It’s summer and my favorite time of year in the Happily Disengaged household. Summer is an easier time to do things outdoors while spending less money, and in general, is the most frugal time of year for us. Backyard grilling is cheap. Biking and hiking don’t cost much (except for the gasoline consumption). Next weekend we’re going camping. Yesterday I went rafting down the American River. I’m intermittently fixing things around my house, last week for example a toilet began…
Wow. Been a while. To give a brief update on my life in the last few months since my last post: Biggest change is I switched companies at work. My new company gave me an offer I couldn’t refuse, and well, in the name of FI, I had to take the money. I’m much busier now that I’m back to building things, on a job site around people again, and to be honest, I welcome the change. The job is…
After nearly twenty-one years of being an official adult, I’ve lost sight and forgotten many times the feeling one has when finally deciding upon (or settling on) a profession, be it a job, career, or calling. I didn’t go to college, so I never had the sort of free-range buffer of growing into adulthood that many who attend four-year universities experience, but I did join the Navy, which parallels the teen to adult buffer college affords. Joining the military bought…
It’s January, so now’s a good time to look back over the year 2021 and post about our total expenditures. There was a time when I did monthly expense blogs, but alas I’ve fallen off these types of posts as my blog bandwidth has narrowed and my blog posts have slowed down. Pursuing FIRE isn’t the easiest in an ultra high cost of living area like San Francisco, but it’s not impossible. This is the land of the $8 dollar…
Something unexpected happened a few weeks ago: I killed one of my longest standing dreams. The murder of this dream turned goal wasn’t made in haste or with a burning emotion in my chest. I spent nearly a week mulling it over. Contemplating its repercussions. Sleeping on it. Waking up at night thinking of how my life would be without this thing that I’d been living with for nearly two decades. I’m still in mourning of sorts. It’s something that…
My mother had a saying when I was growing up and now it’s stuck with me like any good saying does when repeated over and over during one’s formative years. The saying is this: “Lazy people work twice.” It doesn’t take much imaginative work to guess that I probably wasn’t working as hard as I should have been as a youth to have been told this over and over again. Usually, household chores were the culprit. A half-ass job sweeping…
Finally. Touching down in what would turn out to be one of my new favorite places didn’t feel like I’d been delayed 19 long pandemic-infused months for this vacation to Europe. The abrupt jolt of the airplane’s wheels making contact with runway asphalt was like hitting the reboot button for my soul. Rat race competition, schedules, commuter traffic, all evaporated away in the puff of burnt rubber emitted from the plane’s wheels upon touchdown and I was born anew. The…
I write this post from Porto, Portugal. After nearly two years of delay, we were finally able to take our trip abroad. So far it’s been fantastic. Portugal has exceeded any expectations I had of the country. My oldest daughter spent her 8th birthday wandering around castles and the narrow twisting cobbled streets of Lisbon. We haven’t been to Europe since 2012, the long delay in returning being a combination of waiting for our kids to get out of diapers…
That’s right. I made some money from the internet. It was the first time, and first times are special, so I decided to write about it. How did I do it and how much did I make? Well, I finally stopped procrastinating and signed up for eBay. I took inspiration from Freddy Smidlap and his series about selling on eBay. I have a bunch of things that would be great candidates for selling on eBay, but I’ve been hesitant to…
The phone rang and it was the front desk. In broken English, the woman on the other line told me that someone was downstairs waiting for me. I told her I’d be right down. I’d been waiting months for this day. I let my wife know who it was and that I would be right back and then stepped out into the hallway. The hotel was a time capsule. The hallways and rooms have never known anything other than early…