Month: August 2018

Where the Heck Did Our Leisure Time Go?

One of the benefits that appealed most to me as our family started on our journey to financial and location independence was the idea of leisure time, of having time to rest, enjoy our friends, see new things, and linger over meals.

Life is so hectic. It’s “go, go, go” all the time in our society. It’s “what’s your side hustle?” “What day of the week is your child free from activities?” (if there is one).

One of the appeals of technology several decades ago was the idea that it would free us up to have more leisure time. To sit and linger over a meal with family. To plan coffee dates with friends. To sit in a park as a family and do nothing and feel no guilt about that. John Maynard Keynes, an economist writing in the 1930s, imagined a future where the work week would last fifteen hours, and our biggest problem would be what to do with all our free time. I’ll give you a second for a chuckle.

Now, Americans have less leisure time than ever. In an article from 2016, The Atlantic notes that “elite men in the U.S. are the world’s chief workaholics.” The upper class in this country stays at the office longer, takes less vacation, and just works more than the middle and lower class.

But why?  Continue reading “Where the Heck Did Our Leisure Time Go?”

7 Things I Learned This Summer

This week is back-to-school week for the boys. Last year on back-to-school day, I wrote about the ten things I learned last summer. I reread it recently, to remember the important lessons I learned last summer. In honor of that post, and as a memorial for myself for next summer, here are some of the things I learned this summer.

1. Moving is hard.

I had forgotten, or perhaps blocked, how hard it is to move houses. For several months I could barely keep a thought in my head. I ran around from place to place, trying to get everything done in order to move. Then, when our furniture and boxes arrived here, unpacking was the pits. Chaos reigned supreme for weeks. Apparently, a lack of order in your home causes spikes in the stress hormone cortisol for women (not men, for some reason). Let me assure you that is true with me. And pro tip, don’t take an eight-week intensive online master’s class in the same two months you’re moving. Bad idea.

2. It is possible to change your life.

There was a small part of me who thought that we would never be able to make our dreams of location independence come true. I know, I know, we’re not traveling around the world. We moved to one spot. But we moved to the spot we picked, close to the people we love, and we are now both work from home, which is a sugar-sweet set up that Mr. ThreeYear and I are loving. We looked into the future, which is inherently unpredictable, and did everything we could to change our setups, and it worked.

3. The best things in life are (still) family.

When I think that I live so close to my family I get a thrill of joy that shoots up and down my body. I still can’t believe it’s true. Can’t believe my boys will grow up right down the road from their cousins, just a few hours from their grandparents, just a few hours from a huge extended family. Continue reading “7 Things I Learned This Summer”

We Got a 15-Year Mortgage. Here’s Why You Should, Too.

I am a big fan of fifteen-year mortgages. When we bought our first property in Chile, we actually took out a fifteen-year mortgage, and then paid it off a year-and-a-half early last December. But for some reason (money), we did not take out a fifteen-year mortgage with our first house in Atlanta. We did the slick 5% down, 30-year on that house, and lost our shirts with that deal when it was time to sell (well, technically, just our down payment, 4 years’ equity, and $20,000).

Why is a fifteen-year mortgage so great? We can argue all day about paying down debt versus investing (which I’ve done here) and the math behind it. But the truth is, a fifteen-year mortgage only increases your monthly mortgage payment by a little bit and helps you build up equity so much faster than a thirty-year mortgage. Yes, you can take out a thirty-year mortgage and pay it off early. But the beauty of a fifteen-year mortgage is that in fifteen years, it’s paid off, guaranteed. My girl Chief Mom Officer wrote a great post about the same topic with her actual mortgage numbers that I encourage you to read.  Continue reading “We Got a 15-Year Mortgage. Here’s Why You Should, Too.”

The $217.27 Bedroom Makeover

Moving to a new home can be tough on kids. We took mine from the only home they ever remembered and asked them to move 900 miles South, to a 1000-square-foot smaller house with a very small backyard. It was hard for them to see the immediate benefits of that decision (benefits like a close pool, relatives right down the road, and no snow in the winter). All they saw was an unfamiliar new space that felt different and didn’t feel like it belonged to them.

So to convince them to move, we used the oldest parenting trick in the book. We bribed them. While you’re may tsk  at the idea of bribing your kid, let me expound for a minute on the benefits of bribery:

1. It works.

2. It gives kids something to look forward to.

3. It gives them some sense of negotiating power when, in all actuality, they have little to none.

Feeling like you have control in an uncontrollable situation makes you feel a little better about things.

