Month: January 2019 (Page 1 of 2)

Today is the Australia Day public holiday, which to all teachers is The Last Day of the Summer Holidays ( aka day of mourning). The dogs and I slept in till 8 AM, then I took the pups down to the dog beach for the last weekday walk here for a long time.

Keep in mind that when we set foot on the beach it was around 8:30 AM. This time tomorrow, I’ll be sitting in the lecture theatre with the rest of the staff, listening to our principal start off the new school year. There’ll be talk of tirelessly working for the benefit of our students, OH&S reminders, lots of talk of pedagogy (which is just ultra-boring education jargon) and exhortations to keep the standards high, watch uniform infringements and reminders of all the meetings we’ll have over the next two days before the kids come back.

The weather outside will be just like this…

The beach was packed. Every (wo)man and their dog was there. We were all enjoying the moment. Maybe I’ll be doing the same 24 hours from now, but I’m hazarding a guess that it won’t be to the same extent.

It wasn’t too hot, but the bigger dogs were already enjoying the water.

One of them was enjoying the water WAY out with his paddle-boarding owners. See his head bobbing along after them?

Everyone was taking the chance to get their feet wet and enjoy the public holiday.

The saying that people grow to look like their dogs sprang to mind when I saw this guy and his staffies. He looked as if he was trying to blend in with the pack.

Scout gets hot on walks when the temperature goes above the mid-twenties. She’s also a magnet for every single dog on the beach to come up and sniff her. She started to stop, refusing to walk with us.

This is what she did when I insisted. Short of dragging her, there was nothing I could do but wait for her. It’s lucky she’s so cute.

This dog’s owner was holding a tennis ball. I had to hold Poppy’s collar so she wouldn’t go in and try to get it. She wouldn’t win the battle for the ball with a staffie!

Action shot.

In Australia, even our sandcastles have nasty creepy-crawlies in them. Can you see it? Someone has a sense of humour!

Soon, like these people, it was time to turn around and head for home. The day was starting to get warmer and all dogs had to be off the beach by 10 AM.

I said goodbye to all this blue. It was around the time where, in 24 hours, the meeting would be finishing and I’d be heading back to my desk to get things ready for the classes I’m taking this year.

When we got back, I made a China Jasmine tea in the cup I brought back as a souvenir from South Africa. Tomorrow, it’ll be back to the “World’s Greatest Teacher’ mug at school.

(Well, I won’t say it isn’t wrong… Who am I to argue against a mug?)

I’m going to miss spending lazy days with this little crew. Summer school holidays in Victoria run for a little over 5 weeks. This year, I spent the whole time at home.

I didn’t do anything momentous. I spent time with my family over Christmas especially and I saw friends a few times. I pottered around the house and garden, getting a few things done and I read 15 books. I caught up on some Netflix series that I’ve been meaning to watch and I made sure to keep up with the chart I started to try and be more productive. I swapped this site to a self-hosted one and did a lot more writing. I also napped. A lot. Last year at work ended up being pretty tiring for some reason.

Basically, I lived these 5 weeks as if I was retired and it was a normal stretch of time at home.

Was I bored? Not at all.

I guess this ‘beachy’ post is my ode to summer. I’m not sure when the life I’ve been enjoying these last 5 weeks will become my retirement life, but I know that I’ll enjoy it when it comes.

Oh! And if you hear a psychic scream of anguish at about 7 AM tomorrow (Tuesday) morning, Australian Eastern Standard time, you’ll know that I’ve just hopped in the car to come to work.

I love my job, but as I get older I’m valuing having control over my time more and more.

Gardeners have a lot in common with investors. We both need to have a long-term view and the paths to success in each field are very similar.

Here’s where most people start off their financial lives: complete and utter devastation. They’re either starting from $0 if they’re lucky, or they’re in debt for credit cards, mortgages, student loan and cars. Some of us start the journey to FI early, but most of us start later in life.

This photo is an accurate representation of my financial life the day I left my husband. I had $60 cash, a 100K mortgage and 4 boys under 5. Like this snap of my backyard, it wasn’t a pretty picture.

These shots were taken after the first day the landscaper started. He dragged out the overgrown hedges and chopped down some trees. The white planter pot you can see in this picture had a lime verbena plant in it that I’d let die from neglect. I simply wasn’t paying attention. Basically, just as some people put their heads in the sand and try to ignore the devastation of their finances, I did the same with the yard. But once you face up to it, it’s time for a clear-out so that the work can commence.

Once your financial life is laid bare and there are no more surprises – (like that blue clamshell toddlers pool we found lurking behind the shed – who knew?!?) – it’s time to sniff out where you want to go from here. Poppy is demonstrating.

The new backyard is designed to give Old Lady Frogdancer as little upkeep as possible when she’s all old and rickety. Just like how I want her investment portfolio to be like. No one likes weeding, whether it be actual weeds or looking at bad investments.

The brick paving, all fully grouted in so that no weeds will sprout up, is the bedrock of the whole yard.

Education is the equivalent when we’re talking about our finances. When I was younger I had the whole ‘no debt’ thing down pat, but once I paid off the mortgage on the old house I was elated for about 3 weeks. Then I realised I knew next to nothing about retirement.

I discovered the Barefoot Investor and very shortly afterwards I stumbled onto the FIRE blogs. I read everything I could lay my hands on and learned about superannuation and investing.

On the upper level of the yard are 5 wicking beds. These are garden beds specifically designed to have a reservoir of water beneath the soil that the plants drink from. Excellent for drought protection… or, in financial terms – when the SHTF. You want to set things up so that your investments will enable you to sleep at night, even when times are tough.

