Words I have seen other people pick include things like:

• Dedication
• Progress
• Clarity
• Focus
• Thrive
• Fearless

My word does not fit in this list at all. But I am sure it is the exactly perfect word for me right now.

A lot of things came together for me that just made this snap into place.

I love how sometimes I read or learn things that don’t seem to make much difference at the time and yet later sometimes those things make a big impact.

• I’ve seen some different things people have said about the new year and goals in various places.
• I saw a couple of people asking about what others’ words for the year were.
• I got an email that mentioned that one thing people screw up when planning for the New Year is not making plans for how they will respond in a month or two or six when they lose motivation and don’t feel like working on their goals anymore.
• Another email mentioned how showing up is the most important part of habit formation.
• Then I read this story about a marathon runner from 5am Joel. If you want the rest of what I’m writing to make sense, you seriously have read the story. Sort of a sappy type of story but for whatever reason something about the concept of it resonated with me.

After reading that story something clicked in my brain and I decided that crawl would be my word.

One reason I like this concept is because of some of the challenges I’ve been facing

One of my big challenges is parenting a four year-old. I love my son and parenting is a high priority for me. It also takes a massive amount of time and energy and I do sometimes wish I had more left over to make progress on personal and career goals.

And sometimes I just don’t have the energy for things even when I have the time for them. Maybe some of this is the general level of stress from the last few years with a particular world wide health issue that shall not be named today. Maybe it’s reading too many stressful news stories and worrying about things I can’t control.

Other times I feel like I just don’t have the togetherness. Like if I had the right plan and the right motivation I could make x, y and z happen but seriously all I want to do is curl up with a good book.

SO while maybe I’d like to make MASSIVE PROGRESS or BIG CHANGES, the reality is that it’s just not going to happen right now. In the mean time, I can make small steps, little changes and slow progress. And maybe if I focus on that the changes, steps and progress will add up more quickly than I might think. Which leads me to a belief…

CRAWLING is a powerful step.

Crawling can have negative connotations. But I’m a parent. I watched my son as a baby. I watched him learn to crawl. He crawled all over the house, the yard, and anywhere else he was turned loose.

At first he was slow and awkward, but it didn’t take that long before he could seriously HAUL ASS while crawling.

It’s deceptive too. Because It’s not just crawling. It’s learning how to navigate, strengthening muscles and building a sense of confidence and agency. Crawling is literally the foundation to learning how to walk and to run.

So maybe in a figurative sense I can learn and grow by aiming to make slow progress on things. I can build habits of showing up and accomplishing small chunks that feel doable. I can trick my brain into getting started on things and then maybe discover that once I’m started continuing is easier.

The idea is to build easy habits that are so easy I don’t quit doing them because I don’t have the energy. I want to build in small things that I can really stick to. I want to make it OK to do 2 minutes of something and make a little progress and actually tell myself that’s a positive step instead of thinking about all that is left.

So now that my theory about this is out of the way, let’s hit on some of the specific ways I plan to apply this.

Specific daily habits I’m thinking about based on the CRAWL mentality

I thought I’d share a few examples of how I will incorporate this. One of those is working on little habits that are designed to help me make a little progress towards my most important goals.

• Writing for this site for 5 minutes a day. Blogging is one of those things that has fallen by the wayside since B was born. While I can say I want to do it, I don’t actually do it. Like having not been doing it has created inverse momentum. “An object at rest…” and all that. But surely I can manage 5 minutes a day.
• Eating a vegetable with a meal. In my habit app, I made this as three separate habits so that I can get an easy win with each meal of the day. I know that eating healthy is super important but that can be elusive. This gives me easy, concrete goals. (And a bit of an extra push to counteract the struggle of knowing that B won’t eat most veggies so why bother? Um… because they’re good for ME.)
• Doing two minutes of strength exercises in the morning. I can do anything for 2 minutes.
• Cleaning off my desk each morning. My whole house might not get cleaner, but at least I can have a space that is cleaner.
• Remembering to enjoy story time. This is a parenting goal for me. Sometimes by the time the worst of the bedtime routine (i.e. the tooth-brushing battle) is over I just feel grumpy and harassed and can’t wait to be done. But that’s not the sort of parent I want to be. I want to enjoy reading stories to my kiddo and take time to appreciate that time. Reading books is really one of my favoritest things that I want to share with my son.

There are a few other habits I haven’t mentioned here and perhaps I’ll add more throughout the year as these ones become a little more ingrained. But CRAWL is my word for my year, so I want it to be more than a few habits. I want to bring it to mind on a frequent basis to figure out how I can make just a little progress towards the things I want.

I hope to use this as a mantra to remind myself to just make small amounts of progress, to keep going when I don’t feel like it and to appreciate my little accomplishments.

The post Crawl appeared first on Live Hoppy.

I wrote earlier this week about why I am taking some time off work. I wanted to follow that up with what I have done over the last eight years that has made this a possibility.

Building up to now

I started working in the tech industry at 19 and for the first 5 years, I wasn’t that responsible with my money. It wasn’t that I was really irresponsible either. I was self-employed, but didn’t set up any retirement accounts. My savings rate was close to zero. On the other hand, my spending didn’t exceed my income and I paid my credit card off every month.

In my mid-twenties I became more serious about finances. A while back I wrote about how reading FIRE blogs has changed my life. This is sort of an extension of that.

One of the things that can be hard about making financial changes is that it just takes time for the results to show up. Don’t let this discourage you.

Early on in my journey I read a lot of Jillian Johnsrud’s posts and she was taking what she called a ‘mini-retirement’ or a year off work. In her case this particular mini-retirement came after hitting financial independence. This was inspirational, but honestly a little depressing to me because it seemed so far away from my current circumstances.

