What’s the point of FIRE? Why bother to reach financial independence? Personally, my go-to answer has always been ‘Freedom.’ I propelled my way to FI on the twin goals of wanting security for my family and freedom to spend my days as I, (and not the school timetabler), chose. But imagine my shock and horror when, after reaching my goal, I find out that in order to truly enjoy the FI/RE life to the full, I’ll have to radically change an aspect of myself that I’ve always held dear. It’s a bitter pill indeed.
Ever since the day I left my husband 23 years ago with $60 cash in my hand, (I gave him the other $60 in the account because fair’s fair, it was a joint account), and dragging the 4 little boys under 5 with me, I’ve craved financial security. Over time, as that goal became closer, it morphed into a desire for overall financial freedom. Six or seven years ago I stumbled across Go Curry Cracker’s blog and asked in the comments what ‘FIRE’ meant – (I went back a few weeks ago and yes – it’s still there!) – and I’ve been steadily and intentionally making my way there ever since.
However, since my brother had his stroke on Christmas Day and my aunt died in January, I haven’t been motivated to write very much. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking and evaluating. My nephew was also battling lymphatic cancer, while being a father to 2 and expecting number 3 later this year, (he’s all clear now!), while people I’ve known for years at work are struggling with various health issues like Parkinsons and other things. Also, Mum falling and breaking her shoulder has affected her mobility ever since.
Maybe, I began thinking, I should look at what’s happening around me and realise that maybe age is catching up to some of us. Not me, of course! I’m youthful and dewy still. Yes… but still…
… maybe our bodies don’t simply carry on forever? What am I actually doing to maintain fitness?
Ugh.
Fitness.
I’ve never been one to go for a walk just for the sake of it. What’s the point? I’ll walk to the shops, I’ll definitely walk the dogs and I’ll walk to the library to return books, but why on earth would anybody walk for fun?!? As for sports… yeah nah.I don’t mind watching a good tennis match and I watch the AFL Grand Final every year, but as for actually playing a sport? No thanks. God invented books for a reason and that is so people can curl up on the couch and read them.
There’s no denying it. I’m not fit. At all. Never have been. This blog post from 2015 shows a photo of Steep Hill in Lincoln. What I didn’t mention in this post, because I didn’t want to worry my family, was that as we were driving away after walking up this incredibly steep street, I had pains in my chest. Poor Scott thought I was going to have a heart attack. Fast forward to my trip to North Korea in 2018, when I had to quit a walk up to the top of a mountain because I knew I’d never make it.
Yesterday I learned that A, my ex-husband, is going into hospital on Monday for a triple by-pass. He’s only 3 years older than I am! My God, it seems like everyone in their 50’s is dropping like flies!
Now, I realise that I’m writing in a niche where bloggers reveal all when it comes to their intimate figures. On their spreadsheets, that is. Well, I’m not about to reveal any intimate figures, either on my rotund frame or numerically. I don’t think the internet is quite ready for the former. But I haven’t been happy with my level of fitness for many years now, so something has to be done.
First step – I bought a Fitbit, (because there’s no doubt I’m a lazy cow). After all, what isn’t measured can’t be managed. Apparently, exercise helps stave off strokes and stuff. I began with not changing a thing about my life, just to see the baseline of where my steps are. It was in the summer school holidays, so it was always going to be low.
Turns out that if I have a book-reading day, my steps are as low as 2,000. Yikes! A normal day would be around 4,000. No wonder I’m getting to be what used to be described as a “cosy armful.” So I set the goal of 10,000 steps a day.
Turns out going from 4 to 10 thousand steps is really hard. So instead of beating myself up, I’m now looking at my average daily steps each week and aiming to improve on them each week. I figure that’s a more sustainable way to get into the habit of moving more. I’ve now reached the stage of giving the dogs an extra walk if I’m low in steps, which they love.
Though I didn’t think ahead when I bought Scout. Those tiny little legs can’t walk a long way before they get tired. I can’t leave her behind when I walk the other dogs because she literally screams. You’d swear she was being torn limb from limb. Still, I guess me carrying her adds to the weight loss goal.