This is where you start setting up some automated payments. You arrange to salary sacrifice. You open a brokerage account to start putting a share portfolio together. You might start researching where to buy a rental property. You keep reading and asking questions.

It’s all beginning to look fairly organised, isn’t it?

But it’s a bit bleak and stunted without any green stuff. This applies for both the gardening and investing metaphors.

Time to start planting!

And planting. And planting. In this case, columnar apple trees, with lavender to bring the bees.

With investing, you start buying shares or making regular payments into a managed fund. You might decide property’s your thing and so you start saving every payday for your first deposit.

The point is that you keep on planting and planting and planting. It becomes a habit.

Initially, you trim the budget to find some excess money. You’re able to plant more seedlings – and if you’re sensible, you make sure they’re heirloom plants so you plan to save the seeds and plant for free every year after this one.

This is a little like planning to re-investing dividends into buying more shares, rather than taking the money and running. Or planning to take rental income and use it to pay off the mortgage faster.

You hear about the damning effects of lattés and avocados on financial success, so you stop wasting little amounts of money and you add what you’ve saved to your accounts. Every little bit helps!

But a garden can’t grow without good soil. You start to look for ways to add to the health of your plants. Using the things you have available at home, you begin digging coffee grounds, tea leaves and eggshells into the soil and you begin composting.

But how can you keep adding more to your investments once you’ve trimmed the fat from your living expenses?

You look around at work and see that there’s a lot of compostable things that are being thrown away, so you arrange to bring them home. You value-add from your job, finding ways to accumulate more from your work to add to the things that you really value.

In a financial sense, if you have a job that allows paid overtime, you start picking it up. You go for a promotion. You make your job work harder for you and you pump what you make back into your investments.

After a while, you look outside your property for things to help you grow your veggies faster. You buy some worm farms, (freaking people out at work when you have them delivered there), and put them on the garden beds. It won’t be a quick fix, like winning the lottery, but over time the worms will improve the soil.

Sounds a bit like a side-hustle, doesn’t it? Most side-hustles just bring in a few extra dollars, but everything helps. I tried a few different things, mainly on Etsy or tutoring, but it was my side-hustle as a thermomix consultant that seriously accelerated our path to financial freedom. I paid off my original house YEARS earlier, as well as paying for a decadent 9-week trip to Europe and the UK.

You still live your life. No one can stay in a garden or in front of a spreadsheet their whole lives unless they want to have a life not worth living.

Go to that beach with your family!

Chase that ball! Bark at those seagulls!

Enjoy the little things along the way.

Then, after what seems like a long while, you begin to see results! Apples!

The first income from your hard work begins to trickle in. Whether it be dividends or rental income or your superannuation account starting to climb, it doesn’t matter. Your heart sings.

You keep plugging away. As time goes on, your garden (and investments) become ever more fruitful.

Not everything will go your way. These celery plants were put in last September. They haven’t grown since and are turning yellow, and just towards the back of the wicking bed, you can see a dead snow pea plant. Also, see the spring onions? They should be ready to eat by now, but they are the size of toothpicks.

This can be disheartening. Some people start a garden, run into things like this and give up.

Obviously, there are times where the stock market loses value and your net worth goes down. The real estate market may soften, as it’s doing at the moment, or you may have damage from tenants. If investing was guaranteed to always make money hand over fist every year, then everyone would do it.

But investing is for people who are in it for the long haul.

Even in the lean years, there’s room for optimism for the future.

These potatoes weren’t visible above ground once the plant died off. But underneath the surface, they were still there, quietly growing.

The garden has surprises, just like the market. Sometimes you don’t get what you expect. See those purple beans? Pop them in boiling water, walk away and when you come back – they’ll be green.

Over time, as your knowledge about the ebbs and flows of the seasons grows and you keep adding to the soil, your garden will reward you.

And just like your investments, you can save the produce/profits for the future. These bags of zucchini are bound for the freezer! Future Frogancer will be enjoying the results of Present Frogdancer’s work.

With regard to your finances, if you keep treating your money like a garden, by the time you’re ready to retire you’ll be like these girls!

via GIPHY

Today I woke up early, mainly because Jeffrey shut himself into my walk-in robe and was trying to get out. It was almost like he knew how hot the day was going to get and he was searching for the ice and snow of Narnia. There were weird noises and Scout was sniffing under the door at him. When my feet hit the floor at 6:30AM, it was already 33C/92F.

As my 4 long-term readers know, this year I’m experimenting with a chart to try and develop productive habits that I want to continue. One of the columns on the chart is to walk the dogs. If I was going to be able to do this, I had to get going pretty quickly, before the footpaths got so hot that they’d burn the pads on the dogs’ feet.

After I downed a 16 cent coffee and the dogs had their chicken necks for breakfast, we set off. Little Scout gets hot really quickly, so it was only a 5-minute walk around the smallest block. The day was already worrying. The wind was howling and the air was gearing up to be like it felt like an hour later – exactly like stepping into a fan-forced oven. It’s bush-fire weather.

By 9:30AM I had walked the dogs, watered the garden and harvested some more beans, cleaned the kitchen and read a couple of chapters of the Tess Gerritsen I’m reading at the moment. 4 columns down! Winning!

Then I had a 2-hour nanna nap. This heat is exhausting. I’m just glad that today is still in the summer holidays. If it was next week, I’d be trapped in classrooms after lunchtime with 28 sweaty teenagers.

Or almost worse… 28 teenagers who believe in ‘The Lynx Effect’ and are awash with synthetic fumes.

Now THAT’S a reason to focus on FI/RE, if ever I’ve heard one!