In 2014 I started tracking all of my expenses and income and really paying attention to these numbers. This was the start of everything for me. Eight years can make a BIG difference. I am still nowhere near financial independence, but… I DO have enough to take some extended time off work!

I thought I would share what I’ve done that has gotten me to this point.

Tracking my spending

Tracking all of my spending (and income) is definitely the foundation of all of my financial success.

I have been tracking all of my spending for about 8 years now. This has had a lot of benefits. It helps me to be more thoughtful about my purchases and make changes to my spending habits.

My preferred tracking method is just a spreadsheet. I have a sheet for each account, one for aggregating my account balances to track net worth and one for aggregating all expenses by category. Once a month or so I go through all of my accounts, add transactions and make sure everything adds up.

I love the category view because I can really see where I have a large portion of my money going. This lets me see where making changes will have a big impact and notice trends.

A lot of people talk about budgeting and in some ways maybe I sort of do this in a sort of loose mental sense. But I really don’t sit down and plan X dollars for groceries and Y dollars for car expenses, etc. That whole thought process doesn’t work for me. I feel like too many expenses are sort of random and hard to account for in that model.

Knowing my spending over several years has let me make lots of changes that have resulted in me saving more money. The second aspect of this in regards to taking time off is that I am very familiar with my spending patterns. I have a good grasp on how much money I actually need to be able to cover my time off.

Thinking about my REAL priorities

One thing that helps me a lot is putting a ton of thought into what my real goals are. I’m not super restrictive with my spending. If there is something I really want, I’ll get it. I do think about what is worth it to me.

Freedom, travel, time with my family, hobbies. These things are important to me. I know that having money means I can work less, which means I have more time for the things I value. If I’m looking to buy something, I weigh that against the other things I could be doing with my money. Things like taking months off work and being able to go on walks in the woods on weekday mornings.

Retirement contributions

I have focused a lot over the last several years on contributing to my retirement accounts. I have a Roth IRA, a SEP IRA and more recently a 457(b) account.

The rule of thumb is that money contributed in your 20s ends up being worth twice as much as money contributed in your 30s due to investment growth. (Extended out that means it’s worth FOUR times as much as money contributed in your 40s and EIGHT times as much as money contributed in your 50s.) This has driven my desire to prioritize retirement investments.

I feel like I’m at a point where I have a good initial amount in my retirement accounts working to grow more money for me. I have a lot more security taking time off work knowing that I have this savings. Some of it is in account types where I could use the money now if I really needed which provides extra comfort. I would definitely look for a new job before breaking into my retirement accounts though.

On the flip side, it is hard psychologically to face maybe not having the extra money to keep making contributions during my time off and continuing the savings. The act of saving money can be kind of addictive.

In the end, it’s really important to me to have some balance and live my life now. B is four now and I know that THIS is his childhood. I’m not going to waste it all on trying to collect a pile of treasure I can sleep on in a cave when I’m 80. I’m a person, not a dragon after all.

Following FIRE blogs and learning about finances

A lot of what I’ve done goes back to following people in the FIRE community. I even wrote a whole post on How reading FIRE blogs changed my life because this has had such an impact on my thinking and on the technical financial knowledge to work towards my goals.

There are some fairly obvious financial principles like subtracting the amount you spend from your paycheck to see how much you have leftover. There are a lot of considerably less obvious things like how to invest, what sort of accounts are best for different things, nuances to tax law, etc.

Something else that has helped me about following FIRE bloggers is seeing how those who have reached FI often take the freedom to build new businesses or switch careers. They sometimes end up making more money and it seems to me they could have switched a lot sooner!

This has been more of a psychological help than a direct financial impact. It’s made me want to use the savings I have now to really live the life I want and be mindful about what I am doing for a living. (Part of why I’m taking time off work is to explore my own business ideas and/or really take the time to consider what I do next.)

Killing monthly expenses

I focus heavily on monthly or yearly expenses and doing what I can to reduce them. I try really hard to avoid subscription services because I look at the long-term impact of them.

As an example I changed my cell phone provider to Mint Mobile. Which frankly was one of the best financial decisions I’ve made because I actually like the service better than my old plan with Verizon and I save a ton of money on it.

Right now I’m paying $180 for cell service, but that is for the ENTIRE YEAR. And I love that I can pay it up front and forget about it instead of having another monthly charge to enter into my spending spreadsheet.

Even on the cheapest Verizon plan I could get I was paying around $70 a month. Which is $840 a year. I’m now saving $660 a year. One of my financial tricks is to multiply monthly or yearly expenses out over ten years or longer to see the impact more on a lifetime scale. Over a decade I’ll save $6,600 just from having switched my cell service!! That’s a huge impact. Changes like this that are super easy and then go on autopilot are so valuable.

If you’re interested in Mint Mobile, you can use my refer a friend link to get a $15 credit when you sign up. The cheap cell provider trick was one I learned about on another FIRE blog and at first I thought it sounded fishy, but Mint Mobile is legit.

Reducing monthly expenses sort of has a double impact. First, I’ve been able to save a lot more because of it. Second, my expenses are lower so the amount of money I need for each month off is lower. A double win!!

Savings

A lot of the other things add up to one specific thing: having money in the bank. At the end of the day, it’s the fact that I’ve worked hard to build up my savings that makes all of this possible.

Working to save money is a long process. Sometimes, it’s not all that fun.

Having the freedom and flexibility from a little extra money is amazing though. Every Monday morning when my car is the only one at the trailhead parking lot I’m crazy thankful for this opportunity to take a little time for myself.

