Articles with family finance

Guest Post: “Harnessing the Power of Comparison” from Changing Our Default

I’m featuring a guest post from Mrs. COD who blogs at Changing Our Default. She is a former teacher turned stay at home mom, freelance writer, blogger, and more. She and her husband blog about their path to Financial Freedom and the changes it requires in attitude, mindset, and the habits you build up over your life. Today, Mrs. COD is talking about the double edge sword of comparison and the journey to FIRE. Take it away Mrs. COD!

Everyone knows we’re not supposed to compare ourselves with others. Comparison is such a rotten thing. It leaves you dissatisfied, jealous, joyless. Right? We shouldn’t compare our marriages, our jobs, our salaries, our possessions, our families, to anyone else’s, or we’ll resent what we’re missing.

“Love your life, not theirs.” -Rachel Cruze

Watching my kids interact provides daily evidence of the truth that comparison can indeed steal our joy. Junior COD can be perfectly content with a toy until he notices Mini COD equally content with a different toy, and suddenly, it’s ON. He wants what little bro has, and whatever he’d been playing with before pales in comparison. I mean, the other day at the pumpkin patch, they both got a tiny plastic bug toy as a prize, but they fought the rest of the day over who got the ant versus the beetle. Seriously?

I may deride these kids’ immaturity in my mind at times, but in all honesty, how different am I from them on any given day? I can be totally content with my lot in life until perusing social media and seeing something I’m missing. Even though I have a cushy life by most standards, it doesn’t always feel like enough.

In general, I totally agree with the idea of not following everyone else’s path and not being swayed by peer pressure to buy or do or think a certain way. Comparison can drag you down, for sure. It can be depressing. It can be discouraging.

But today I’d like to turn the discussion to the other side of the comparison coin: motivation. Comparison, if we use it well, can be an incredible tool in our arsenal, spurring us on to bigger and better things.

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Summer Look Back and More!

This summer has seemed to fly by. We spent the first part of it researching and meeting with different homebuilders for our Canyon Lake property. That was followed by a month long road trip for Mrs. SSC and the kids, and I got to catch up with them for the last half in Montana and Idaho. I even got to spend a day solo exploring Seattle on my way out there.

The blown glass museum was awesome, the pics don't do it justice.
The blown glass museum was awesome, the pics don’t do it justice.

I even met up with a reader who was kind enough to let me pay homage to one of my childhood idols, Bruce Lee. Thanks again for the ride, Max!

I watched SO many of his movies over and over as a kid
I watched SO many of his movies over and over as a kid

We didn’t escape the heat of Texas, but you can’t match the beauty of Glacier NP anywhere in Texas I’ve seen yet. Coeur D’Alene was beautiful too and we spent almost a week there as well.

So hot, even in Glacier Nat'l Park!
So hot, even in Glacier Nat’l Park!
Lake McDonald - Glacier Nat'l Park
Lake McDonald – Glacier Nat’l Park

We were home just a short time before heading out to San Destin to spend a week on the beach.

Awesome week of boogie boarding and excellent waves!
Awesome week of boogie boarding and excellent waves!

With one of the kids in school, our vacation is now timed with every other family with school aged children. Sigh… On the plus side, we were able to not have either kid in daycare/preschool over the summer and that saved a lot of coin. Woohoo! Our spending was good for most of the summer, even including the big road trip and beach vacation, but man was August spendy! We had a lot of big expenditures hit as we are starting to prep the house for sale in a few years. Why start this far out? Well, we want to enjoy some of those things as well and not just make improvements immediately before moving out.

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May 2017: Our Money Went Where?!

May. The end of spring and kickoff of summer and what a month it has been. We had some bumps in the road with our spending, and there is room for improvement, but in general it wasn’t bad. We were able to close on our lot in Canyon Lake, so we now have an official place to kick off Phase 1 of our Lifestyle Change. We reviewed our budget situation and decided that we can make the house work if we build it sooner than later, so we met with a custom home builder and designer this month and are on track to start designing our house probably by the end of the week. We found a couple of plans that we like ~90% of the layout, and we have a powerpoint presentation (because who doesn’t use powerpoint for everything?) with notes and details for the other things relating to homebuilding beyond the layout. I think it will come together pretty easily as we seem to be on the same page for almost every design aspect we’ve come across so far. Getting back to our spending, here’s where our money went this past month.

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Estimated Lifestyle Change Spending: Canyon Lake Edition

We’re closing on our lot out in Canyon Lake this Friday and we’ve been doing a lot of reviewing of the numbers and seeing if we can make them work to start our Lifestyle Change. It’s difficult to know what will come of all of this, and how accurate they will be, because they are all estimates based off of our current house/utility usage, current lifestyle, and some moving forward assumptions. We have tracked our spending for over 2 years now, so we have that to go off of, but again, they’re all just estimates. Since that’s the best we have to work with, it’s what we’ll move forward with in our planning scenarios. The short answer is that we’ll be right around break-even or living paycheck to paycheck. We’ll only need to draw off of investments for travel and unplanned items that pop up, assuming I make zero money.

