Fall is my favorite season for a myriad of reasons, but mostly because fall signifies change. A change from heat. A change in the color of the trees and east bay hills from dry golden yellow to a luscious rolling green. A change in age; my birthday is in September. My oldest daughter’s birthday is in October. School is in session, so our family’s routine changes back to “normal”…then the holidays come rolling around. Combine all that change with football, and fall can’t be beat for me.

My oldest daughter is in middle school now. The school is a block away from my house. She starts school at 9am (weird), an hour later than my youngest. She joined the cross country team, and so she stays late three days a week at practice. This means she is now walking to and from school. I bought her a Nokia 2780 dumb phone on a Mint mobile plan for ease in pick up and letting us know if she’s staying late or not.

I’d been pretty adamant in my stance that my kids won’t get any phones till they are near 18. I’ve read and listened to plenty of psychologist explain why it’s bad for children’s (especially girls) mental health and attention spans to have unfettered access to social media and short video clips. School curriculums have pulled back from giving kids entire books to read because of attention span loss–I’d feel as if I’d failed tremendously, if my kids haven’t read a real book before college age. Even with the strong evidence of how negative a smart phone can be for a pre-teen and teen, I see my stance as trying to give my kids some freedom from a phone before the ‘addiction’ and employer required necessity to it starts. Plus, I never had a phone growing up and came out ok.

But I have to be open minded. I’m reminded at my place of employment all the time about the need to be open to new technology and ways of thinking. I remember being young and getting frustrated with old hard headed baby boomer bosses unwilling to be open to the benefits of new technology. I used ot tell myself I’d never be that way. At work, I find myself sometimes reeling back from complicated looking tools, or a change in methods that I’m comfortable with. I don’t want to be that way at home too.

I can’t become stuck in an old person’s way of thinking that: ‘if it was done this way before, this is the only way that is right’. There is a technology out there that better allows communication between my kid when she’s out in the world, why not use it? So I settled on a halfway mark. She gets a Nokia that calls and texts perfectly fine. Even has a small amount of internet and apps and games. But it’s not a smartphone–no apps as we know them.

I’ve been staying away from the news as best I can. Though some news does break through and gets me stirred up. I’ll bite my fingers from too much text on this subject, but one slips through as it weighs heavily on my heart. It’s the Perdomo v Noem ruling that the SCOTUS recently ruled on, it legalizes racial profiling. If you appear Latino, speak Spanish or English with an accent, or are in a place where Latinos congregate, that counts as reasonable suspicion to be arrested, detained, and asked for papers.

This ruling makes me, a 2nd generation American Latino, a second class citizen. I do not have the same rights as do my other fellow citizens who need evidence based suspicion to be arrested or detained. It breaks my heart that I fought for this country in the Iraq war, and now this country is turning its back on me because of my race. Of course, as a student of history I should have known better than to be so optimistic about the present and future.

This reinforces my resolve to my “expat fire” plan of moving abroad. I’m zeroing in on Spain, Mexico, Portugal, and France. These countries allow you to get a ‘retirement’ visa so long as you have enough money in the bank and private insurance. Spain would be easiest because of language, but France is very appealing because of its strong history of liberty and rights. We are also considering a nomad type retirement, where we stay a month in different places and doing the Schengen visa dance.

Despite the crazy headlines, the stock market keeps finding reasons to move upwards. My portfolio is up 14% YTD, boosted by my holdings of international. An inner voice, maybe my anxiety, tells me we are in a bubble, waiting for some shock to hit and send things into correction mode. As Ive written before, I’m noticing that as my portfolio value increases, I’m more worried about protecting it than in years past. Regardless of what my anxious mind thinks, I’m sticking to my investment plan. I’ll rebalance in December keeping with a boglehead 3 fund portfolio strategy, which if December were today, I’d take some off the top of my US domestic holdings.

My savings rate has taken a hit as I’m preparing for another trip to Europe. Despite knowing ahead of time how exhausting a whirlwind trip can be, we are hitting 5 stays in 2 weeks. Starting from Munich, we will stop off at my favorite Oktoberfest. Then take the train down to Rome for a few days. Fly to Sicily and spend a week on a beach. Fly to Seville. Then the train to Barcelona.

Sounds exhausting just typing this out, but I can’t help myself when planning these trips. Vacation time is so short, and all of these fantastic destination being so close together…well, it’s a slippery slope. Two new destinations for us will be Sicily and Seville. We will be renting a car in Sicily, and so will have freedom to explore the corner of the island we are staying in. So many of the ancient civilizations I’m fascinated with have spent time occupying and fighting over Sicily; Greeks, Carthaginians, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, etc., so I’m very excited for this part of the trip, even if its merely stepping foot on this soil I’ve read so much about.

August Monthly Spending

Ok here’s what I spent last month. I’m hoping to get back into this spending report like I used to do when I started the blog. Maybe this will push me to be more consistent in my blog posting.

As usual, food comes in high. I’m going to start a new strategy of driving way out to Walmart and see if this line item can come down. I really have to drop going to Safeway for groceries.

The tax line is another high one. I pay around $12k total. Property tax is $6k. And state and federal avg $6k. So I save $1k a month in preparation, which goes to a HYSA saving account. This is the same deal with Home Insurance, which just bumped up to $3k a year from $2k last year! I looked around and could not find anything cheaper, and surprisingly almost all insurance companies simply do not insure in California anymore.

All other spending is typical. Travel line is our upcoming trip, which I’ve been dolling out in monthly increments since March. In January I’m going to quit my membership for sailing again. I just don’t get out enough to make my membership worth it.

In 2026 I don’t think we are going to take any international vacations. Maybe a Hawaii trip using credit card points or another domestic locale: Seattle, Chicago, Boston, are all in the running. Since 2026 will be our last full year working, we are going to hunker down on the saving like the good ol’ days and pump what we can into (mostly) cash and investments. We will be making the most out of our One More Year Syndrome. I want to get to a point, where if I were to retire and not travel, it would not be a lean fire here in the pricy Bay Area.

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