Articles with early retirement

When Work Makes You Want to Quit EVEN Sooner.

What a week it has been around the office. I’ve been back for a week from our most recent vacation up to the MT/ID area, and I was feeling pretty refreshed.

Lake McDonald - Glacier Nat'l Park
Lake McDonald – Glacier Nat’l Park

I had gone the whole vacation not even thinking about work, and after I got back I was even feeling super recharged from a Personal Finance (PF) standpoint. The field I’ve been working the last 3 years is almost ready for drilling and we’re just finalizing the field development plan. The other project I’ve been working on has gotten extended as we’ve come up with more ideas to test than upper management was expecting, so that has been fun too. There was even another minor reorg/power shift while I was gone and I lost 2 of my 7 bosses, so now I’m back to having only 5 baby, yeah! All, in all it was looking up. And then the rails came off of the train… I essentially got ambushed in a meeting that wasn’t even my group, and taken to task for things I didn’t work on and wasn’t responsible for. It didn’t matter though because I was the one that was there accounting for any and all work done on that project. Let me back up and set the stage for one of the weirdest, bizarre, and unprofessional experiences I’ve ever dealt with in my career, and how knowing where we were in relation to Financial Independence Retire Early (FIRE) helped me keep perspective and make the best out of a wack-a-doo situation.

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Choose FI Podcast Interview: How we got here and even more SSC household background!

A while back I got an email request to do an interview with the guys over at ChooseFI and thanks again to reader Isaac and others who recommended us for an interview. It was really fun to do and was released on their podcast this morning!

The link to that interview can be found here.

Interview Details

In the interview I discuss a lot of our backstory, more so than we’ve gone into on the blog, and how Mrs. SSC is the big driver for our Fully Funded Lifestyle Change (FFLC). You can learn my name (gasp!), even more details about how we got on track for FFLC, find out more about the lure of “the spreadsheet that drives it all” and even more about how dense I was with realizing that “retiring early” was a real concept that could happen without making ridiculous sacrifices. Seriously, it only took me 6 years to believe it could happen. Bonus points to try and see how many times Mrs. SSC come out as the hero in our story. Hint: It’s a lot…

 

Choose FI Background

If you haven’t heard of Choose FI, they’re a couple of guys, Jonathan and Brad, that started their personal finance blog and podcast, ChooseFI. It covers everything from college issues, investing outside your 401k, travel hacking, debt payoff, and even making the perfect cup of coffee.

They’ve got a plethora of articles and podcasts to appeal to all kinds of readers, so make sure to check them out over at ChooseFI.

I hope you enjoy the interview, and let me know what you think!

May 2017: Our Money Went Where?!

May. The end of spring and kickoff of summer and what a month it has been. We had some bumps in the road with our spending, and there is room for improvement, but in general it wasn’t bad. We were able to close on our lot in Canyon Lake, so we now have an official place to kick off Phase 1 of our Lifestyle Change. We reviewed our budget situation and decided that we can make the house work if we build it sooner than later, so we met with a custom home builder and designer this month and are on track to start designing our house probably by the end of the week. We found a couple of plans that we like ~90% of the layout, and we have a powerpoint presentation (because who doesn’t use powerpoint for everything?) with notes and details for the other things relating to homebuilding beyond the layout. I think it will come together pretty easily as we seem to be on the same page for almost every design aspect we’ve come across so far. Getting back to our spending, here’s where our money went this past month.

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Estimated Lifestyle Change Spending: Canyon Lake Edition

We’re closing on our lot out in Canyon Lake this Friday and we’ve been doing a lot of reviewing of the numbers and seeing if we can make them work to start our Lifestyle Change. It’s difficult to know what will come of all of this, and how accurate they will be, because they are all estimates based off of our current house/utility usage, current lifestyle, and some moving forward assumptions. We have tracked our spending for over 2 years now, so we have that to go off of, but again, they’re all just estimates. Since that’s the best we have to work with, it’s what we’ll move forward with in our planning scenarios. The short answer is that we’ll be right around break-even or living paycheck to paycheck. We’ll only need to draw off of investments for travel and unplanned items that pop up, assuming I make zero money.

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April 2017 Spending: Our Money Went Where?!

What a month it was around our household. There was a lot going on and the year of spending seems to continue. Some quick highlights were that we found a lot around Canyon Lake that we liked and are closing on that in a week, woohoo! We finalized our vacation plans up to MT and ID for the summer trip and I can’t wait to get to hang out in that part of the country for a few weeks. Property taxes just keep rising, but it looks like home value is actually commensurate with that this time. I’m trying a new cell phone plan that will drop my part of the bill to only $17/mo. More on that to come. Overall, it was a pretty rough month financially even though it was a great month in every other aspect. For more details read ahead, and for everyone else, we’ll see you next week with a detailed finances post about our Canyon Lake Fully Funded Lifestyle Change projections.

