Last week at some point, Angela from Tread LIghtly Retire Early tweeted about giving time versus money and it reminded me of what I did with my time when I wasn’t working.
I found my time that I give is rewarded so much more in “soul currency” than money.
If I didn’t have to work, I’d be back volunteering at school, scouts, PTA , CASA, and other orgs that need volunteers.
That was my jam. I found it. I’d love to continue it. Soon… pic.twitter.com/jm7WoSxHed
Recently in the Discord group, we were talking about how just being “retired” or not having a purpose in life wasn’t very fulfilling either. Getting to a point that you can “not work” doesn’t mean the absence of work was the goal. So, what do you do to feel fulfilled? Years ago, I wrote a post about a japanese concept called “ikigai”, pronounced “icky guy”, that translates to “reason for being” or having meaning in your life. I go into it more in that post, but essentially, without some meaning or purpose to wake up for everyday, your life will be shorter and people without an ikigai reported being more unhappy than their peers with a purpose.
This brings me back to “soul currency”. I found that when I was unemployed and being a SAHD, I got lots of rewarding feelings from volunteering at the kids elementary school as a sub, Watch D.O.G., PTA, general volunteer to set up and run events, volunteer at Scouts assisting running a den, and setting up and running events, and even as a CASA, court appointed special advocate for kids in the foster system. For me, that gave me a lot to wake up and look forward to each day. IF there wasn’t anything going on with either of those things, I had my hobbies and clearing the property to look forward too. Honestly, just because I wasn’t working a 9-5 I found it was easier to get as committed or over committed without a job. Here’s why I liked doing all of that for free.
Over the weekend, I was catching up on some recordings of Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency and I was struck by a conversation that went on during the show. The really short setup is they’re looking for something based on a map they’ve found, and they have been digging holes, fairly randomly at one of the “X” locations. When Todd wants to quit digging and look somewhere else, Dirk points out that they’re in as good a place as any to look for their treasure, so why quit. As he puts it, “What if you’re only one shovelful away from finding it but you stop. You’ll never know, will you, because you gave up. What you’re looking for could be right there, and you walk away right at the worst moment. I’m trying to say, You’ll never know if you don’t try.” That last part really stuck with me in relation to our Fully Funded Lifestyle Change (FFLC) journey, recent career changes, and even a new venture concept I came up with a few months ago. Let’s start with the FFLC aspect.
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.
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.          Â
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.
If you recall, a few months ago we got a flyer in the mail that made us seriously consider downsizing our SUV, but after running the numbers we came to the conclusion it was more expensive to downsize… Earlier this month we got another flyer in the mail, but this time for our home. The flyer stated that if we wanted, we could let this team of realtors
1. Sell our home for free (no closing costs)
2. No buying fees on a new house, and
3. Get $20k in upgrades in said new house.
Dude, now that sounds like a bargain!! Actually, it sounds too good to be true, especially since this development is just up the road from us, and we think it’s the prettiest, best designed “new neighborhood” going in around here.Â
Maggie from Northern Expenditure put out a post about a “Filling your Bucket” List a little while back, and I’ve compiled some things that have “Filled my Bucket” so far. The thought is that instead of obsessing about ticking off things on a Bucket List, you’ve probably already done some pretty cool things in your life, so take a moment to reflect on all those things that have already “Filled your Bucket”. Below are some things I’ve done that have been really fun and Filled my Bucket. Enjoy the pics, I tried to put in more than usual!
Mr. SSC: Hike most of the Appalachian Trail – While trying to figure out what I wanted to do in college or if I even wanted to remain in college, I decided hiking would be the best way to figure that out. So, I researched, planned, and then hiked from Maine down to Lower VA which was about 1700 miles. The hike worked and I figured out that I wanted to study Environmental Science which ultimately led me to my career in Geology.
Grandad and a much, much younger Mr. SSC. He got me started hiking though.
Mr. SSC: I got to go hiking in a jungle in Belize. We hiked in for a few miles and then we got on tubes and floated back down a creek, and we went through a bunch of limestone caves. It was pretty awesome floating in darkness through a cave, and then you see the light and come back out in a jungle!
Back into the light!
