like one year into FIRE and now she gets into more of the financial changes accompanied with such a big change.
Last week, the folks over at Our Next Life proposed a challenge called The Road Less Traveled. They laid out what seem to be the “Commandments of FIRE” and they’re hilarious and pretty spot on, you should go read them if you haven’t already. Some of my fav’s are “Thou shalt make thy choosing between Vanguard index funds or dividend-yielding stocks” and “Thou shalt be frugal in all things, and shall not partake of worldly temptations like cable television. Bigger riches await those who partake only of self-powered travel.” Outside of these sort of Personal Finance community commandments, the challenge is what do you do that is different than these sort of “rules” everyone seems to profess and follow. I don’t know that we have much that is different from “The Commandments”, but I’ll let you be the judge.
The painful wrap up of May. A lot of big rather unexpected expenses popped up, mostly in the form of auto related expenses. Although as a surprise, we did not dip into savings for these expenses and we still had $953.75 left over, Lol. I’ll highlight the big hitters, gloss over the little hitters and even more importantly, tell the story behind the really big expenses. Let’s start with the little stuff.
Good morning everybody! Today we have a guest post on what it’s like actually living your FIRE dream! This comes from Lois at Living Dubois and that’s pronounced “Dew-boys” not “due-bwah” as you may have assumed. She’s got some great posts and awesome pics about living post-retirement life in Dubois, WY.
Downtown Dubois, WY
She writes about what it’s like living in Dubois, WY as opposed to where she lived her entire adult life, New York City. Yep, she went from big city, and big sky scrapers, to.. well, just big sky (I know that’s Montana, but if you’ve never been to WY, it fits there too!).
Downtown NYC – no comparison
FIRE One Year In: Living Out Our Paradigm Shift
While packing for our latest road trip, I was amused to notice that this time I hadn’t bothered to give the house the usual top-to-bottom cleaning before our departure. And I didn’t really care.
What changed?
Once, I thought of it as a dream house, and I was preparing to return to my dream. Now it is just home. Our dream has become a satisfying reality.
Back porch view from the dream/reality home
We have spent a lifetime working for financial independence–working two jobs, saving money, and spending only prudently. As a result, I was able to retire early last June, several years after my husband did so.
The “retire early” element wasn’t necessarily part of our original plan, but I have no regrets about it Quite the opposite.
Getting to this place required us to take a step that seemed wildly impractical at the time (and may still seem wild to some friends and family). While living and working in New York City, we bought a log house thousands of miles away in remote Dubois, Wyoming.
Given our lifelong habit of financial prudence, this felt like a crazy leap. But we were both in love with the small town and its dramatic surroundings. We had visited a guest ranch there when our children were small, went back several times, and eventually realized we just didn’t want to stop being there.
We figured we’d work it out somehow.
Luckily, the Internet service in Dubois is even better than in New York, which allowed me to telecommute to my Internet-based job before retirement. For eight years, we traveled back and forth twice a year, spending ever more time in Wyoming and ever less in New York. Importantly, from the outset we decided to fully integrate ourselves into the life of the town.
Gradually, we realized that the city we called home had little appeal for us, now that we weren’t part of its ladder-climbing mindset. And our Wyoming home has all of the factors we wanted for our retirement.
Climate: When we first moved here, we didn’t understand how important the weather would become as aches began to set in to our aging joints.
In the “banana belt” of Wyoming, the weather in Wyoming’s Wind River Valley is so temperate that the prehistoric Shoshone natives made it a habit to winter there. The winters feel milder than those we experienced in New York, because the snow tends to blow away and the dry atmosphere moderates the temperatures.
We have also traded the humid summer storm cycles of the east coast for a dry high-mountain desert atmosphere that tempers the heat. Nights are very cool and so are the days in summer.
Community: I thought I was a dedicated city dweller, but (like my mother before me) I discovered that city life can lose its appeal as you mature. Our neighborhood of 30 years has become very hip, hot and cool at once, and I feel out of place there now.
View from her old place in NYC
Besides, I’ve seen it all so often before. The sight of the playground always made me miss my now-grown children. The sound of revelers made me weary, not jealous or nostalgic.