I have made a habit of prioritizing my spending and savings habits based on what is REALLY important to me. New car? Nope. Freedom to not work for several months? YES!! This makes building up savings a lot easier because I know I’m working towards my real goals.

The post How good financial habits have provided me the freedom to take extended time off appeared first on Live Hoppy.

At the beginning of May this year I (mostly) quit my job(s). My idea was to take time off from work, although I’m still doing a minimal amount of things for a couple of different companies.

I came up with the idea as a serious thing sometime in 2020 although it took me a while to actually implement it. I don’t remember exactly when I started thinking about it, but I was rereading some journal posts from 2020 where I started writing about it.

The COVID childcare hell

(I realize that “The COVID childcare hell” may sound a bit dramatic. I know that anybody with kids during this time period knows what I’m talking about and those without have no right to judge although some of them may anyway.)

There was definitely a part of my decision that was influenced by COVID.

For the first year of COVID I was working 20-40 hours a week as a data science bootcamp instructor and did some big contract projects on the side. My son was not in daycare. The whole situation was a lot of stress for my family.

Looking back on the whole thing, I sort of wished that I hadn’t even bothered to work through it. Although I had no idea at the beginning of it all how long it would last or how stressful and hard it would be. Plus I was too busy to even really think about whether or not what I was doing made sense.

Eventually I started to feel like what I was earning was not worth the stress for my whole family. While I was spending a ton of time with my son I was so burnt out that it didn’t even really feel all that enjoyable. And I just didn’t want to tell B one more time, “Mom is working. You can’t be in here right now.”

There were also a lot of factors for me that were more about having the time to create the things I wanted in my life.

Exploring

I wanted time for exploring both on my own and with my son. Some people might use the word ‘travel’ for this urge. For me travel is a part of exploring, but there are other things too. Going on hikes and bike rides close to home, checking out new places close by and going on camping trips.

Even trying new restaurants or visiting a new museum or store can make for a fun exploring trip.

Also since I got a new RV I wanted time to take it out. Plus we wanted time to go on a family trip to Maine over the summer, which was so much fun for all of us, especially my son. I just wanted to wander.

My Son

I also really wanted to spend more quality time with my son and have the flexibility to do cool things with him.

I see how fast he is growing up and I want to make the most of this time. Sometimes I think of career opportunities that I am missing, but they just are not as important to me as quality time with my kid while he’s little. I really don’t like the feeling of regret and I don’t want to look back later in life and regret not spending more time with him.

Some day he’ll have his own friends, his own hobbies, his own life. Some day he’ll move out on his own. There will probably come a day when he doesn’t want to spend time with mom anymore.

I don’t want to spend weekends trying to just recuperate from work- trying to come up with meal plans, do the laundry and wishing that I could just nap for half the day all the while with B saying, in his whiniest voice, things like “Moooooooom!! I want you to play with me.”

I dream of craft projects, camping trips and bike rides. (Realistically though, all of these things can still be a lot of work to pull off with a young child and there is no predicting when a bike ride is going to turn into tantrums and tears.)

Hobbies

Another big driver for me was hobbies. I have more hobbies than I know what to do with. I am interested in so many different things and I just never have enough time to do them.

I wanted time for:

• Gardening
• Hiking
• Biking
• Art
• Woodworking
• Photography
• Writing
• Reading
• Learning new things
• Drinking coffee
• Hanging out at the makerspace
• And my favorite hobby… starting new hobbies!

Time to do nothing

I also just wanted space. Quiet. Time to think. To dream. To do nothing. To rest or do yoga. I wanted to have hours that weren’t scheduled. I wanted to have time when I wasn’t busy.

I think that time and space breed creativity. They create ideas. They are restorative. I knew I needed this.

My health

There were some general and some specific health-related things I was noticing. Almost all of the work I do is computer-related (programming, teaching Data Science via Zoom, etc) and I don’t believe there is anything healthy about sitting in front of a computer all day every day.

For a couple of years I’d been having trouble with daily, chronic headaches and I’ve long had occasional, sporadic bouts of cluster migraines. The almost constant headache state has totally gone away since I mostly quit working. I have also not had many migraines, but it’s a little harder for me to tell if there is a correlation there because good streaks are normal for me.

In a physical sense, I’m not sure I can go back to the combination of sitting and staring at a monitor all day. (Also, I have some wrist problems from projects involving lots of mouse work. S tells me that this is not something that gets better.)

Sometimes when I think about what sort of job I’ll take up next I dream of things that involve zero time on a computer like mowing grass or putting toilet paper in outhouses in the National Forest.

Business ideas

I also wanted time to explore some of my own business ideas. I have a few different ideas I’ve been tossing around and I just wanted the freedom to test them out a bit.

I’m unsure what is next for me career-wise, but I do think about it quite a bit. I’m sort of looking for increased clarity. I know that sometimes things just happen, but at this point in life, I want something that is really a good fit for me.

How it’s going so far

Time off has basically been amazing. At first, it was a little weird to get used to. I definitely had some early anxiety around the financial aspects – maybe some time I’ll write about that side of this and how I’m making this work. Oddly, that anxiety has faded a lot.

I had grand ambitions for the summer with B, which I half met. We made the first successful garden of my life, did lots of craft projects, spent time outside, visited the splash pad, went to the zoo and cooked things. Also, I spent some days counting down how many days it was until he would start pre-k.

I wanted to take some RV trips with him over the summer, but the AC that runs in the truck cab needs fixed and there is no generator so there is no AC with off-grid camping. The summer was hot and then it was rainy and all the places I want to go have dirt roads. I don’t want to camp in a parking lot. I also don’t want to get stuck in the mud with an RV and a four year old.