Mr. SSC: Sky dive! I was writing an article for a magazine in Denver – a sort of advertorial but it was a paying free-lance writing gig and I covered reviews for mountain biking trails, white water rafting, etc… Sky diving was one topic I was supposed to cover, and when interviewing one of the schools, he asked, “How can you write about it if you’ve never done it?” I told him I didn’t know, so he asked if I could be there at 7am the next day. I went and got my first jump in by stepping out onto the wing strut of a small Cessna! It was awesome!
Mr. SSC: I’ve gotten to throw beads from the Royal Sonesta balcony on Bourbon Street during Mardis Gras. If you live in or near New Orleans, Mardis Gras is a weeks’ long event culminating into revelry on Bourbon St. when Mardis Gras finally gets here. Most of the balconies on Bourbon St. are booked years in advance, and are not necessarily open to the public. You need passes and they even have security at the doors checking invites. BUT, I was able to get passes one year and it was a pretty awesome vantage point! No parades come down Bourbon St., but the people watching was some of the best I’ve ever seen.
The view from above – early on Mardis Gras
Mr. SSC: Visit the “Goonies” house in Astoria, OR! Yep, the first real vacation Mrs. SSC and I took together we decided we’d visit the Portland, OR area. She asked, “What do you want to do around there?” I said, “OH!! We’re only a few hrs from the house where they filmed Goonies!! We could go see that!” And so we did, and I never got much more input on vacation itineraries after that, lol. I’ve seen that movie over 300 times easily and so it was really cool getting to see “the house”, even though I didn’t get to do the Truffle Shuffle on the stump.
Once a Goonie, always a Goonie…
Mr. SSC: Ride on a Mardis Gras Float – While we lived in LA I got a chance to join a Krewe and ride on a float. I did this for 3 years, and it was pretty awesome, but word of warning, it’s also expensive! You have to pay to join the Krewe, which covers float maintenance and all the costs associated with putting one of these things on. Plus, you buy everything you throw, so in essence, you are literally throwing money away. The first year was the worst, but following years, I stocked up on a lot of it through yard sales, where local kids would repackage beads and animals and trinkets caught, for $1/bag or less.
Mr. SSC: Climb 23 Colorado 14’ers, which are peaks at or over 14,000′ high. To be honest most of these were glorified hikes. Well, long hikes with some tough sections but still, I loved it! There were a few where we took some radical routes (like below) and probably should have had ropes, but it all ended well thank goodness!
Our route to the peak on the far rightThe view from the Top!
Mrs. SSC: I’ve been to all of the contiguous 48 states so far in my life. I want to eventually visit them all, and so far, I’ve gotten to all of them except for Hawaii and Alaska.
Mr. SSC: Being a father. This might be cheesy, but there was a time when I was younger I didn’t want kids or see me ever having kids. As tiring, trying, challenging, and frustrating as they can be at times, there isn’t anything I’d do differently or trade to not spend time with them.
Mr. SSC: Go to France! I’ve always had a fascination with France, even studying French for 5 years from middle school to high school. I didn’t get to go on that class trip, but I did get to go on my grad school field trip to Le Mont St. Michel. I got to see some rare silicilastic reefs (most are carbonate), the Eiffel Tower, and even visit Normandy Beach, along with the memorials and cemeteries associated with that invasion. That was the saddest, and most inspiring part of that whole trip.
Clockwise from top left: Normandy Beach, U.S. Cemetery, Eiffel tower, Le Mont St. Michel day and night, Siliciclastic reef – size 11.5 flip flop for scale.
Those are some of the things I’ve gotten to do that have filled my bucket. Thanks again to Maggie for putting that out there, this was fun getting to relive a lot of these memories!
Dollar, Dollar bill y’all! Oh wait, those are just dollars…
It’s no wonder that we as a society are such consumers and create such financial issues for ourselves all in an effort to keep up appearances that we have money and are successful. You can’t go anywhere without seeing ads showing what success looks like, and therefore what we need to strive for. The bigger question that we forget to ask ourselves is, “What does success mean to us and who are we trying to look successful for”?  It all seems to be relative though, driven mostly by how you define success. When you’re constantly looking forward striving for bigger and better and more, at what point do you declare yourself successful enough?