I was talking with Jen, my sister-in-law today. She says she has a Pilates machine at home and she invited me to test drive it. She’s as thin as a twig and is constantly moving, so I’m going to go over there and have a go. Why not?
I can’t see myself ever being a fitness fanatic, but there’s no doubt that I’d be a fool if I ignored everything that’s going on with the people around me. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but better I swallow this than a packetful of Haribo Gummy Bears.
After all, what’s the point of becoming financially independent and retiring early(er) if you’re too fat and unfit to do anything with all that freedom?
Well, the Australian school year began two weeks ago and I – I have begun my new life of part-time work. Yes, I gave myself the gift of time. And boy, do I have a story to tell you!
At the beginning of last year, I had no intention of going part-time. I was racing towards my FIRE number and I thought I’d simply push on through with full-time work until I reached it. But then Mum had a bad fall and broke her shoulder. It brought home to me the fact that my parents aren’t getting any younger and I really should step up and spend some more time with them. So, before I could talk myself out of it, I went to see my principal and asked for 2 days off a week in 2020 – one for Mum, one for me.
Fortunately, she also has ageing parents so she understood and agreed. This year I’m working Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, with Thursday afternoons devoted to taking Mum to her physical rehab appointments, while Thursday mornings I’ll spend with my brother in his rehab place as he deals with the aftermath of his stroke.
But Tuesdays are for MEEEEE!
The Australian school year started a couple of weeks ago, so I’ve had a bit of a taste of what my life will now look like. And it’s not bad…
The first school day for teachers was on Tuesday January 28. Now, Tuesday is one of my days off but all teachers had to attend school that day due to Important Teacherly Meetings and such, so I got a day off in lieu, where I can choose the date of my day off. Remember this because it’s important later.
At the end of Wednesday, I announced to the staffroom, “I’ve worked two days in a row. I’m exhausted!! I’m never doing this again. See you Friday!”
Judging by the comments flung my way after that, they now all hate me.
Last week was the first week where it was Business As Usual. Monday was a workday, then came Tuesday. That morning, my feet hit the floor at precisely the time when, if it was any other year, I’d be throwing things into my bag and racing out the door. I loved getting up, feeling rested and leisurely making my morning coffee.
I took the dogs for a long walk and then surveyed the hundreds of tomatoes that I had ripening on the benches in the kitchen. I decided that I’d have to spend time harvesting them and putting them into the freezer for meals.
I put on my son’s podcast, grabbed a chopping board, a knife and the thermomixes and got to work. I’ll blog about this in more detail later, but suffice to say that I worked from 9 – 4 processing bags of tomatoes, squash/zucchini and herbs to make the basis of 50 pasta meals. Yes, FIFTY.
They’re all in the freezer and amazingly, my kitchen is now filled with just as many ripening tomatoes as before. My garden has gone crazy. But do you know what the really crazy thing is?
In previous years when I was harvesting produce from the garden, I had to do it on the weekends. I’d be chopping things and bagging things like a threshing machine, all the while thinking, “Argh!!! This is taking so long! I’ve got a million other things I need to be doing! WHY is this taking so long? I don’t have TIME for this!!!“
But this time? I was chilled. I was working steadily but it wasn’t a problem. In fact, I wasn’t even conscious of how much time it was all taking until in the afternoon, chatting with Ryan25, I saw a secondary school kid crossing the street. “What’s the time?” I said. “I just saw a kid either walking home or wagging.”
“It’s 3:30,’ he said.
Wow. The whole day passed in the kitchen and I wasn’t stressing out about how long it was taking. This was bonus time – I Got Things Done that would normally have been put off until the next weekend. I was relaxed and feeling productive. What a great feeling!
This really brought home to me how cool this new work/life balance is going to be. There is no way I could have even considered this before I became financially independent, but now I have options. And speaking about cool – how cool is it that it all fell into place just as my parents and brother needed me to have more time?
It definitely shows that working towards financial independence is the way to go, even if you think that you don’t want to give up working. You never know when your priorities will shift and it’s nice to able to have the choice, without money being the major thing holding you back.
But remember that day in-lieu? This story gets better…
The second day back, I was talking with some of the young Maths girls in the staffroom and I mentioned that I’ll be able to choose a day off in the next few weeks.