Retired to Wyoming, I’m enjoying the new experience of life in a small town that both welcomes newcomers and takes care of its own. I love the fact that a car will stop for me as I’m crossing the highway to the Post Office, and that I will recognize the friend who’s at the wheel. We enjoy new friends who share our enthusiasm for these surroundings. There’s more to enjoy about it than I have space to tell here.
Ice cream social – so many people just hanging out, having fun!
Cost of living: An important economic factor is that Wyoming has no state income tax. But a great deal more makes this a frugal place to live.
For one thing, we’re in an environment where others don’t have a great deal to spend, or if they do they don’t flaunt it. There is no Fifth Avenue with expensive shops, not even a shopping mall. There aren’t many dress-up occasions where you feel the need to trot out an evening gown or showy jewelry.
You can find what you need here, and there’s a well-stocked grocery store, but only a few restaurants. We enjoy doing things for ourselves anyway, including cooking.
Many of the favorite pastimes around here – hiking, quilt-making, painting, and photography, musical jam sessions, book clubs and card games—are free, or nearly so.
HikingQuilting even!
There simply aren’t that many attempts in Dubois to separate us from our money, and most of those are for good charitable causes.
Geography: Our new home is in the center of the great American West, a region I took little opportunity to visit back when I was a working woman with children. We’ve spent plenty of vacation time in the last 8 years exploring, and now we have the liberty to discover even more.
Activities: Retirement means the liberty to do what you wish. I love to keep busy. So except when I’m out hiking with my dog, which is my main diversion here, I enjoy spending my time at volunteer work. This supplants my paid career with equally meaningful work that gives back to the community. It also allows me to continue working as part of a team, in this case people in the community who share my goals. I’m content, and happy to get out of bed in the morning (although now I can often ignore the alarm).
How different it all is than the retirement I imagined for myself! When I was younger, I assumed that retirement meant loss: Losing money, losing work, losing friends, losing contact. I never guessed it would bring so much adventure, fulfillment, and delight. Of course it all began with those two important words: Financial independence.
Thanks again Lois for the insights into FIRE and what its like in Dubois! And be on the lookout for a follow up look into how her finances have been affected by this change.
Soon we’ll be enjoying a week away from everything and go on vacation, and I realized that my brain is already there. Since vacationing is on my mind this week, I thought I would discuss vacations – SSC style. Taking vacations used to be no big deal, we would pick a place to visit, get everything lined up and then go. Yeah, easy!! Add 2 kids in the mix and everything gets a lot harder to manage, and WAY more expensive. Plus, get kids out of their routine and schedule, and OMG things can get crazy pretty quickly. So how do we deal with this and what do we do to keep the costs down so we can vacation more, let me tell you.
Hooray us, as it has been a nice and fairly uneventful month financially! Any questions? See you next month then! Kidding… Personally, it was a pretty exciting month though. Mr. SSC completed his first half-marathon, and Mrs. SSC is gearing up for a new job (hopefully, because so far only a verbal offer has been given, and the school seems completely bogged down in their bureaucratic hiring practice – but she is assured weekly a legit offer is on the way…). Only time will tell how that plays out, but is it an omen of disappointment and frustration that they’re that inefficient? Here are the highlights and how it all panned out.
Something funny started happening a few weeks ago – first with a close friend, then again with numerous colleagues… I have been having more and more conversations about financial advisors and investments. Now, you may think this shouldn’t be so funny, I mean, I do blog about personal finance (well, sometimes). But, if you had told Mr. SSC from five years ago that he would be having multiple conversations about finance where he was considered the ‘expert’ of the group – well, younger Mr. SSC would’ve thought you were drunk.
After the deluge that hit Houston yesterday, I’ve been thinking about how much home ownership is loaded with risk. First off, we’re fine, and our house is fine, although there are thousands of people that are not in that situation today. A quick recap on what happened here yesterday, according to news reports, there were over 1,200 high water rescues, and the equivalent to ~240 BILLION gallons of water fell in a matter of hours. Effectively, almost 17” of rain between 3 am and noon. Whoa… We had a lot of rain around Memorial Day last year, but it wasn’t a quick episode like this one. Even though we didn’t plan to end up in our neighborhood, more and more we appreciate where we are and how little we have to worry about flooding.