Then what measure do you use to determine “success”? Is it having enough free cash to do what you want with? Is it the “He who has the most toys wins” mentality? By those standards, I should keep the job I have now for many more years, and spend money like I have a good oil-field salary. Why can’t I have a boat? I love to spend time on the water, the kids are old enough to enjoy it now, and we can afford it. Check – we’re getting a boat! We should get some nicer cars too. Right now we can drive past people and they don’t realize the kind of coin we’re bringing home, not anymore. Check – we’re getting newer, fancier cars! Plus, we need something to pull the boat! Now that I have a boat, I don’t want to spend 1-1.5 hrs on the yard each week to save $25 and I like boating better, so we should get a yard guy. Check – we’re getting a yard guy! You know what, now that I think about it, I like eating out for lunch at the office. I’m tired of my home made sandwiches and chips and apple every day, day in, day out. Check – I’m eating out more! We also need to vacation more, because we don’t get a lot of down time to reflect on our “success”, so you know what, we’re taking more vacations!
Dude, now this is success!! I’ve got a nice boat, a better ride(s), no lawn worries, and I get to have someone else make lunches for me and they’re WAY tastier than my ol’ sandwich. Plus, I get to plan our next vacation for the end of the year and the ones for next year. Talk about living the good life! See, it’s pretty easy to measure success, just look at all our stuff. We have SO much stuff, we even have a storage unit now to hold our extra stuff. It reminds me of when Homer told Monty Burns he was the richest guy he knew, and Monty responded with, “Yes, but I’d trade it all for a little more.” 🙂 So does more stuff equal “more success”?
What would it look like if I defined success by a different measure; a measure of time and freedom.
You’re doing what?!
If I tell someone that instead of pursuing all of that, I want to quit my 6 figure job, give up the boat, give up ever owning a fancy car (goodbye BMW dreams), eating out all the time, and give up a “big, fancy house”, so I can try to live off of $50k/yr they’d tell me I’m nuts.Heck, I told myself that before I got on board with this whole lifestyle change we’re striving for. Honestly though, after reviewing our spending this last year or two, I don’t see why we would need to live on more. Yes, more money could be more comfortable, but I’m already comfortable now. Yes, we could feel a little more secure having a paycheck show up each week, but I’m okay with withdrawing money as needed from our savings, as per the plan. You know what I will get more of though? Time and freedom.
I can’t BUY that right now. Let me rephrase that. Right now, I am currently buying future Mr. and Mrs. SSC time and freedom by forgoing the boat, the BMW, a bigger house, and bringing my own lunch to work each day. We still vacation enough for me, and after our lifestyle change, we’ll have more time to do more of that. So I can buy time, but it’s in the sacrifice of current convenience and luxury stuff now. But what about being successful, because I’ve worked my whole life to be a “success”!
Seriously, I don’t know how you could be more successful than by choosing to dictate your life how you want to live it. For me, I want to spend more time doing more family things, and to paraphrase the great Winnie the Pooh, I want to do more “Mr. SSC things.”
Fishing shouldn’t only be done on vacations!
Even more importantly, I want the freedom to do them when I want to do them. Not when they fall into an empty slot on my schedule and I also have the energy to do them. My current schedule has openings between 7pm and 11pm weekdays, weekends (sort of), and every other Friday (sort of). The sort of is a reminder that I still have “life things” to do like dentist appointments, car maintenance, house maintenance, errands, groceries, yard duties, and appointments for who knows what else, like haircuts, kids haircuts, kids dentists, kids birthday parties, dog things, and more. It’s amazing how easy it is to fill those days with things I’d rather not do in my “free time.”
In the end, it’s all about how you decide what success looks like to you. As the Grateful Dead put it, “sometimes we live no particular way but our own” and this rings true all over the PF blogosphere and life in general. We all have different ways we want to live our life, and we all have a plan in place to get to achieve those dreams. Some of us will get there sooner than others and some of us may never get there, although I hope we all get to where we want to be. But I guarantee that none of us will get there if we try to measure up to someone else’s definition of success.
What’s your definition of success? Do you have something you see as a success that others might think “wouldn’t count”?
Soft skills offer you glimpse into a persons personality.
With all of this talk about layoffs and possibly looking for a new job soon Mrs. SSC has been working on her resume. Don’t worry, she’s been working on it before now, but it keeps bringing up this debate over whether or not to highlight soft skills. If you do list them, to what degree should they be featured and what is the best way to incorporate them? We have opposing schools of thought on this concept. I think they show a side of you that your technical skills may not reflect, while Mrs. SSC tends to go the more traditional route and downplay or not list soft skills at all. Let me elaborate on some of my more humorous soft skills and then I will show how they can be interpreted on a resume.