Emily’s face lit up and she said, “Frogdancer! You should take the Friday before the Labour Day long weekend off. Then you’d get Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday and Tuesday off!”
OMG. Mind Blown.
And to think I was planning to teach my 3 classes for a few days, see which class I liked the least and then take off a day when I had them for a double. WHAT an idiot I am!
I raced over to the Daily Organiser and got that day off locked in. I came back to the staffroom and then Emily said, “You know? You really need to go away for a holiday…”
“You know? I really DO!” I said.
I jumped onto my computer and within 15 minutes I booked a three-night getaway in Bowral, just outside Sydney. I was supposed to be working on Important Teacherly Stuff but hey… this was more important.
Bowral is a cute, funky little place with art galleries, cafés, bushwalks and the Don Bradman Cricket Museum, (not that I’ll be bothering to set foot into THAT place!Hate cricket with a passion.) It’s an 8-hour drive from Melbourne, so I’ll take the car and have a real road trip. It’ll be just me, my podcasts, my books and a thirst for sedate adventure.
It’s already shaping up to be a great year! Hmmm, I wonder how I’ll spend my day off tomorrow???
Poppy in the background, Scout seductively in the front. Just chillin’.
I know I said I’d be back when my head clears. I don’t know if I’m quite there, but after today (Monday – a public holiday) I go back to work, so if my head isn’t ready to deal with Real Life by now, it definitely has to be by tomorrow! But over the last few weeks, I’ve noticed that things I’ve put in place in the past have started to come to fruition in the present. Sow the seed now to enjoy the future.
As people playing along at home may remember, tomorrow is the first day of my new, part-time life. It marks the beginning of a new stage in my life. A stage where, for the first time since I left my marriage 22 years ago, I have actively decided to decrease the amount of money I earn, instead of frantically trying to bring home as much money as I could from my job and any side-hustles I could find.
I never thought I’d be in a position to drop my days of work down to 3 days a week – let along reach financial independence before I was 67! Yet here we are. Seriously people, keep chipping away that that debt/paying off that mortgage/salary sacrificing into superannuation and throwing money at investments. Sow the seeds before you need them, even when you think that the goal of financial independence is so far away you’ll never reach it. Sometimes life will surprise you.
The time will pass anyway, whether you look to the future or not. You might as well be a little bit frugal and put money aside for when you’re older. It can’t hurt and it might help.
It definitely did for me.
Jeffrey, just chillin’.
My brother’s condition remains unchanged. Jen, my sister-in-law, has gone to the country for the long weekend to spend time with her family, so yesterday I went to the hospital to see him. When he woke, he was surprisingly lucid. He definitely knew me, laughed when I said I was distraught about having to go back to work in 2 day’s time, noticed my big solitaire diamond ring and even remembered what his dog’s name was when I asked him.
Sometimes the lights are on and some of him is at home, other times not. I was lucky I happened to strike him at a good time.
The latest project.
Meanwhile, the projects continue at The Best House in Melbourne. We now have a new front fence and electric gate. I was tired of the little woofs defending us against all other dogs, prams and motorised scooters for the elderly, so I decided to block their line of sight. You may remember a little while ago I decided to harvest some profits from my investments and Get Some Jobs Done? This is the first of them.
In a month or so after the timber has been seasoned, it’ll be painted. Just wait till you see what it looks like! I always think it makes life more fun when you have something to plan and to look forward to.
It’s a bit dark. Sorry. Hundreds of free tomatoes ripening, lots of squash and some coffee grounds waiting to be put into the garden soil.
While I’ve been preoccupied with family matters, the garden has been powering along. Currently, I have piles of tomatoes gently ripening in the kitchen where the birds can’t get them, while beans are hanging by the hundreds and squash and zucchini are growing so fast you could almost swear you can see them doing it.
Back in November I wrote a post called ‘Growing a portfolio is just like having a veggie garden.’ Now, 2 months later, we’re reaping the results of putting in that work of fertilising and planning – not to mention the work of installing the beds to begin with! Like a money nerd happily upgrading his/her net worth spreadsheets at the end of the month, there’s something deeply satisfying about being a gardener, walking back to the house with an armful of produce that you’ve grown on your own property.
