I live 42 miles from downtown San Francisco where I’ve worked for the vast majority of my career. My commute on average is 3 hours a day. 1 hour in the morning and 2 in the afternoon. This equates to 32.5 days of commuting a year. I believe I’m being as efficient as possible with my money by choosing to live in a “cheaper” suburb, but is commuting to work really the most optimal way to live in a high…
For the first time since we’ve made a concerted effort to pursue Financial Independence, we have to temporarily reduce our after-tax investment purchases of VTSAX this November. An RV road trip vacation in September and our 10 year marriage anniversary weekend in Yosemite in October, sucked out all the buffer we had in our checking and saving accounts—and actually left us chasing our credit card balance in October. Not good. Minimal cash in my bank means more market exposure, but…
The hope that tomorrow will be better than today is the greatest motivator of all time. And for the most part, if we plan and strategize, this Living For The Future works out. If we work hard and sacrifice a little today: saving money, eating healthy, buying stocks, teaching our kids to behave, obeying the law; tomorrow will be better for us. Just about everything we do, individually and as a society, is based on some reward we hope to…
Most major investment firms are predicting lower than average returns for the stock market in the next decade. Horrifying words like Lost Decade are being thrown around. Even the vaunted Vanguard stock outlook has market returns in the 5.5% to 7.5% nominal annualized range for the next 10 years. This Vanguard report was recently updated over the summer after an even worse December 2019 outlook of 4%-ish returns. International equity growth seems to fare better when modeled by all parties….
Once a year we take a vacation abroad. In 2018, it was the tiny beach village of Chacala in Nayarit Mexico. 2019, we hit up South East Asia; Hong Kong, Vietnam, and Taiwan. This year we had a spectacular trip to Europe planned for March. Spain, Hungary, and the UK were on the itinerary. But then COVID happened, and like most everyone with 2020 travel plans, we had to cancel the trip. We never once thought we’d rent and RV…
We are ardent Capitalists here at Happily Disengaged. But we are also ardently aware of the problems associated with consumer culture in our society. There’s a problem with consuming items in ever-increasing quantities. Suffering inevitably results from the constant pressure we feel from advertisements and the need to show others we’ve made it. When you make more you spend more. The Consumer Okay, so the quotes are just a paraphrase of a mentality that us consumers have. There’s a bunch…
Sometime during the last decade of the cold war, America’s unions began to die. Blue-collar work in America, while respected and looked upon with nostalgic eyes by nearly all economic classes as the backbone of this country, just isn’t something that America aspires to be. And in turn, many young people are passing up what may be a great career and the fastest lane to Financial Independence. Not to mention a high salary with college degree needed. With the preconceived…
When we moved into our house in 2015, we knew that the air conditioning didn’t work. The region of the Bay Area where we live has clockwork wind in the summer. This wind is usually enough to mitigate the need for paying thousands to fix the AC and then pay mightily to run it. Between the hours of three and five in the afternoon, on cue, a breeze picks up and continues on throughout the night. When my alarm goes…
For the 4th of July weekend, we usually go camping. It’s a time of taking an extra day off work, to turn a three day weekend into a four day weekend, and driving out into one of the national forests we love to visit with friends and family. We swim. Drink. Cook delicious food. And enjoy being outdoors. For the last few years, we’ve been driving up into either the verdant forests of the north or the banks of the…
In two months we were able to increase our savings rate from 25% of our net income to 50%. Since we gave ourselves a 7 year deadline to call it quits from the rat race, the importance of jacking up our savings rate in a timely manner was number one on our FI course correction list. Achieving a 50% savings rate in such a short amount of time is not impossible, as long as you don’t have a lot of…