Soft Skills:
Advanced Banjo, Guitar, and Dulcimer player
Excels at Small Talk: Voted “Most Likely to be in Someone Else’s Office Chatting” by my previous company
Excellent Gardener: Produced 1 perfect tomato from a single plant – expects to double success this fall
World of Tanks: Blitz!:  Deputy Tank Commander of VOLT clan. Achieved a 64% Win Rate
Excels at Weeding: Uses hands to pull roots instead of indiscriminately using chemicals
Franchise owner in Madden XXV: 8 consecutive Superbowl Titles, Developed 2 MVP quarterbacks from Rookie status
Candy Crush Soda: Achieved Level 368 – current level progress may be higher than listed
Interpretation of Soft Skills by Hiring Manager
Creative, and disciplined to become advanced on an instrument – instrument choice shows outside of the box thinker
Good office personality, probably well-liked by colleagues. Would transition well into any group. Plays nice with others.
Prefers quality over quantity! Willing to put in the hard work for little reward. Probably would accept more work for same pay and not complain…
Knows how to strategize, lead a team, and manage risk. Can quickly assess a situation and determine the best scenario to achieve success!
Not afraid of hard work, selective in his thought process and work methods.
Good manager, and can develop people – possibly mentor material and/or leadership position
Persistent, driven to win. Won’t accept defeat, but continues to strive for victory
Interpretation of Soft Skills by Mrs. SSC
Choice of instruments sounds like a hippy, maybe not corporate material
Doesn’t stay on task – disrupts others – could be counter-productive to the whole floor if left to roam the halls on his own
Can’t grow anything – must not use internet for help or reach out to others when needed. Who grows only 1 tomato?!
Spends too much time playing games – 64% win rate?! That doesn’t happen overnight…
Weeding by hand?! Who does that – this guy is stuck in the past – chemicals are around for a reason, sounds like a typical work harder not work smarter situation…
Again with the games?! Does this guy have a social life – probably just everyone he chats up at work…
??? Shows ability to get obsessed with things that don’t matter. Probably heads down lots of rabbit holes in his current work projects. Probably easy for him to get distracted and stay off task…
Clearly Mrs. SSC is a bit more harsh than the hiring manager’s interpretation of my awesome soft skill set, because I did get hired by a different company. They tend to like the out of the box soft skills I’ve spent a lifetime developing, but I can’t seem to get Mrs. SSC on board with that. She keeps rolling her eyes and telling me I’m ridiculous and those kind of soft skills would get her passed over for an interview, much less a position. I have to disagree. I mean, I added some soft skills like mine to her resume, and she didn’t protest at all. Although, I didn’t tell her, so maybe she hasn’t noticed yet?
What are some soft skills you would put on leave off of a resume? Have you ever seen anything as ridiculous as my soft skill set on an actual resume?
Over the last few days, we’ve all seen the stock market crash. Following that, there have been a plethora of articles that have come out regarding what to do, what to buy, how to adjust, etc… This is not one of those articles. Inspired by all those articles, the talking heads on tv, and boredom at the office, Mrs. SSC and I have been having an impromptu haiku contest related to the stock market performance. 🙂
Here are some of our back and forth haiku below:
Be a young willow
Bend in the downturn breezes
Stay strong, be patient
No selling when low
Stay the course for tomorrow
Until then, just be
Goodbye ER plans
Stocks, why did you fail me so
I sit at my desk
The sky is falling
Hope is lost! Dreams crashed! Sell! Sell!
We are doomed! Doomed! DOOOOOMED!
We now return you to your original programming, please enjoy the rest of your day.
If you would like to add a haiku of your own in the comments, please do! I’d love to hear some other peoples haiku, just remember 5-7-5 for structure. 🙂
I can’t believe it but it was a year ago that we decided to start this blog. It was a Friday off, and we were enjoying some coffee, on our sort of a “date morning” where we get 30-40 minutes to just catch up and talk about whatever and not be dealing with two demanding little humans. I love ’em, but man!. That week, our conversation was all about our FIRE plans. We’d been discussing it for real, because my brain finally accepted that, “Yes, yes we CAN do this and it’s not a pipe dream!” I was mainly quizzing Mrs. SSC about the intricacies, when she mentioned other blogs she had found that had kids and were in our situation, like Mixing Maroons and Big Guy Money.