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Phase 1 of the Lifestyle Change Begins: We’re Buying Some Land!

This past month has been a whirlwind in regards to our Lifestyle Change and life in general. It’s literally only been about a month or so since Prof. SSC proposed her idea of our revised Hill Country Lifestyle Change to me. Since then we’ve taken a couple of different weekend trips looking at property. We’ve scoured Zillow and google maps street view (if street views actually exist…) and even more so, we’ve begun looking at house plans. Great googly moogly it’s been busy! Who would’ve thought retirement life planning would be so hectic?

Couldn't be said better.
Couldn’t be said better.

During that time though, we’ve figured out what we find important in our property and it’s not what you’d think. Even though we’re looking around lakes, we don’t necessarily find a lake view as important as we thought. We found that we would take more seclusion over a lake view. Yep, seclusion and that feeling of our own space is way more important to us than being right on the water with a killer view. That’s what led us to decide on the lot we think will be a perfect fit for us. It’s almost 3 acres, heavily treed with mature oaks, and we can put a house on it and have it surrounded by big trees. As of last weekend, we’re under contract on it with a closing date early next month. Now the real fun begins!

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March 2017 Spending: Our Money Went Where?

March was a pretty good month. The “year of spending” seems to continue as we had another month and another round of big ticket items show up. Specifically, the fence got replaced, well on 3 sides of the yard anyway. Our other neighbor didn’t feel like replacing the side we share, so that’s fine with us. On the upside, we also got about 30’ of fence replaced that no one paid for. Not us or our backyard neighbors. At $22/ft. that saved us about $330 (that’s going halvesies with the back neighbor). We dumped my bonus into the kids 529’s so they got a nice boost, but beyond that, there wasn’t a lot of craziness in our spending.

A quick look at our FI target shows that we’re still at 84% of our goal, down ~0.5% from last month. That’s all market driven as we’re still contributing the same and just watching and waiting. Some fun stuff that happened last month was our first trip out to look for property for the Lifestyle Change. For more details on that plus where the rest of our spending went last month read on.

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February 2017 Spending: Our Money Went Where?!

February was a great month for us! Or maybe it wasn’t who knows? Oh wait, I should know… Maybe I should write “February was A month for us!” and just leave out a descriptor, good or bad. There wasn’t a lot of change although I noticed our “pets” category comprised 10% of our total spend for the month. Yipe! I got a bonus at work – woohoo! That was pretty unexpected considering we still didn’t make money last year, but I am not complaining. Beyond that, it was a pretty normal month. For the number voyeurs out there, here is a look at the charts and graphs of our spending and how it stacks up to last month.

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Visualizing Early Retirement – It only took me 6 years…

I was reading some past blog posts and I came across this one and it reminded me how lucky I am to have met Mrs. SSC. I’m also often reminded by Mrs. BITA, how lucky I am that she is so patient with me, especially because it took me 6 years to realize that achieving financial independence and early retirement (FIRE) before we turned 45 was really possible. Yes, 6 years… The following post elaborates on that backstory and the struggles Mrs. SSC has had to put up with before I finally “got it.” Thanks for sticking with me Mrs. SSC, even though I know it gets difficult at times.

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January 2017 Spending: Our Money Went Where?

January, thank goodness you’re over… It seems like once one thing gets taken care of another comes up. So how did January pan out for us – expensive. Lots of deltas, not too many plusses. Some of it was fun, some of it was sad, and some of it was routine things that snowball into more expensive costs than we expected. Here’s the rundown of our spending this month and where we are in relation to our FIRE/FFLC goal.

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2016 Spending: Where did it all go?

I’ve finally gotten motivated to pull our 2016 numbers together and put them out there for your voyeuristic perusal. That’s not true, Mrs. SSC did that about a month ago, but I’ve been feeling a bit unmotivated, so there’s been a delay. For those of you that don’t care to see charts or hit the nitty gritty, the summary is that 2016 was no 2015 in terms of savings. The overall outside 401k investing sums were down, however, I am happy in the fact that it wasn’t from lack of saving, rather we essentially piled it into cash in the event we suffered double layoffs. That didn’t happen, thank goodness, and instead Mrs. SSC took a teaching job with a huge paycut and we’re all happier as a result. That’s pretty much 2016 in a nutshell. Below I’ve put together more details on where our money went and a chart on how it compares to 2015, and what we plan to change for 2017.

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