As the weather has turned cooler though B and I have made it out for a few trips. It’s a lot easier now that he is in school because I have a little time when I can plan and prep things without him trying to be on top of me all the time.

In general, things are easier with B finally in school. For the first time in four years I actually have ‘me time’ which has been so nice. I’ve been riding my bike more and doing short hikes. Catching up on lots of random things that I didn’t have time (or the quiet needed to focus) to get to. Learning some new things. Even taking on small work commitments for things that are interesting to me.

I am really, really enjoying this time and looking forward to what I’ll be able to do over the next few months.

The post Why I (sorta) quit working appeared first on Live Hoppy.

I frequently browse the books at the Little Free Library closest to my house in hopes that I’ll find something good. Romance and crime novels often fill the two small shelves. And sometimes pamphlets on Jesus or PETA. There’s been an Anne McCaffrey book in there for months now that always catches my eye, except it’s the second book in a series. I keep looking anyway because once in a while, there is a real gem. (Also, knowing that I’m unlikely to find anything I want actually makes it feel safer to look because I’m not worried about coming home with a giant pile of books.)

The Forester’s Log by Mary Stuever (Amazon affiliate link) was one of these occasional gems. Mary Stuever spent here career as a forester, working mostly in the southwest United States. During this time she wrote a column called The Forester’s Log which was published in a number of newspapers. The book is largely a collection of some of these writings with a few of her other articles added in.

There are five main sections including fire, forestry, burn area recovery, environmental education and recreation. Each section contains several articles. The articles are from 1985 to 2008. The articles are often aimed at enlightening the general public on forestry practices and issues.

What I love about it

The locations covered

This book covers a lot about locations that I am familiar with, particularly in New Mexico. One of the fires mentioned even happened in my neighborhood (long before I lived here) so it hits close to home. I love books about places I’m familiar with although I also get very into books that let me feel like I am learning about totally different places too.

There is also a part in the recreation section about Stuever’s attempt to climb Pico de Orizaba in Mexico. I climbed it when I was 13 so again it was fun to be intimately familiar with the setting.

The importance and relevancy of the topic

The writing about forest management, forest fires and burn area recovery seemed particularly relevant today as there are so many wildfires across the world. The problems Stuever writes about have only grown exponentially more pressing.

The section on burn area recovery includes a lot about the work after the 2002 Rodeo-Chediski fire in Arizona. According to Wikipedia, this was Arizona’s worst recorded fire… until 2011. As we see record-breaking fires each year, I think it’s really important to think about how this land is rehabilitated afterward. There are huge issues post-fire like soil erosion and flash flooding that we see repeatedly in burned areas.

After reading this, I strongly believe that burn area recovery needs to become a much more talked about (and funded) piece of the climate-change fight.

This book also makes clear the increasing urgency of better forest management. After decades of fire suppression our forests are so filled with excessive fuels that when fires do burn, they burn hotter, longer and further than 100 years ago.

It’s clear to me that doing something about this problem needs to be a much higher priority in our country. Sadly, with so many of our forestry professionals spending more and more time on active fires there will be even less time for them to focus on fire prevention.

Overall, I learned many things about forestry and burn area recovery.

What I don’t love

The book is a collection of articles originally intended to be able to stand on their own. There are several articles that contain redundant information which is just a little obnoxious when reading the book straight through.

At times the author’s sense of humor and wit really show through and at other times the reading can be a bit flat. It’s definitely more of a book to read to learn about the issues than something to read purely for entertainment. (It did still have some moments of entertainment though.)

I also would enjoy a book that just dug a little deeper into some of the topics. Something that allowed me to geek out on forest management a bit more. Although that may not be a fair critique since that’s not really what this book is trying to be.

Who might love this book

I’d definitely recommend this book to anybody who cares about the forest or is interested in learning about wildfire issues.

Actually, I think it would be a relevant book for just about anybody. As smoke from forest fires is spreading across the country and globe, we are ALL impacted by these issues. Even people that don’t live in or near forests are impacted. At the end of the day, healthy forests are part of a healthy planet. That is something we should all care about.

Also I wish all of our government officials in Washington would read it. Maybe I can mail a copy to the president.

The post Best Books: The Forester’s Log appeared first on Live Hoppy.

After the engine threw a rod in Texas and needed replaced, I eventually ended up selling my van. It made sense – it was a 1980 model and was not going to get any newer. It was still in Texas. I’d just found out I was pregnant when I sold it and knew that while it was comfortable for solo travel it wasn’t going to be a great family vehicle.

I always missed it though. I sort of wished that I’d just paid to have the engine replaced. I’d browse RV listings, but I never saw the right thing at the right price. I’m unwilling to pay the prices for a newer RV and a lot of the older ones just aren’t in good shape. Plus there are a lot of types of RV that just wouldn’t meet my needs.

So when I heard a family member with a small RV was upgrading to a newer and larger model, I mentioned I’d be interested in the old one… and here we are!

I am now the proud owner of a 1990 18 foot Toyota Sunrader which I’ve nicknamed ‘The Yot’.

I was looking for good pictures of the inside, but I don’t seem to have any. I have lots of weird pictures of it instead. Mostly there are pictures of little things I’ve been working on fixing – the leaky shower faucet, the propane valve that spritzed me with propane when I first tried it, the bathroom cabinet that was falling off.

I do have a few inside pictures from when I first got it two months ago that I’ll share. I’ve been hard at work on it so some things look different now. Maybe at some point I’ll get some good inside pictures of the changes I’ve made.

I got it about 2 months ago and have mostly been at work fixing things, customizing things, etc. Overall it’s in pretty good shape considering it’s age, but it’s spent a lot of it’s recent life just sitting and is in need of some love.

