May 2019 - THE THREE YEAR EXPERIMENT

Wanna Be More Frugal? Try Under-scheduling.

I hope that this post isn’t head-smacker obvious in its conclusions, but I had an epiphany of sorts yesterday at my kids’ swim practice.

First of all, I’m not super frugal but I’m always trying to get better at spending, because it’s my Achilles’s heel, my Kryptonite.

Second of all, I believe very much in a simplified schedule. This year, I don’t have a full-time (or even part-time job), so my schedule has been very bare, on purpose. That’s been nice. We’ve enjoyed a blessedly busy-free schedule for the entire school year. It’s very much in keeping with our location independent lifestyle. We’ve made last-minute decisions to have a beach weekend or travel to see a relative several times, even skipping a day of school if we needed to.

However, this week, I’ve had a taste of what an over-scheduled life might feel like. The kids have only had one activity each for most of the year, but as of two weeks ago, they both tried out for and made swim team. We have practice every evening.

During the day, after I get the kids on the bus, I’ve been running, writing, applying for jobs, and quickly tidying the house. Then, I run off to help my sister with her new baby, so she can work her Etsy business. After that, I drive back home, pick up the boys on the bus, get them changed, take one to swim practice, come home, eat, then take the other to swim practice.

I’ve had one week of this, not an entire school year, like many parents. But already I’m feeling the effects.

Yesterday, I ordered groceries from our grocery service (which continues to be a major, huge, wonderful help in my life that helps me spend less on groceries despite its cost). After putting them away, I realized that I hadn’t taken inventory of the food we currently had in the house. Because our week had been so busy, and we’d eaten out once during the week, we had a lot more food left over than usual.

Which College Major is the Best Return on Investment?

What do you want to be when you grow up? I’m guilty of asking this question to my kids. But the truth is, it’s hard to figure out what you want to be as a kid. As an eighteen-year-old entering college, it’s still pretty difficult. We share words of wisdom with freshmen in college like “follow your passion” but that is terrible advice, according to Cal Newport, author of How to Be a High School Superstar.

First of all, how many of us have passions? If we do, it’s obvious what we’ll major in. If we don’t, how are we supposed to develop said passions?

When we send our kids to college, we’re often making a huge financial investment in their futures, or asking them to take on massive amounts of debt. Yet we do so with very little forethought or planning into what, specifically, they’ll get out of the process.

Sure, we know that four years at a liberal arts university will teach the next generation higher thinking skills, give them writing skills, and generally expose them to thinking that will help them in the workplace (and maybe help them learn to hold their own at parties), but do we give enough thought and planning to how they’ll produce a return, in the form of a salary, on the investment of college?

The Chilean model

When I lived in Chile, where I moved shortly after I finished my own university education, I was surprised by how pragmatic Chileans were about their educations.

With average student debt rates climbing ever higher, it's time to pay attention to our return on the college investment. #highered #college #university #careers #collegemajor

Practicing Retirement

Happy Memorial Day. Many thanks to those who died serving their country, and to the families they left behind, we are grateful.

It’s been almost a year since my family achieved our goal of location independence and moved to North Carolina from New Hampshire.

Which means it’s been almost a year since I stopped teaching.

When we moved, I took a year off teaching in order to make sure that we got the boys into the right schools, we could get them well-settled, make appointments with doctors, dentists, counselors, and get their lives set up.

In many ways, this past school year, soon coming to an end, has been a practice retirement for me. Sure, I’ve had small jobs: I’ve tutored a middle schooler in Spanish once a week, written several freelance articles for various websites, and blogged three times a week. But by and large, I’ve had large chunks of free time to fill up and enjoy.

For one thing, both boys adjusted to their new schools really well. They had great teachers and counselors in place who made sure they were getting the assistance they needed. So I could take a giant step back from setting up counseling appointments, getting them into charter schools, and the like. They just didn’t need those things.

For another, we had hardly any activities programmed this year. Junior ThreeYear went to a climbing club once a week and Little ThreeYear had tennis lessons for half an hour on Sunday afternoons and did Lego club for a few weeks in the winter. Other than that, they didn’t do any organized activities.

Effort, Achievement, and FI

This article, written over a year ago now, is timely. I’ve been looking for jobs for next year. Looking for jobs isn’t fun. It’s an exercise in humility, effort, and rejection required to be undertaken daily. One of the reasons I blog is to remind myself of lessons I’ve learned that I can easily forget as time goes on. I wish that I could learn a lesson once and internalize it forever. Alas, these life lessons are to be learned over and over again.