I’d recently begun to dig around ol’ Mister Money Moustache and find that not everyone on there was an uber ER extremist, and that was heartening. This was when he was still cranking out posts regularly with his “clown car” and “sheeple” bravado if you can call it that, but all of his posts were great food for thought. They reaffirmed that I don’t need things to be happy, and trying to acquire things to achieve happiness is not a sustainable or healthy lifestyle. It had been a turning point a year or so earlier when I’d broken myself of my, “oh shiny! buy-now, oh shinier, buy now, oh! more shiny! Buy, buy, buy!” sort of lifestyle.
Exploring different blogs, I realized that “hey, everyone has their own thing going on, and our plan is going to be our plan.” Like everyone out there, they all have their strategy to get to FIRE and we have ours. I also realized there shouldn’t be a hangup with our plan being different from everyone elses, because, well it should be different, it’s ours. Reminded me of Full Metal Jacket a little, “This is our FIRE plan! There are many like it, but this one is ours!” Hahaha….
You WILL retire early, or so help me!!!
I remember the newby-ness of WordPress, and it seemed so foreign. Yet, I still get SO frustrated when I add a picture that has been turned the right way up, and I’ve snagged it the right way up and re-saved it the right way up, only to have WP turn it sideways when it gets emailed out, GAH!!!!! WTF WordPress?! Anyone else get that? Like this pic (although it will probably look right today).
Yep, that’s my favorite mug to drink coffee from.
How do you fix it? GAH!!!!! But I digress…
It’s been 52 weeks and there have been 69 posts, and 682 comments! I can’t believe there are 69 posts, I mean a year ago I would have thought, what kind of crapserious financial gobbeledy-gook insights do I have? I don’t pay attention to that stuff, I rarely even know the price of oil within $20 and that’s my OWN industry, what views will I have to put out there? All the wrong kind, let me tell you. I know how to burn through money, make bad decisions, and live it up, above my means with the best of ’em!
So at least in the beginning, that was my voice and how I wrote. I find I still gravitate towards that sometimes, but I find it easier now to understand where those bad habits came from, why I felt that they were justified, and what it took me to break them. If I figure out how to put that all out there coherently in under 10,000 words, you’ll hear about it. It’s a twisted story my friends, but maybe one day… Besides, I’m sure more than a few of you have probably had your own version of the same experiences. Maybe we could start a “Before FI” series – Oooohhhh….
Now, I just like to write about what’s on my mind, and how our FIREFFLC affects everything and a lot of our seemingly little decisions can affect that date. It’s also made me realize that while financial security and a constant paycheck is great, it ain’t everything. I’d rather take a chance and walk away from my industry and career while I’m just getting to that “show me the money” stage to have more time to get to make memories with my wife and kids. Having those little guys around has made the ER goal even more concreted into my brain because I’d love to have more time with them.
I got to spend the last weekend with my 2 yr old daughter, it was just us, and except for Friday, we didn’t even leave the house. We gave each other multiple “haircuts”, threw balls across the house, and each time she’d say “one more time throw ball!” and about 15 times later she went to go do something else. We played dress up with her baby dolls, and had lots of tea parties. Heck, we didn’t even get out of our pajamas all of Saturday and Sunday. We had a blast just getting to hang out and be, and cook, and play chase, and do what we wanted. When I dropped her off Monday morning at daycare, she was crying and sobbing, and I felt like it too, because I’d much rather have another day getting to hang with her than go to work.
A lot can change in a year, and I can’t even begin to guess what a year from now will look like in our household, much less many of yours. Steve at Think Save Retire is planning on being done in 2016, and looking at Even Steven Money’s Financial Independence Day list, a LOT of you guys, that I follow anyway, are looking at 2017! It should make for some interesting reading, while I’m in my office… Hahaha!
Until then, I’ll keep cranking out some posts and thoughts and do my best to keep it entertaining. I can’t say there won’t be more song and music analogies in there, because I do love music and find lots of ways to relate lyrics into real life, if you hadn’t noticed. 🙂 Thanks for a great year, and thank youall for putting out the great content you do that keeps me coming back for more. You all have been super supportive, helpful, and dang interesting to follow and get to know!