Even better is when you nourish your family with what your garden has produced. It’s like the feeling you get when it’s cold and stormy outside, yet your kids are tucked up safe and warm in the home that you’ve provided. It’s a good feeling.
Incidentally, scroll back up to the photo and look at the men on the window ledge. One is from Bali, the other from South Africa. Travel is important to me and lots of tiny frugal decisions made along the way has enabled me to be a Valuist – able to have money put aside to spend where I find the most value.
A baby quilt for my brother’s grandson, who’ll be born later this year.
It’s not just spreadsheets, investments and actual plants that the harvest metaphor applies to. Hobbies and skills are another.
Back in 2008 I decided to learn how to quilt. I borrowed a sewing machine from Blogless Sandy and bought a basic pattern from the local quilt shop. The thought that tipped me over the edge was that all quilting was, was sewing little straight lines. Surely even I was capable of that?!? I made a quilt for my youngest son, Evan11, because I thought he’d be the least critical of my efforts.
Thirty-odd quilts later, here I am. The baby quilt above was a result of mixing 2 quilting ideas together to come up with a fun gift for this new little boy. There was Maths involved, (and we all know how much I hate that!), and some slight swearing, but now I have a fabulous gift that cost me nothing but time to create.
I took a break from quilting for years when I was hitting my side-hustle of Thermomix really hard, but now I’m back. I still have the skills I learned and the fabric I bought back in the day and now, given that I’m only working part-time this year, I have the time to devote to creating more beautiful and snuggly things for the people I love.
I didn’t start off intending to write about sowing and reaping, but as I wrote, the thread seemed to be clear. I’m writing from a position where, because of hundreds of tiny actions and decisions made over the last 2 decades, I’m able to begin to start harvesting the rewards. I’m able to spend serious coin on the things that matter to me and to ease off the throttle of full-time teaching to be able to enjoy the simple pleasures that life offers.
I hope that anyone reading this who is still on the earlier parts of the journey (how I hate that word but sometimes there’s no alternative!) will see that there’s no need to get discouraged or disheartened by how long a road there seems to be in front of you.
By sowing the seeds of financial independence, learning new skills and hobbies along the way and having little projects and things to look forward to, you’re not only laying the foundations for an excellent life for Future You – you’re also enjoying your current life along the way.
Remember, the time passes whether you’re sowing the seeds or not. You might as well intentionally scatter some as you go.
I’m always interested when retired people continue writing their blogs, or when people post interviews with people who have already reached early(ish) retirement. So many of us in this space are still working our way towards the time when we can strap on our socks and sandals and skip off towards the sunset, so it gives me great motivation to hear from people who have reached the goal and can let us know what it’s like to live the dream.
Today I have a post from my best friend Blogless Sandy. She and her husband retired a couple of years ago, long enough to settle into it, so I thought it’d be interesting to hear her perspective on this whole retirement thing. The photos she’s attached also means we can literally see her perspective as well!
Here she is:
After a lazy mid-week lunch at a winery.
I’m Blogless Sandy, aptly named by Frogdancer because my real name is
Sandy and I don’t have a blog. Who would have thought an English teacher could
be so imaginative!
Anyway, given that Frogdancer is working her way towards retirement and I’m already there, she has asked me to write about my experience of retirement so far, a whole 2½ years of it. This all started after her post quite while back titled “Retire? But what will you DO all day?” and a discussion we had at the time about retirement in general. Frogdancer and I met 24 years ago when our kids were still babies and we’ve remained best friends ever since, so we discuss stuff a lot.
A little bit about me. I’m married with 2 adult children and 2 grandchildren. My husband and I retired to the Mornington Peninsula (about an hour from Melbourne, Australia) 2½ years ago, after selling our large family home in a suburb of Melbourne. My husband, who is 11 years older than me, had just retired. Selling our home and buying a smaller house further from the city meant I could also retire immediately. I was 56, so although not an early retirement by FIRE standards, it was still a lot earlier than most Australians manage.
Blogless Sandy, like me, has a dog beach at the end of her street. How handy!