As educators, wrote an article I recently read, we must teach our students the relationship between effort and achievement. That is to say, there is a direct correlation between the effort we expend on a particular endeavor and the likelihood that we’ll have success in said endeavor.

This may sound like a basic concept, but, like so many basic concepts, once you take a minute to unpack it, it has profound implications.

The more effort I put into something, the more likely I am to have good results.

Many times, I water that advice down in my head. I pretend there’s not a direct correlation between my level of effort and my achievements: “I’ll just run three times this week instead of four. I’ll skip the mid-range run.” Every time I skip a mid-range 6-mile run, my longer 10-12 mile run is super painful and I’m slower. Over an entire training period, that means I’ll run (even) slower on race day.

“I’m tired, so I’ll wake up at 6am instead of 5am. I can still write a blog post.” That’s when I publish 2 posts per week, not three. Over time, I notice my page views slipping and readership going down.

“I’ll just wing it in class, instead of preparing a lesson plan for the week. I can prep before class each day.” My classes are not as good, I’m scrambling for activities to fill the time, and over time, my students don’t make as much progress learning English.

The truth is, consistent, daily effort pays off. It pays off in life, and it pays off (literally) when you’re working towards financial independence.

Making More Money

In the past two and a half years, I have expended a great deal of effort towards my new career–ESOL Teacher. When I started teaching in September of 2015, I knew very little about teaching English. I worked very hard to network with other teachers, observe their lessons, ask questions, and take copious notes. I started a Master’s Degree in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages, and many nights and weekends were spent reading, on our online classroom, or in class, an hour and a half away. Continue reading “Effort, Achievement, and FI”

What It Feels Like to Forget It’s PayDay (and How to Get There)

I realized, recently, after I saw the Pinterest quote above (credit: CleverGirlFinance), that I no longer notice when payday is.

Sure, I eventually notice when paychecks land in our bank account (which I keep track of through our budgeting software YNAB), and I put them into our “To Be Budgeted” envelope to save for the following month, but I don’t remember if it’s this Thursday or next Thursday that paychecks will hit.

I will often let a few days or even a week go by before I do anything with that money, because I forget it’s there.

I don’t worry about when our paychecks will hit because we no longer need this week’s paycheck to pay our bills.

Believe me, I worried about when we got paid plenty before this past year. Even though we were debt free and on our way to FI, I still had to make sure we had enough cash in our accounts to pay the bills.

It’s only after getting a month ahead in our budgeting that I no longer worry or think about when we get paid, because we use last month’s income to pay this month’s bills.

And it’s as awesome as it sounds.

We should have made it a financial priority years ago to get a month ahead in our budgeting. It means we have so much less worry and anxiety around paying the bills. I never have to madly check my bank balance right before the 18th of the month (when our credit card bill is automatically paid) because I know we’ll have the money available to pay the bill.

The Non-Frugal Guide to FI

As many long-time readers of this blog know, I am a spender. I am not particularly frugal, or even somewhat frugal.

That’s hard to admit when you’re a personal finance blogger. So why am I a personal finance blogger? How have I managed to accumulate any assets as a spendthrift?

I believe that part of this blog’s purpose is to encourage people who aren’t particularly frugal that they, too, can create financial freedom in their lives.

I’m going to be honest: you will not create massive assets or be able to retire early without some sacrifice. You just cannot spend everything you have and save nothing and become financially independent. Not gonna happen.

HOWEVER, it is very possible to train yourself to stop going in to debt for the things you want to buy and trick yourself into saving. I know because I’ve done it. It’s not instantaneous and it takes persistence to develop some of the habits you’ll need, but it is very possible. Trust me because I’ve been there. Maybe it’ll take you a little longer to get to FI. But you can get there.

It’s Your Life and Your Spending, Yo

Here’s the thing: as cool as frugality is, and as useful as it is to rein in your spending and save more, it’s not for everybody. It’s YOUR life, and if you want to spend it regularly eating out and buying lattes at Starbucks, you can!

This philosophy is called values-based spending, and it’s the one I personally employ. Basically, you figure out what your values are, and you spend on them. Then, you save in areas that don’t mean as much to you.