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Phase 1 of the Lifestyle Change Begins: We’re Buying Some Land!

This past month has been a whirlwind in regards to our Lifestyle Change and life in general. It’s literally only been about a month or so since Prof. SSC proposed her idea of our revised Hill Country Lifestyle Change to me. Since then we’ve taken a couple of different weekend trips looking at property. We’ve scoured Zillow and google maps street view (if street views actually exist…) and even more so, we’ve begun looking at house plans. Great googly moogly it’s been busy! Who would’ve thought retirement life planning would be so hectic?

Couldn't be said better.
Couldn’t be said better.

During that time though, we’ve figured out what we find important in our property and it’s not what you’d think. Even though we’re looking around lakes, we don’t necessarily find a lake view as important as we thought. We found that we would take more seclusion over a lake view. Yep, seclusion and that feeling of our own space is way more important to us than being right on the water with a killer view. That’s what led us to decide on the lot we think will be a perfect fit for us. It’s almost 3 acres, heavily treed with mature oaks, and we can put a house on it and have it surrounded by big trees. As of last weekend, we’re under contract on it with a closing date early next month. Now the real fun begins!

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March 2017 Spending: Our Money Went Where?

March was a pretty good month. The “year of spending” seems to continue as we had another month and another round of big ticket items show up. Specifically, the fence got replaced, well on 3 sides of the yard anyway. Our other neighbor didn’t feel like replacing the side we share, so that’s fine with us. On the upside, we also got about 30’ of fence replaced that no one paid for. Not us or our backyard neighbors. At $22/ft. that saved us about $330 (that’s going halvesies with the back neighbor). We dumped my bonus into the kids 529’s so they got a nice boost, but beyond that, there wasn’t a lot of craziness in our spending.

A quick look at our FI target shows that we’re still at 84% of our goal, down ~0.5% from last month. That’s all market driven as we’re still contributing the same and just watching and waiting. Some fun stuff that happened last month was our first trip out to look for property for the Lifestyle Change. For more details on that plus where the rest of our spending went last month read on.

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https://www.vrbo.com/295623

It’s Still About a Lifestyle Change – Not Early Retirement.

Over the last week or so Mrs. SSC has come up with FFLC (Fully Funded Lifestyle Change) version 3.0. I think it’s 3.0, but it’s probably more like version 12.0. This is focused more on how we see our Lifestyle Change and less on whether or not it’s truly Early Retirement. Version 1.0 was that we both quit at the same time and move out West, or to the East Coast and become full-time stay at home parents. Version 2.0 was that Mrs. SSC would continue teaching and I would quit and become a full-time stay at home parent, but we’d still be moving out of Texas, and definitely Houston. So what’s different with version 3.0?

Not moving close to views like this...
Not moving close to views like this…

Well, with the lack of jobs anywhere in the U.S. for Mrs. SSC to apply to, and the fact that she loves her current gig where she is now; this version of our Lifestyle Change has us staying in Texas, but moving out to Hill Country. Yep, there’s still no snow, still no snowboarding, but I’d be able to be a stay at home dad, she’d be able to continue teaching and we could live in a drier more hilly part of Texas. Again, we’d be Changing our Lifestyle, not necessarily focused as much on “just not working”.  What’s driving this new change and where did it come from so quickly? In short, we’re making our own future and not waiting for it to happen to us.

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February 2017 Spending: Our Money Went Where?!

February was a great month for us! Or maybe it wasn’t who knows? Oh wait, I should know… Maybe I should write “February was A month for us!” and just leave out a descriptor, good or bad. There wasn’t a lot of change although I noticed our “pets” category comprised 10% of our total spend for the month. Yipe! I got a bonus at work – woohoo! That was pretty unexpected considering we still didn’t make money last year, but I am not complaining. Beyond that, it was a pretty normal month. For the number voyeurs out there, here is a look at the charts and graphs of our spending and how it stacks up to last month.

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Retiring Early Creates a Perspective Shift at Work

This week has been crazier than usual and has me a little out of sorts. I hadn’t felt in the right mindset to write anything even with a funny idea like “Our retired greyhound needs an ikigai” sidenote – she does though, the transition from racing 69 races to retired has been a little rough on her. Even animals go through a transition from career to retired and it’s not always smooth.

It’s been a bit hectic at work, which is a nice change of pace, and the work has been fun but man, some people just haven’t figured out their new roles in this reorg. This week has made me so glad that today is my Friday. Yippee for the 9/80 schedule where I get every other Friday off! Seriously, since 9am Monday morning, I’ve been looking forward to today. Even with a positive perspective shift on Monday morning, it still only took 3 hrs of work before I was ready for the weekend. Here’s how it got to that point so quickly and why I’m excited about spending tomorrow outside, trimming bushes, doing yardwork, and weeding the flower beds.

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