I retired on a Thursday and we moved to our new home (the best house on
the Mornington Peninsula) the following Monday. When I look back I contemplate
that it could have been a complete disaster. I left our family home of 24
years, my job of 27 years, our friends and everything that was familiar, moved
to a totally new location, and all within the space of 4 days. Was I concerned?
Not at all… well, if I’m being totally honest, maybe just a little bit.
When I announced to friends and work colleagues that I was retiring and moving, the question asked most often was “But what are you going to do?” I’d never considered that filling my days was going to be a problem, but it seemed to be a concern for others. This is understandable, given we spend a good deal of our lives in the workforce with our schedule dictated by our job. Then when we are at home, for many, much of the time is taken up with raising a family and running a house. Our lives are interspersed with holidays where we get to choose what we want to do, but trying to imagine a life that is essentially one big extended holiday can be difficult.
For me, the biggest change when I retired, apart from the obvious one of not having to work anymore, was the lack of social interaction compared to working in an office environment 4 days a week. Even though we often work with people that we are not necessarily friends with outside work, we tend to socialise quite a bit at work. We usually talk with work colleagues about our weekends, events we go to, activities we participate in and just make comments about things in general. Suddenly all that was gone! It was just me and hubby! But don’t panic, it all worked out fine, without one of us doing serious harm to the other. Just saying though, it was a huge change that I hadn’t really thought about before it happened.
Fortunately for us, we’re both reasonably self-contained people who are quite happy with our own and each other’s company. For people who struggle a little with the whole being on your own thing though, it’s probably worth considering how this will impact you. You might surprise yourself and learn to love all that “aloneness”. You may discover that you’re actually damned good company and that a bit of alone time can be quite replenishing.
Just another afternoon at the office on the beach.
I liked Frogdancer’s post (mentioned above) as she was obviously considering that retirement is not just about travel and sleeping in. The day to day needs to be filled with something too and having a number of projects or interests in mind is a good start. When people asked me what I was going to do in retirement, my response was that for the first 6 months I would sleep, read, knit, take long walks along the beach, spend time with my grandchildren and explore our new location. Then once I got bored with that I would consider what else I wanted to do. Of course, I had projects and activities in mind, but my initial goal was to just unwind and treat the first stage of my retirement as an extended “staycation”. I picked 6 months as an arbitrary length of time, not really knowing if it would take more or less time before the boredom began to set in.
Imagine retiring early enough so you can keep up with a toddler?
And there’s that word – boredom – that we all seem to be so afraid of. Now I agree that an extended period of boredom is not a good thing, but I don’t believe that short periods of boredom are all bad. After all, if you’re a bit bored, isn’t that when you start looking for something to do? I know in my life, many a good project or new activity has been kick-started by a little bit of boredom.
One by-product of retirement is that I’ve finally learned to slow down – most of the time anyway. It took quite a while to wind back to a gentler pace, but generally I no longer feel the urgency to get everything done today, not when I can see a whole bunch of ‘todays’ in front of me. Life is not lived at the same frantic pace as before and there is more time to enjoy the small moments. Interestingly too, having learned to slow down, I just don’t need as many things to fill the day. Compared to my pre-retirement life, I now feel like I do a lot of “nothing”. It’s not really that I’m doing nothing of course, but I’m going at a slower pace and enjoying more quiet moments.
Being able to spend more time with the dogs – sounds good.
I know that before I retired, I generally thought of retirement as a
fixed kind of thing. You retire, you do certain things, lead a certain kind of
life and that’s it until you’re carried out in a box. I realise now, that for
me at least, retirement is more of an evolving process. Initial retirement was
the “relax and unwind” phase. After years of raising a family and being in the
workforce that’s what I needed. There were lots of sleep-ins and idle mornings,
lots of lazing around. There were lots of days with nothing planned and lots of
spur of the moment outings. It was wonderful, but I reached a point where I
needed more than that. I’m the kind of person who functions better when I have
some kind of structure to my week and that’s what I have now.
I like the sameness of familiar activities and pastimes, but I also revel in the challenge of doing new things too. Now, 2½ years into retirement I find I’m busy, but a new kind of busy. I’m busy doing the things that I want to do. I always said that when I retired I wanted to volunteer at an animal shelter, so now I walk the dogs at a shelter one morning a week.