For Little ThreeYear, we told him we’d finally get a dog. We realized that with our fenced-in back yard and both of us working from home, a dog would be a much more feasible addition to the family than it had in the past.

Lucy the dog www.thethreeyearexperiment.com
Meet Lucy the dog.

We told Junior ThreeYear that we’d decorate his new room however he wanted.

He wanted to paint it black.

I worked my creative wiles and convinced him that black accents would look much better than a completely black room. We looked at the myriad options online and found a couple of pictures that he liked as inspiration.

On the night before we moved into our new house, when we were doing the final walk-through, we discovered, under a rug and desk that the previous owner had left, a giant hole in the carpet. A tense negotiation commenced between our real estate agent and hers. Finally, she could no longer deny that she’d been trying to hide a huge hole in the carpet and agreed to pay to have it replaced. Continue reading “The $217.27 Bedroom Makeover”

Budgeting a Month Ahead

I know there are many people who don’t budget, but for me, it’s been a lifesaver. I am a natural spender, not a saver, so putting artificial boundaries around my money is important. Over the years, I’ve trained myself not to touch some of it, to keep it off limits, and giving myself artificial boundaries around eating out and entertainment has helped us spend less over time.

One thing I’ve never been able to do (and I say “I” because Mr. ThreeYear has pretty bad money anxiety and doesn’t look at the budget) is get a month ahead in our budgeting.

We’ve been budgeting for ten years this month, and it’s the first month I’ve gotten a month ahead in the budget. Previously, I’d budget one paycheck at a time, so I wouldn’t fully find my budget categories at the beginning of the month (I have a habit of throwing any extra money we get into investment accounts). It worked, but I was never budgeting all at once. With budgeting one month ahead, you use this month’s income to fund next month. So you need to have a full month’s income saved, in addition to what you need to pay your bills for the current month.

Part of the reason I never got one month ahead was that I didn’t see the benefit. As long as our budget was working, why fix it? Sure, it was a little awkward to fund our essential expenses and then later fund our nonessential expenses (using our 50/50 budget) but it had worked for years, and we always had investing, saving, or debt payoff goals that seemed more important than getting a month ahead with our budget. Continue reading “Budgeting a Month Ahead”

Investing through the Next Decade

This post contains affiliate links. Please see my full disclosure for more information. Thanks for supporting the blog! 

Vanguard recently published a forecast with projections for returns for domestic and international stocks and bonds over the next decade.

“The chances of a recession by the end of 2020 are mounting. And the prospects for the American stock market in the next decade have worsened appreciably,” writes Jeff Sommer in the New York Times. That’s a fun paragraph to read.

Vanguard would never make predictions about actual returns, but suggests it’s highly likely the US will have a recession by the end of the decade.

More interestingly, in my opinion, are the projections for securities.

Vanguard projects that US (domestic) stocks will return 3.9 percent annualized over the next ten years.  Continue reading “Investing through the Next Decade”

Is All Our Goal Setting Messing with Our Happiness?

I live in a land of achievers. Our nation of immigrants has come scratching and clawing their way to a better life, risking everything to work hard so the next generation has more.

Or at least that’s the narrative. I grew up hearing stories of my immigrant great-grandfather, a Russian Jew who entered Ellis Island alone at nine years old to escape the Czar’s army. He somehow managed to survive living in NYC’s garment district and selling newspapers, relying at least once on the kindness of a stranger’s $5 tip to live through the winter.

As a young man, he moved to South Carolina, married a Gentile, had four kids, the youngest of whom was my paternal grandfather, and opened a successful clothing store. Like many second generation Jewish children, my grandfather, and in turn, my father, went into medicine.

I grew up in a Type A, achievement-oriented house. I was never overtly taught to set goals. It’s just embedded in both my DNA and my conditioning.

In this blog, I regularly share both my process for setting goals and my progress, updating you on how I’m doing with these arbitrary measures I’ve set for gauging my life’s work.  There are plenty of times in life where I haven’t set goals, namely when I was living in Chile as a 20-something and right after I had kids, when the biggest goal I could muster was to survive the day. Even then, I started working with a MLM company shortly after and set goals out the wazoo.

The times when I didn’t have goals feel, in hindsight, like wandering, anchorless times. At the end of my stay in Chile, I became incredibly disillusioned because I was so ready to move back to the US and get on with life.  Never mind that I was busy living it in Santiago.