5 Proven Hacks to Combat Anxiety

This is the time of year when anxiety tends to dip down in our house, because it’s the end of the school year, summer’s approaching, and everything’s a bit more relaxed. That’s the best time, in my opinion, to brush up on some strategies for managing anxiety. When my family’s anxiety is well-managed, everything else, including money management, work, and school, is so much easier.

There’s nothing worse than that creeping dread–anxiety–that steals in and leeches all the joy and excitement from life. Mr. ThreeYear suffers from anxiety, and so do several more of my family members, including both my sons. So we have lots of practice in how to overcome anxiety.

Anxiety is genetic, and I’ve learned that the anxiety gene is powerful. It got passed down to both of my kids, even though I have relatively little anxiety myself. But once you’re aware of it, it becomes very clear who in your family suffers from it. It took me awhile to figure out why Mr. ThreeYear was always so wigged out when we took the boys for a walk around the block. “Careful!” he would yell to the boys as a car rolled by at 15 mph 500 yards from us. “They’re on the side of the road and we’re surrounding them,” I would say. “Even if that car managed to light on fire and fly through the air past us, it would still miss the kids.” Somehow those types of comments didn’t help. And my own feelings about taking a walk soon changed–it was no longer fun, it was torture.

One of the best articles I’ve ever read on how to overcome anxiety (or just live with it) is written by Scott Stossel in The Atlantic. It’s a long read, but is an excellent primer on what it feels like to live with debilitating anxiety. I have used this mega guide of his and adapted some of the methods or ticks to my family with varying success. Over the years, we’ve experimented with lots of different ways to overcome the anxiety and overarching fear, the low-level worry that eats away at your ability to focus and find joy in any activity. Some worked and some didn’t. Here are our five proven hacks to combat anxiety in our family. They’re tried. They’re true. They work.

Exercise

Without a doubt, exercising is the number one way to overcome or at least ease anxiety. We have seen it over and over again at our house. Unfortunately, according to the American Psychological Association, psychologists have been slow to study the mental health benefits of exercise. There are scant studies showing the effects of regular exercise on anxiety disorders or OCD. However, one study done by Princeton University and reported by the New York Times sheds light on how our body adapts to stress, after long-term training, by creating new neurons that produce GABA, a neurotransmitter which inhibits brain activity. The study found that the active mice felt just as much anxiety initially as non-running mice, when exposed to stress, but were soon calmed by their new neurons, designed to quiet the brain. It turns out that when we’re able to turn down our monkey brains, we can turn down our screaming anxiety, too, creating a calmer, less tense mental space for ourselves.

But how in the world to get to the gym when your anxiety is sky high? It’s the last thing you want to do.

Continue reading “5 Proven Hacks to Combat Anxiety”

7 Free or Cheap Activities for Kids This Summer

We’re slipping into the golden days of the school year, where activities are starting to come to an end. I received a note from the third grades teachers that after the kids do their end-of-grade testing, an apparently extremely big deal here in North Carolina, they’re throwing learning to the wind and will be having “camp” for the last two weeks of school . I can’t decide if I’m really annoyed or really inspired by this.

However, I have printed out my three-month calendar and have started to fill in the weeks, and I’ve begun to plan some of the activities I’d like to do with my boys to explore our new city.

Last summer, we were so busy with moving and unpacking that we barely got to check out what was available.

This year, though, we’re going to enjoy the free or low-cost activities available to us. While the activities in your area will inevitably be a little different, I hope this research from the Charlotte area will give you ideas for your neck of the woods.

You’ll Need to Plan (at least a little bit)

Before I list some ideas we’re planning to take advantage of this summer, may I make a recommendation? I am not always stellar about planning ahead, but for many of these suggestions, you’ll need to do some advanced planning, because they’re only free and low cost on select days and times.

Why I Gave Up a Career in Marketing to Become a Teacher: Guest Post on Full Time Finance

On Wednesday, Full Time Finance featured my story of how and why I went from a Marketing Director to an ESL Teacher.

Full Time Finance is a personal finance site dedicated to those who have full time jobs and are concurrently pursuing financial independence.

Here are some of my favorite posts:

While I don’t work full time, my employment situation definitely plays in heavily to our financial independence story. Here’s how I made the switch.

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The Chilean model

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Making More Money

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It’s Your Life and Your Spending, Yo

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Exercise

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You’ll Need to Plan (at least a little bit)

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