It’s been fun to have a project to work on. Considering the amount of computer work I do it’s a nice change to have a hands-on project.

I’m also really looking forward to taking trips! After the last year (plus) I am antsy to get out.

B is at an age where he’ll like exploring too. Although RV travel with a young child is definitely a bit different than traveling on my own.

So far we’ve taken two trips – the first for one night and the second for two. There is nothing like actually taking an RV out to see what works and what doesn’t.

I’m looking forward to exploring more and (hopefully) sharing more about my travels. Although I don’t want to jinx myself because my blogging record for the last year has been dismal – I was working a TON and just doing the whole parenting a young child during covid thing.

Now things are looking really different. I’m taking the summer off work, at least mostly. My family is all vaccinated except for B who is too young. And I have a new RV to explore in!

The post I finally have a new RV! appeared first on Live Hoppy.

I’ve never written about finances on my blog before. I’m changing that now for a few big reasons.

I believe being intentional with money is an important aspect of living a happy life.

Which is NOT to say that I believe more money equals more happiness.

Having money might not make you happy, but not having enough money will make you miserable.

Working a stressful job does not add to happiness.

Taking the time to figure out one’s priorities and really consider financial goals and plans is important. It’s important to question which things and experiences in life are worth trading your time (life) spent working and which aren’t.

Working towards a life with financial stability and prioritizing the things, experiences or people that are important to YOU does increase happiness.

That’s the first reason I want to write about finances right now. The second has to do with the current global economic situation.

The economic changes and uncertainty of the COVID-19 era have impacted almost everyone.

I feel very fortunate because the things I’ve done over the last several years have put me in a position where I don’t have to really worry about my financial situation right now. I’m not set for life or anything, but I could weather being unemployed for several months without any real change to my lifestyle.

I know there are people out there struggling right now and if I can share tips or ideas that will help someone I want to do that.

There are also a lot of lessons to be learned right not about making financial plans that will hold up to emergency situations. I want to use this as a time to analyze the things I do and change some of them.

Passing on what I’ve learned

I’ve read quite a few personal finance blogs and had some good (and bad) role models over the years and they’ve had a big impact on me. I want to pass that on.

There is so much useful information out there from small, practical tips to changing one’s perspective, goals and outlook about money.

(I know personal finance can sound like a dry topic, but it’s deeply meaningful when you make the connection to how it lets you live the life you want.)

I want my blog to reflect the things that I am passionate about.

My goal is to share the things that I’ve found that interest me or improve my life.

Sometimes this makes me feel like I have topics that are all over the place. In the end, it’s more important to me to have the flexibility to write about what is important to me at the moment than to keep on a specific topic.

Often my finances are on auto-pilot to some degree. At times, I also get extra energy or motivation to apply to them and make spurts of progress. Like the time I first started really tracking all of my expenses in a spreadsheet or when I got brave, started a retirement account and began learning how to invest.

Recently, I’ve been on one of those little bursts of energy when I start reviewing everything and trying to see where I can make tweaks. Since it’s what’s on my mind, it’s something I want to write about and share.

Read my last post on how reading FIRE blogs changed my life.

The post Why I want to start sharing about finances appeared first on Live Hoppy.

A bit over five years ago, I started to get serious about my finances. I don’t remember exactly the first time I stumbled across a personal finance blog, but it must have been around that time.

I found a whole trove of people on the internet that were part of ‘the FIRE movement’.

What is FIRE?

FIRE stands for Financial Independence Retire Early.

People that are dedicated to FIRE are working to cut back their expenses and save enough money that they can live off of their investments.

They are also a very diverse group. Some of them have huge incomes, others don’t make that much. Some of them get fairly extreme in their frugality. Others are more interested in being really mindful about just buying the things that they feel really add value to their lives.

A lot of them keep working even after ‘retirement’ but find the freedom to switch to work they love instead of feeling stuck in a certain job.

FIRE blogs

So somehow, I found myself reading blogs of people in their 30’s who were set to retire. And not people who had any advantages over the rest of us like wealthy parents.

Actually, a lot of them were people that had loads of student debt, got serious about paying that off and then used the financial skills they gained to start saving and investing.

They were people who were willing to make sacrifices that not everybody would want to make – driving old cars or no car at all, having roommates well after college, not eating out, renting their houses out on Airbnb when they go on vacation and a whole range of creative scroungy strategies.

Reading their stories, I’d sometimes feel jealous of what they had but it was also clear that I often wasn’t interested in making the same sacrifices.

That said, I have drawn a huge amount of inspiration and ideas from this crowd. Sometimes I read their stuff and think “That’s not for me.” Other things strike me as brilliant and I adopt them.

The biggest change for me has been becoming intentional and thoughtful about my financial life. I’m making real choices and plans about what is worth it to me and what is not.

I’m definitely not on a path to reach financial independence in my thirties. I am in a much more stable place than I would have been without these resources.

Learning from others

Just reading about other people’s journeys and all of the things they have tried and learned has helped me immensely. There have been so many specific strategies I’ve read about.

I have learned about:

• investing – index funds, expense ratios, and three fund portfolios
• cheap cell phone plans (something I waited too long to try out because it sounded weird but now love. I use Mint Mobile and pay $15 a month. You can use my Refer A Friend link and get a discount if you want to try it out.)
• the importance of keeping monthly (recurring) costs low
• having rentals (not something I’m likely to do)
• budgeting (which I still don’t really do because so many of my expenses are one off- how do you put new tires for your car in your monthly budget anyway?)
• expense tracking (which I have done religiously for years now).
• tackling my largest expense categories.
• high yield savings accounts (my emergency fund now earns interest for me while sitting around)
• how others keep grocery bills low
• finding the best credit card rewards

And so much more…

Changing my mindset

I have learned lots of strategies and ideas.

