It started with the lawn mower this summer. It wouldn’t start. I changed the spark plug and filter and it still wouldn’t start. So then I tore apart the carburetor and cleaned the injectors. The mower started, albeit reluctantly. Over the holiday weekend the lawn mower died again.

After dozens of pulls on the starter, I gave up and rolled the old red workhorse into the garage. I sat there for a while, staring at the machine. Debating internally whether I should open her up again and tinker around. How long had I had her? Was it really 2013 when I bought the lawn mower? Nine years. Was that a long time in lawn mower years? Is it time to put her down and buy one of those electric mowers I see all over the place now?

Then the numbers began rolling through my mind. Three, maybe four hundred bucks. No, $700 was the price for the one with good reviews.

But it’s not just that I realized.

My downstairs toilet was broken as well. Not broken, just needs some repair. The handle arm that lifts the plunger needs to be replaced. It doesn’t stop filling with water when flushed. I probably just needed to buy some parts, maybe twenty, fifty bucks at most.

My electric oven also broke a few weeks ago.

Whenever my wife turns the oven on to heat up it trips and says error on the small display screen. I’ve reset the oven a few time already by tripping the breaker, like the google searches I’ve found says to do, but it’s still not fixed. I’m thankful we didn’t host Thanksgiving at my home this year or else the dinner might have been ruined by this faulty oven. I have no idea what an oven costs, but I bet it’s not cheap.

The dishwasher beside the oven in the kitchen has been broken for six years. We wash dishes by hand in my house and have forgotten about the dishwasher. My wife and I had been talking about maybe buying a new dishwasher in the spring. We will need to buy one for our tenants once we rent the house out in 2025/26, why not have one for ourselves for a bit before then? How nice would it be to just rinse dishes and place them in a machine to have them get washed? It would be amazing. I looked online recently and they cost around four hundred for a lower-priced one.

The two columns outside of my home that hold up the overhang on my porch are rotting. They’re pretty tall, maybe twelve or fifteen feet tall. For some 8×8 and molding and paint, I’ve mentally estimated $1000 bucks to replace the work, doing it myself. I’m planning on replacing those and the siding at the front of the house in the spring.

Okay, I’m done listing out and complaining about what it costs to fix my broken things.

Writing this out has made me feel a bit better about all the things that are breaking at once in my home. There’s a perfect storm of things just getting old enough that they need replacing. And it’s been irritating, to say the least.

Spending money on home maintenance costs me on average about $300 bucks a month or $3600 annually. This year it’s looking like I’ll be spending more than expected, but that’s always the case for me. I’ve noticed I am always under budget forecasting for things. I assume the best case and it comes back to bite me. A bit of the edge of the sword for a hopeless optimist such as myself.

So I will have to reduce some investments in December and January in order to get my home maintenance machine back on track. I have other upcoming costs in December that are really taking a bat to my investing scheme.

I just signed my daughters up for fast-pitch softball: $500

Bought them some gloves, bats, and practice balls: $200

We are going to LA next Saturday for my wife’s family. I’m using Hilton Honors points to take care of the hotel…but we’ve decided to hit up Disneyland while were are there: $1100

Booked a cabin with a friend for next February up in South Lake Tahoe: $700 (paid half now)

This is life.

I know it may seem like a bunch of unneeded money being spent. Maybe it seems like I’m not serious about FIRE. But what’s the other option? Not do shit with my kids because I need to have a 50% savings rate?

This is my FIRE path, as a homeowner, and more importantly, with a family. It’s going to take a bit longer than if it were just me living as a bachelor or as a DINK.

Two Truths

There are Two Truths to everything. Without delving too deep into eastern philosophy, there is relative truth and absolute truth.

I’ll quote here a story from Thich Nhat Hanh:

Imagine two hens about to be slaughtered, but they do not know it. One hen says to the other, “The rice is much tastier than the corn. The corn is slightly off.” She is talking about relative joy. She does not realize that the real joy of this moment is the joy of not being slaughtered, the joy of being alive…

Being a homeowner is both the best and worst thing for my FIRE plans.

The pain and burden of paying all this “extra” money to fix things around my house is a relative truth. At the moment I find pain and suffering in owning a home. I can’t invest as much as I’d like and it is true that this hurts the bottom line of my investing forecasts. To put it simply, for a saver, homeownership is a hardship. And mentally, it fatigues me to think about spending money on a lawn mower instead of buying my future freedom (VTSAX). For a homeowner of a single-family home, the spending never ends, and it’s simply a money and time pit. That last sentence might be the truest thing I’ve ever written.

But.

There’s always a but.

Having a fixed mortgage rate is one of the best things that ever happened to me. Having complete autonomy on what I’d like to do to my dwelling is dreamy. Knowing that I own a piece of real estate in the pricey Bay Area of California, just feels good. There is a piece of mind that comes with knowing nobody can evict me or raise my rent.

And in regards to FIRE, I will be able to FIRE sooner than traditionally because I own a home. My plan is to rent the house out. Part of this rent income will fund my retirement. The home, once rented, will become part of my net worth and a diversified element of my portfolio.

I’m very fortunate to be a homeowner. I bought in 2015 and my home value has doubled since, while my mortgage has been cut in half from an original $2786/month in 2015 to $1630/month* in 2020 (with insurance and tax it’s $2k/month but I removed my escrow).

The things inside my home may be having a perfect storm of breaking at once, but I can’t ignore the fact that I bought the home during the perfect storm for buyers. A goldilocks era of ultra-low interest rates. A housing market still recovering from the shock of the financial crisis. A high inventory of houses on the market.

I could say the same thing about the concept of FIRE. The delayed gratification of cutting costs for the goal of saving up enough to stop working. The buying of stocks during a Bear Market. The money spent to enjoy experiences with loved ones over having a higher savings rate. The mindfulness of doing something yourself instead of the convenience of paying someone to do it for you.

There’s no singular way of thinking. There are no singular outcomes to the decisions we make.

There are always two truths to everything. Two sides to a single coin.

And that’s just it. That’s all there is. A single coin is all we have.

What do you think?