The smell of a Red Bull always takes me back to Dubai. It’s not a pleasant aroma in any way for me. It’s more like a warm and comforting lamp that lights up and gives definition to a darkened and hazy blur of memories from my youth. It conjures up flashes of burning hot nights on the Arabian Peninsula. It brings back thoughts of vodka and discos full of Russians and swimming pools and taxi rides speeding down Sheik Zayed…
March felt a little like a down hill leg of a race for me and the family. Time is moving faster. I can feel it. I got into cycling at the beginning of the month, and it manifested itself into my wife and I purchasing entry level road bikes at a decent price at the end of the month. How’s that for a slippery slope? At work, my work load is reaching levels I haven’t felt in quite some time….
A few days ago, the unpleasant anniversary of San Francisco’s shelter in place order ominously came and went like a slow drifting summer fog across the bay. I’d forgotten the exact date, March 16th, if you’ll forgive me. I would have been perfectly fine to keep on with my life without that unneeded bit knowledge, if it weren’t for NPR declaring it over and over again on my way into work. So I got to thinking, drifting in and out…
Now that we’re in the thick of tax season, I figured it might be nice to have a post related to tax savings; specifically what we pay in 401k fees vs the tax saving benefits. I just paid my federal and state taxes and I’m getting ready to pay my property taxes. Part of my decision making strategy when I refinanced, was forgoing escrow so that I could use a credit card to pay my property tax. It lets me…
February. The ancient Romans called it Februarius and it marked the start of spring for their empire two thousand years ago. Back then of course, Februarius didn’t occur at the same position of the earth’s axis as it does now. The ancient Romans used Februarius as the time to plan for the upcoming good weather and prepare the fields. And so we followed suit in the Happily Disengaged household even though it’s not quite spring. The warm weather allowed us…
Recently I’ve started purchasing individual stocks again after taking a few years off. And in addition to that, I’ve started to invest in small cap index fund shares. Now that I’m buying individual stocks again, I’ve been asking myself why I stopped picking stocks in the first place. A few questions bubble up to the top of my mind as I ask myself this. Is there a wrong way to invest money? Well, that’s a loaded question. This is like…
I’ve found myself in a new role at work this year. I translate blueprints into construction schedules. A lot of staring into computer monitors. Actually, I’m only staring into computer monitors. Blueprints these days aren’t what you might envision. They aren’t the lovely, unwieldy paper drawings that I can make notes on, or color in, or casually flip like a good book. Just like our currency, blueprints have gone the digital route. The first few days of this new gig…
My kids have this bad habit of complaining about being bored or calling something they don’t like boring. My girls probably overuse the word a bit, but it emphasizes their dislike for idle time. They are so used to having things at their fingertips, that any wait time instantly becomes intolerable dead time to them. They don’t know what it’s like to have to wait for their favorite song to come on the radio, or movie to play, or tv…
In January we didn’t have a mortgage to worry about and we took a spur of the moment trip to the Sierra Nevada for a weekend getaway for the MLK holiday weekend. While I usually dislike spur of the moment money spending, this trip to the snow was exactly what we needed as a family; just a few days out of our house in new surroundings doing absolutely nothing. Somehow we managed to stay in the black this month despite…
The other day I was going over my expenses and admiring my low transportation costs. How have I have gotten so lucky that my transportation costs are only 8% of my household monthly expense? That’s pretty good considering how much it costs to commute out here in the Bay Area. Tracing back my path to this point, I realized that it’s sheer luck that my transportation expenses are so low. Okay, maybe not 100% luck, but it definitely feels like…