More importantly, I have changed my mindset and become really interested in this idea of exploring what of those ideas and strategies are right for me to adopt and what aren’t.

Financial independence sounds amazing to me, but it’s not actually my goal at this point at least not on an accelerated scale. However, my financial goals and plans have changed due to reading the journeys of others who are pursuing financial independence.

I have put time into thinking about what my real priorities are in life. Where do I want my time to go? My energy? My money?

I’m still not cheap. OK. I’m actually pretty frugal. I also basically buy whatever I want. The trick is that my wants are balanced by knowing that I work hard for my money. I don’t want to give that time and energy away for things that aren’t really important to me.

I save a lot more than I used to, not because I’m interested in being rich, but because I am interested in freedom and flexibility in my life.

Keeping monthly expenses low gives me the flexibility to pick work I enjoy instead of having to make a certain amount in order to maintain my lifestyle.

FIRE blogs

Here’s a small sample of some of the different blogs and types of posts I’ve read over the years.

Mr. Money Mustache’s article on The Shockingly Simple Math Behind Early Retirement was really eye-opening to me as well as this simple Early Retirement Calculator that it links to. It turns out how long until you can retire is directly dependent on your savings rate and you can calculate it without using numbers for income and savings. This makes sense, but I had never thought of it in those terms before I read this.

Jillian Johnsrud has a post about saving 100k by the time she was 24. She also has a lot of other great posts about financial independence and intentional living.

5am Joel has a lot of great posts. Him and his wife took a year off work together even though they’re not technically FI yet. It was interesting to follow that journey. Here’s a post from him on credit card hacking to demonstrate some of the different things people come up with to try.

How Understanding the Marginal Utility of Money will Make you Happier by The Happy Philosopher talks about how when we have a small amount of money it has a big impact on our quality of life. As the amount of money we have increases, the impact it has decreases.

A post on PFGeeks about high yield savings accounts was one of the things that recently gave me that final nudge to move my emergency fund to a new bank that pays better interest. (Interest rates have dropped since this post, but my new account is still a lot better than what my last one paid.)

Here’s a post from Michael Lacy of Winning to Wealth discussing lessons he learned due to losing his job during the COVID-19 crisis. (Hint: job loss is a lot more comfortable if you’ve worked hard to be in a good place financially.)

For the final post I’m including I’ll link this one on Slow FI from the Fioneers because it resonates so much with my perspective on these things. It’s about taking the scenic route to FI and considering options like a part-time job a person loves instead of a full-time job that makes one miserable.

In the end, reading FIRE blogs has opened my mind up to options. It’s let me know that there are so many different ways to do things. I’m motivated to explore and find what works best for me.

You might also want to read about why I decided to start sharing about personal finance on my blog.

The post How reading FIRE blogs has changed my life appeared first on Live Hoppy.

I love my laminator. I also love trying new things with it. There is nothing more fun than trying out a new idea.

One day I’d seen some pictures on Pinterest of nice laminated fall leaves. I thought, what similar things could one laminate like that?

Flowers!

That sounded like a good idea. But instead of reading online about how one should do such a thing, I decided just to give it a go.

I just picked some flowers and sent them through the laminator. It turns out that was a bad idea. In retrospect, it is very obvious.

They were still all fresh and wet and steamed on their way through and made sizzling noises. They came out looking gross and had a bunch of liquid in there.

Yet for some reason, I sent a few more through. And these ones made sizzling noises too. And steamed. And started to smell burnt. But they did not start to come out of the other side of my laminator.

Worse, I had used only a partial laminator sheet so I didn’t have any of it sticking out so I couldn’t pull the thing back out. All I could do was unplug it and listen to it continue to sizzle.

(That’s actually a normally a great hack for laminating small things: just cut a laminating sheet to slightly larger than what you want to laminate and don’t waste the whole thing. You just want to be careful that the front and back pieces are the same size and carefully aligned.)

I figured that the sheet must have gotten wrapped around one of the rollers. I assumed that it would be completely melted to it and fused to itself. I even got a little excited thinking I would have the perfect reason to upgrade to a better laminator. (Like maybe this one that is 12 inches wide verses the 9 inch one I have.)

But then I decided I had to at least try taking it apart and seeing what it looked like inside and if I could salvage it.

It turned out that while the sheet was wrapped around one of the rollers, it was not melted and fused to itself. It pulled right off. It did permanently want to be rolled up after that, but my goal was to save the laminator not my failed project.

It turns out that laminating sheets are actually designed so that the inside will melt and fuse to another sheet but the outside does not.

Here’s a few more pictures if you’re curious about what the inside of a laminator looks like. They’re actually ridiculously simple: just a couple of rollers and heating elements. (The orange here is the rollers.)

And a little motor to drive the rollers.

My process for getting the sheet out involved unscrewing the case and also undoing a couple of the screws on the ends that hold the rollers in place so I could take one of the rollers out. The whole thing took just a couple of minutes.

I also later made successful laminated flower coasters and bookmarks that came out really cool! Here’s a picture of a few of the bookmarks.

Read about my other laminator projects!

The post How to fix a laminator that ate your paper appeared first on Live Hoppy.

We see exceptional intelligence as a blessing. So why, asks Maggie Fergusson, are so many brilliant children miserable misfits?

1843

I recently read a piece in the magazine 1843 called The curse of genius that really resonated with me. (1843 is the sister magazine of The Economist.)

The article left me thinking. And it made me want to share things that I don’t normally share.

Some things are hard to talk about. There are a lot of pretty deep topics that I’ll open up about. Maybe not on my blog for the whole world to read, but to the people close to me.

