Reminders

Posted On May 12, 2024

For a few years now I’ve been putting off replacing two columns in front of my house that hold up a roof overhang over my front porch. There’s a big tree in my front yard, a hackberry, that loves to spill its leaves each fall into my gutters. I’ve since screened over the gutters, but years of clogging the gutters, before I even moved here, had allowed water to overflow at times from the gutter. This overflow created water damage to the wood columns.

I tell myself each spring, when the weather starts to get better, that this will be the year that I replace the columns. And each spring I find something else to work on. Another project that feels more pressing. Some lap siding that needs replacing. My fence. Concrete slabs on the side of my house. Re-screening all the windows.

Well this year I’m getting to them.

After I get the yard in order. And pressure wash my backyard concrete flatwork. And re-stain my backyard pergola. And fix that gate latch on the side of my house.

Just thinking about my to do list makes me feel defeated.

The problem, I realize, is that I give myself a seasonal time frame to get this exterior work done. As if it would be impossible in winter to replace these columns. To top it off I only have a couple of ‘free weekends’ to perform this work, with kids activities and going out and doing stuff filling my weekends. And so for years, I’ve been putting off the column replacement. Seeming to never get around to it before it starts to rain in the fall.

At this particular phase of my life, home maintenance has become a nuisance, not financially or because I can’t figure it out. It’s solely a nuisance because of my limited time. Thinking about what I have to do, my ever shifting list bouncing around my mind, causes me stress. Don’t get me wrong. I enjoy doing things with my hands. I enjoy building things. I’m a carpenter after all. I get a sense of extreme satisfaction fixing and building things, something I don’t get from work anymore due to my managerial role.

The problem is my time. I just don’t seem to have enough of it these days.

I just got back from a week in Mexico City for spring break. We rented a little condo, a two bedroom with a small back yard and front garden, on the ground floor in a 9 story building in the La Condesa neighborhood. The roof had a common area pool and lounge. It was just what my family needed. Sure my kids shared a room, but they don’t mind or know better at this age. The living room was just big enough. The kitchen a perfect size. No lawn to maintain. No siding to worry about. No columns.

And of course my daydreamer mind couldn’t help but imagine how it would be to live in that place. I tried to take off the ‘vacation goggles’ and think how day to day life would be in a smaller little condo. To not have to worry about exterior maintenance would take a big load off my shoulders.

There are other huge tradeoffs of living in a small condo I’m not focusing on. But man, would it be nice to not have to worry about mowing the lawn and fixing exterior shit.

Back to time.

I feel it slipping away like I never have before. Life is moving at the most rapid pace it has ever moved for me. I blink my eyes and months have passed. Something about having a routine makes life aerodynamic and blurs the line between days and months. How and when did my life become this speeding rocket ship? I remember being a kid and teenager, even a twenty something, and watching the clock seemingly never move. Lazy afternoons that felt like an eternity. Playing video games for hours. Waiting and waiting for a never moving week for the weekends to arrive. That didn’t just feel like another life, that truly was another life compared to the gushing spin of the clock hands I feel in my forties.

Time is a perception thing. Chronologically, time is not faster now than it was when I was a kid, but subjectively it is. And I don’t have enough of it. I feel my lack of time acutely pressing down on my neck. Falling between my fingers like grains of sand; the harder I grip the more I lose hold of what I have. There’s nothing more stressful than doing something while wanting to be doing something else. And I don’t want be doing home maintenance on my time off from work.

But I’ve decided to change my mindset instead of complaining about it. Change the way I view things by using a little word play and gratitude.

I tell myself: I don’t have to fix things around my house. I get to fix things around my house.

I own a house. That in itself should be something to celebrate.

There are many people out there right now trying to find a home to buy.

With the recent skyrocketing home prices and higher interest rates, I wouldn’t be able to afford the house I live in today. I see some apartments nearby, in a less than ideal location, 2 bedroom…and the rent is higher than my mortgage!

Buying a home isn’t always the right answer. But I dodged a big bullet by just a few years. I accidentally timed the housing market. My low fixed rate mortgage is a winning hedge against the inflation that has taken root in the economy. The more inflation weakens the dollar and drives up my income, the lower my mortgage becomes.

I live in a quiet well maintained neighborhood settled in amidst the rolling hills of the Bay Area. My home is a perfect structure to shelter my family from the elements. Our garden out back is blooming and relaxing to be around. Everyone in my family can have their own bedroom and private space.

My home does its job exceptionally well. It just sits there all day waiting for me while I’m at work. And when my entire family is within its walls it cradles us like a caring parent.