While goal-setting has helped me put some parameters around a mind that’s particularly good at planning for the future (which is what Martin Seligman says distinguishes us from other primates), has it increased my happiness, as I like to think, or has it promulgated a restlessness, a longing for more, that has undercut my ability to appreciate the here-and-now?

When school starts in two weeks, my boys will go back to school and I’ll be officially not working (because playing cruise director with two kids and a puppy is decidedly NOT not working).

And I’ll be left with time to fill. My first inclination will be to put some parameters around this time, to give myself some goals so that I don’t waste even a half hour of my time.  But is that wise? Continue reading “Is All Our Goal Setting Messing with Our Happiness?”

A Year of Good Food: Shop at Aldi

Time for the seventh installment of our family’s grocery challenge for the year, which I’m calling “A Year of Good Food.” (Spoiler: this is the first month we failed).

At the beginning of July, we moved from New Hampshire to North Carolina. We sold a house there and bought a house here, but along the way, we lived in hotels and stayed with my sister for about a week, then filled up a new fridge and pantry, then fed all four of us breakfast, lunch, and dinner all month. We blew an exorbitant sum of money on everything in July, including food.

The Back Story (Skip This if You’ve Already Read it Six Times)

This year, our family is challenging ourselves to spend less on food so we can save and travel more. Last year, I adopted one habit a month that would translate into better money moves for our family. You can read all about our A Year of Good Habits here.

That experiment worked so well that we tried a new one this year. In 2018, we are challenging ourselves to do better at our food spending. Last year our family spent over $12,000 in groceries, or $966 per month.

This year, our goal is to spend 20% less on groceries. That may not sound like a lot, but it’s almost $200 per month in food savings. The extra $200 per month is going into a travel savings fund, so we can see the results of our hard work in spending less on food.

Continue reading “A Year of Good Food: Shop at Aldi”

Your Three Year Experiment: Scott and Caroline

Hi there! As promised last week, today I have a brand new series for you, featuring people who are sharing their three year experiments, that is, their plans, goals, and dreams for the next three years. 

Today I’m thrilled to introduce Scott and Caroline, who share their early retirement strategies at Costaricafire. In this interview, you’ll learn:

  • how they created a real estate portfolio to help them retire
  • the three income streams they’ll use to fund retirement
  • the first thing they’ll do when they’re fully location independent

If you’d like to be featured in the series, send me a note! My contact info is on the Start Here page.

Hello! Tell us about yourselves.

We are Scott and Caroline, 40-something parents of two daughters from New York City. Caroline has been operating her own Career Coaching business for over 10 years after a career in finance, consulting and recruiting, and Scott has recently stepped away from a 23-year IT career to focus on our real estate investments and IT consulting.

What’s your background? Early years, education, married, kids, jobs?

Continue reading “Your Three Year Experiment: Scott and Caroline”

The Age of Anomaly: Interview with Andrei of One Minute Economics

This post contains affiliate links. Please see my full disclosure for more information. Thanks for supporting the blog! 

Today I have something a little different for you—an interview with economist Andrei Polgar of One Minute Economics. He’s just published a book called The Age of Anomaly.

He sent me a copy of the book to preview and I agreed to interview him for two reasons: 1. I was very impressed with the economic history contained in his book and 2. I think we don’t do enough preparation in the financial world for the Black Swan events that will inevitably come and can wreak havoc with our financial plans.

Now, if you’ve been reading this blog any length of time, you know I’m very even-keeled, and not prone to hysterics or emotional claims. But I’ve experienced enough in my life to be aware that things can happen out of left field that you’d never expect. My husband grew up in a dictatorship in Chile. Ordinary Chileans had no idea their land would be privatized and then General Agosto Pinochet would take over the country in a US-backed coup in 1973. My friend is Syrian-American. She could never have guessed that her entire family would flee her home country because of the bloody Civil War there.

Yes, I am American, and so I have that annoying American sensibility that nothing bad will ever happen to our country. And while we may never deal with civil war or dictatorship in our lifetimes, we may deal with brutal recessions or other unexpected economic events that can knock us off our financial footing. And so, this interview. I hope you enjoy, and take advantage: this week only Andrei’s book is $.99.

Hi Andrei! Can you tell me a little bit about your background?

I grew up in Eastern Europe, and currently live in Romania, in the second largest city there.

Even as a child I had these dreams of lemonade stands, things I saw in US movies and cartoons. I tend to like economics, being an entrepreneur, anything that has to do with financial stuff. I’ve always been pretty good with anything money-related. Continue reading “The Age of Anomaly: Interview with Andrei of One Minute Economics”