This is a topic that I rarely broach even with those that I’m closest to.

Being smart. Like really smart.

I’m talking here like traditional test-taking smart. The ability to remember and synthesize information. Math smart. Being able to figure things out.

I’m not on the level of some of the kids mentioned in the article. I might not claim the title of genius, but maybe of borderline genius. If you put me in a room with a hundred random people, I’ll probably be the smartest one there. In a room of a hundred thousand people… probably not.

That’s not an easy thing to write. It’s not the sort of thing that you make friends saying. It doesn’t lead to positive responses. Even typing that out, I imagine I’m not making friends with you, my imaginary reader.

When I was in the eighth grade, I went to a combined middle school and high school. I took pre-calc with the high school seniors and felt bored to tears.

I didn’t even have the opportunity to take calculus for another few years. I can still remember my high school principle telling me she didn’t think I could handle a college math class.

Looking back on it, I realize she could not have handled it and she couldn’t imagine that I could. At the time, it was just frustrating. ( When I did go on to take calculus later, it was so easy for me.)

This lady told me I needed four years of math credit to graduate. She also told me I couldn’t take any of the classes the school offered because they were below my level.

So basically I was screwed and more than anything I just wanted to finish with high school and move on to something more challenging.

I started college when I was 15. It was officially my third and last year of high school, but by this time I had transferred to a different school.

My new guidance counselor was someone I only met briefly, but was like an angel in my life. She was forgiving with my transcript. She entered in a P for Pass for Algebra II even though I’d never taken it. (Yep, I’d taken pre-calc without the pre-reqs.)

This lady made everything work out so I only had to take one class at the high school and could spend the rest of the time at the local community college. She got out of the way and let me move on with my education.

A few months after I turned 18, I had my associate’s degree in General Science. I transferred and had my bachelor’s in math before I turned 21.

Through all of this, I never found the intellectual challenge I craved. By the end, I did feel a bit burned out by school, in part because I never did find that challenge.

If it had been hard or stimulating, I would have dug in and really engaged. I love challenges. Instead it just felt easy and monotonous.

Looking back on it, I think I could have found a field of study that I found more satisfying.

The thing about math is that it’s sort of thought of as a right or wrong sort of field. It’s all about who can figure out a problem or figure it out faster. My quick wits were not appreciated by my (mostly) male professors.

On the other hand, I minored in biology and hit it off way better with the bio profs. Biology is a field where there is just so much that isn’t known. It’s a messy field. If I pointed out something to a bio prof that they didn’t know, they were excited rather than embarrassed.

When I was in elementary school and everything came easily, everybody told me to wait until middle school. Then they said to wait until high school and then for college.

When I was at the community college, they told me to wait until I was at a 4-year school. By the time I had finished my bachelor’s degree, I had still found most of it boring and easy.

Which is not to say that some of it wasn’t fun stuff to learn. I particularly remember physics and biology as being topics that just had cool stuff. Even if they were easy for me to understand, they were interesting.

And pottery. I took a lot of pottery classes in college.

So once I had my bachelor’s I had no interest in pursuing further education.

This makes me a bit of an under-achiever by my family’s standards. I have an aunt that jokes that she’s the under-achiever in the family because she ‘only’ got her master’s degree and her three siblings have doctorates.

(I still leave open the idea in my mind that maybe someday I’ll go get a PhD. It would have to be the right topic and I’d have to feel that I really needed the resources of a university for it. There are so many things I could just learn on my own and save the money. Of course being self-taught lacks the prestige of a fancy diploma.)

I want to go back a moment and mention something about my earlier years in school. School was a struggle for me. It was AWFUL.

I didn’t find learning new things to be hard. I found the snail’s pace at which classes moved to be excruciating. There is no flexibility in most of our schools for kids that learn faster or slower.

In addition, nobody likes a smart kid. Of course, it didn’t help that I was shy and awkward. (I also switched schools every year due to my parent’s custody agreement.)

I didn’t know that people would like me better if I hid how smart I was. Certainly I was, at times, rather insensitive about how I presented my intelligence which did not help. I yearned for the approval of my peers and teachers. Since all I had going for me was brains, I tried to use that to gain said approval.

I didn’t have the right sort of brains. Like many ‘smart’ people, I didn’t have any social intelligence. I didn’t know how to make friends.

While I’ve made huge strides along those lines, it’s something I can still struggle with. Social interactions can be really hard for me.

These days, I don’t like to let on to anybody how smart I am. I let other people be wrong and don’t correct them. I keep my mouth shut. It helps a lot not being in an environment where it comes up. The whole basis for school makes it a little harder to hide intelligence without an intentionally stealthy approach.

A lot of people have this idea that they ‘wish they were smart’. I have had many people express envy for my abilities. Unfortunately, envy is not a basis for friendship. There is no explaining to these people the challenges.

Being smart does not lead to being happy or wealthy or well-liked. It may give a slight advantage on the wealthy goal, but emotional/social intelligence actually gives a much higher advantage there. As far as being happy or well-liked unusual intelligence is probably a disadvantage. (Of course, I wouldn’t actually trade it in.)

One of the things I loved about the 1843 article was that it brought up these disadvantages. It talked about how so many parents want their kids to be smart, but the parents of these genius kids just wish they were normal.

I want to say, “If you envy those people that are smarter than you, STOP IT!” My saying that probably won’t change anything. It’s really no different than the other traits we envy in people. If you’re not that person, you have no idea what it’s actually like. I also recognize that getting from Point A of knowing that to Point B of squashing out envy is not straightforward.

Also, it should be noted that I spend my time envying people that have other talents or skills or types of intelligence. I sit around wishing I could make friends or had sales skills.