Thinking of it this way changes everything.

That little switch in words has made a world of difference in how I view things I have to do. I use the word play for work too. Right before I get out of bed I’ll tell myself how lucky I am to have a job. A job that isn’t physical manual labor. A job that pays me to stand around and watch people work hard building things. I don’t have to go to work, I get to go to work.

Coming back from Mexico City has made me more grateful for where I am in life. Traveling around always makes me see the United States in a different light. Yes, we have problems in this country, but we also have awesome things here that we don’t see because we’re so used to it. We are spoiled here. To be born in the United States really is hitting the lotto. There are 9.5 billion people in this world. 335 million of them are Americans. That’s only 4% of the world’s population. This means there was a 96% chance I could have been born elsewhere, but I wasn’t. I was born into one of the most prosperous economies known to humanity. A place that gives me the chance to retire in my 40’s.

Thinking along terms like this always makes me question my want for something else and somewhere else. I almost feel embarrassed for not being satisfied with what I have at the moment.

Stopping to think about the good things in life can make almost any situation better. Being grateful for what I have changes everything. It doesn’t give me more time, but it takes away the stress of thinking I’m spending my time doing something not worthy of it. This somehow gives me more time by altering my perception of time. I’m not losing out by doing an annoying mundane task like fixing my porch, I’m indulging in the slow pace of taking care of the structure that houses my family.

And so I will take on my rotting porch columns this spring, not as a whining middle aged father, but as the luckiest man on the face of the earth.

Spring 2024 Update

Things are getting serious around the Happily Disengaged household. We’ve decided to (temporarily) cut out sailing from our lives. What a decision. I’ve been paying around $300 a month for membership into my sailing club…and we haven’t taken a sail since last August! That’s 8 months paying into a service I wasn’t using. $2400 bucks into oblivion. It was like a gym membership in that guilt kept me from canceling. I was thinking with my heart and not my mind.

To lay out my excuses (more for myself than for you dear reader): my work had begun to ramp up in September taking in my Saturdays. Then we took off for a few weeks to Europe. Followed by an extremely rainy winter. Then my wife broke her arm in February, eliminating her ability to co-crew with me. It’s still not completely healed up. But even if it were, my weekends are filled with my daughter’s softball games (and home maintenance).

So I made the decision to stop the bleeding. But it’s more than not having enough time for this hobby.

Now is the time to hunker down and put savings into a higher gear. My goal to quit work in 2026 is less than two years away, and this is the time to hit it hard in the savings department. I’m diverting more cash than usual to continue filling up my high yield savings account that will fund my first year in retirement.

As I’ve stated before in my retirement plan outline, I’m not buying/rebalancing into bonds yet. Two reasons for this, my time to retire is flexible, so I can go to the very last minute invested 100% in equities. Secondly, with the potential cut to interest rates, I would take a hit the minute rates are cut. If I can avoid that I will.

I’ve also done a little more financial housework. I called into two credit cards and down graded them to either eliminate my fees or halve them. I, for one, don’t mind paying a fee for the credit cards as long as they benefit me. I also see this line of credit as something I will enjoy having in retirement. Once I quit work, I assume it will be much harder get a credit card with no W-2 income.

We’re also going back on forth on some streaming subscriptions we have but rarely use. Namely, my YouTube TV subscription that I pay $72.99 a month for. I only keep it around for sports. I wish there was another way to watch my sports without paying for an entire package of channels. I would need a VPN to get my baseball fix ($29.99/month MLB Package) because of blackouts and an antennae for NFL games-something I’ve yet to do because then again I’m subscribing to yet another service. When I was a kid I grew up without cable and they would play the games on our local channels. How I wish they could go back to that.

Being so close to the finish line is extremely motivating. We are right there. With every upward leg of the market, our goal swings tantalizing closer to reality, a carrot on a stick swinging right within my grasp, my finger tips grazing against the vegetable. Finally. FI is around the corner. It’s like having a city as your destination on a long road trip and finally seeing the skyline of that city in the distance. It’s no longer some intangible place on a map or photo. It’s right there, in it’s physical form, not yet attainable, but you can see it with your own eyes and know it exists.

I see my freedom like a hazy mirage along the horizon. Maybe it’s my green oasis after a long exodus through the desert of the Boring Middle. Maybe it’s an illusion to my thirsty soul, ready to disappear as soon as the markets dip. Either way, something is out there, I can see it.

How about you? How do you view time and make time? How’s the journey to FI going?