That’s just what we all do. We envy other people because we think if we had what they do, we’d be happy. Meanwhile, the person we’re busy envying is envying somebody else.

I just feel like being smart has it’s own stigma to it. It’s so much more acceptable to show off being pretty or successful or talented. I’d rather share about my short-comings than mention my brains. (Which is actually part of why I’m writing this. I want to reach that person that is 1 in a 100 with a message that they’re not alone.)

On a side note, I don’t find myself admiring people for innate skills. I admire the people that work their asses off for something.

When I was a math tutor in college, I had so much respect for the people taking the most basic math classes, showing up and putting in the work because they had some sort of goal.

This was when I was at the community college and a lot of these people were three times my age, going back to school for whatever reason and taking something like Math 050 which is not even actually college level math.

It was so hard for them. And yet they showed up and worked their asses off.

I still get riled up when I think about my experiences in school. I recently read an article about a country where they look for their smartest kids and have special programs and schools to help them excel. It makes me think, “Why couldn’t I have had that?”

It’s sort of funny because while I do sometimes wish I were different or that I had different skills and strengths, I would not change who I am.

Over time, I’ve grown much more comfortable with me. I think this happens to most of us as we grow older. The differences that made us miserable as teenagers turn into things we maybe even like about ourselves.

Ironically, the single thing I found the hardest to deal with as a brainiac was school. Once I got past that stage of my life, things got a lot easier.

Now I can learn about what I want when I want. (Reading a book on a different topic while sitting in a high school class just doesn’t fly. Come to think of it, some of my college professor’s didn’t look too kindly on that sort of behavior either.) Now I can learn at my own pace.

The revolution of this thing we call the internet has opened up so many options for learning things that it is ridiculous and amazing. The internet DID exist when I was in high school, but it had no where near the information available that it does today.

These days I’m busy mostly with things that don’t even involve my brand of smarts. I haven’t opened a math text book in over a decade.

Brains do not make parenting a two-year old easier. At times, I find the way my brain works to make it harder. I have an incredibly difficult time switching my mind away from a problem I’m contemplating or a project I’m working on to the immediate issues of parenting.

Maybe I shouldn’t be complaining. This may not be a more difficult problem that switching focus from Facebook to one’s child is for some people. (I do find that having a predetermined idea of my priorities make it a lot easier. I do not want my kiddo to feel like I am too busy for him.)

I have also found that I get a ton of satisfaction working in areas I’m not innately talented. Challenges engage me.

I enjoy things like wood working and riding my bike which go against my natural skills. Power tools and riding over rocks spike my anxiety big time. Every time I have a small success in these types of pursuits, I am thrilled.

So these days you won’t find me in a classroom. You’ll find me and my bike out on some dusty, rocky, steep trail that is above my skill level and me enjoying every second of it in a slightly sadistic sort of way.

Either that or I’ll be trying to make my son laugh by rubbing the top of my head on his belly which he has found inexplicably funny since he was like four months old.

Or maybe you’ll find me reading him books and talking to him with over-sized words so he’ll grow up to be smart.

If you didn’t read the article I linked at the top that was the inspiration for this post, here’s another link to it. I thought it was excellent and if you read all the way to the bottom of this post, chances are you’ll like it too.

Note: I actually wrote this post about a year ago… and then didn’t publish it. It felt too vulnerable. It almost still does. But reading it with fresh eyes, I like it too.

Also, these days, you just might find me in a classroom. I’ve recently taken on a job for a Data Science Bootcamp, which I love. Being smart by itself is not really fulfilling. Being able to use it in a way that helps others is awesome. I love teaching and helping others to learn things.

The post Too smart for my own good: the curse of borderline genius appeared first on Live Hoppy.

Like a lot of people across the world, we’ve been staying home a lot lately.

Some people are doing really cool things to give back… making masks, designing ventilators, helping their neighbors, sharing their talents online. One thing I’ve found really cool about all of this is just seeing the vast community spirit, kindness and desire to pull together.

I feel kind of bad because I don’t feel like I’m doing any of those awesome things. I have to keep reminding myself that the ‘mom of a young child’ phase of my life is temporary and that it is okay to say no to all sorts of other awesome things to focus my energy on said young child. Which in itself is a form of giving back to the world.

But I did start a light-hearted project of taking (almost) daily pictures of Hoppy at home which I have titled #HoppyStaysHome.

There are so many things that I want to be doing with this time at home and on a daily basis, I feel like I’m not doing much of it. I never get ALL the things done, but I almost always get one or two of the things done each day. It’s actually adding up to rich days and seeing all of the Hoppy pictures I’ve collected reminds me of that.

A few things Hoppy and I have done:

• Cooked a lot of stuff and tried some new recipes
• Bake bread and muffins and a few frozen pizzas
• Taken afternoon naps
• Gone on hikes and bike rides
• Checked the mail for special packages
• Played in the snow and the sun
• Ate Easter candy after B went to bed
• Spent time exploring our own yard
• Appreciated flowers
• Yoga
• Taken time to journal and read
• Updated my laminated recipe card collection with new favorites
• Planted seeds (most of which already died)
• Replaced said seeds with a few plants from Walmart
• Colored pictures
• Played drums
• Made some new coat hooks
• Read a ton of books to B
• Made root beer floats
• Watched the sun set
• Talked to friends and family on the phone
• And I’m working part time too

Here are a few of the behind-the-scenes pictures too. B thinks it’s great fun taking Hoppy around.

P.S. If you’re interested in learning how to bake bread during your time at home (or any other time) I highly recommend The Tassajara Bread Book. It has super detailed instructions to help you get started.

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