Taking a hike on a mid-morning Thursday.
I also participate in a walking group one morning each week, always in a different, but nearby location. I get exercise and social interaction and get to explore the local area, all in one activity. We look after our grandchildren 1 or 2 days a week, but that has become fixed days rather than the casual arrangement it started out as. I prefer the fixed arrangement as it fills my need for structure.
Imagine having yoga classes in a studio with this outlook?
I always used to speak about doing yoga or pilates but had never actually done more than talk about it. I no longer had the excuse of being time-poor, so I took up yoga about 15 months ago and currently attend 5 classes a week. Then there’s the small commitment of being a member of the local beach cleaning group and trying to combat the never-ending amount of rubbish that gets left behind or washed up on our local beach. In amongst these things are the outings, the dog walking, the bike rides, the walks along the beach, the catching up with friends, the gardening and the pottering around. Oh, and just a bit of bad news, even in retirement the housework still needs to be done!
It’s a lovely kind of life that I’ve created and I’m very content.
That’s not to say things can’t or won’t continue to change though. I feel free
to keep creating the kind of retirement I want and as time goes on circumstances
are bound to keep changing. We were only recently contemplating that before we
know it our caring commitment to our grandchildren will be reduced to just
school drops-offs and pick-ups. Then we found out that grandchild number 3 is
on the way!
Little do they know they’ll have company soon…
I spent 12 months volunteering at 2 animal shelters and recently decided to discontinue one of the roles. I was feeling overcommitted (overcommitted in retirement! haha!!) and my role at one of the shelters was very physical and rather thankless. I kept going for the sake of the animals, but ultimately decided to focus my energy on the shelter where I feel my contribution has the most impact and is more valued. If I want to increase my shelter volunteer work again in the future I can easily commit to additional shifts at that same shelter.
As mentioned, I took up yoga about 15 months ago. I was attending
classes once or twice a week and decided about 5 months ago to make a bigger
commitment. I didn’t feel I was doing my yoga practice justice and wanted to
see how I’d feel about the whole yoga thing if I got a bit more serious about
it. So now I attend 5 classes a week and yoga is my current obsession!
After another 2½ years of retirement, my weeks may be entirely different. I may decide in the future that I want more in my weeks, less in my weeks, different or new things in my weeks. The beauty of retirement is that it’s an evolving process full of endless possibilities, limited only by what I want it to be.
So don’t be concerned when people ask you what you’re going to do in retirement and you don’t have all the answers. If you have a vague idea of some things you want to do and some interests you might want to explore, you will be able to create the perfect retirement for you.
Retirement looks awful, doesn’t it?
It’s me, Frogdancer Jones again!
I really like how Sandy and her husband utilised domestic geoarbitrage in much the same way I did to free up capital that was otherwise locked into real estate. Being able to use that money to downsize and invest has shaved YEARS off her working life (and mine too! It’s 2020 – hello part-time work!!)
Something that she didn’t touch upon is that retirement looks a bit different for her and her ‘hubby’. Blogless Sandy likes a structure to her week, whereas her husband is a more ‘go with the flow’ person who takes each day as it comes.
For me, looking at how they’ve settled into their new life down on the Peninsula, it’s made early(ish) retirement seem far less risky and scary. They live life in their own ways and they’re very happy. I could do with a piece of that…
Thanks, Blogless Sandy. Enjoy your beach and your spa!
Nearly all of the Redneck Christmas package. I ate the Chex Mix before I took the photo.
One of the best things about being a blogger is when you start to build a community. I first discovered this over a decade ago, back when I was writing about knitting and quilting with my personal blog Dancing With Frogs and I started attending blogmeets with other ‘crafty’ women.
One of the funniest times I bumped into a fellow blogger was when I was attending a two-day quilting workshop and I was talking to someone about knitting baby hats for my Etsy shop. One of the women on the other side of the table said hesitantly, “Excuse me… are you… Frogdancer?” Turns out we’d both been reading each others’ blogs for ages!
A similar thing happened when I was on a four-day course to learn how to run a team for Thermomix. Chatting away at dinner on the first night, Bee from Tick of Yum and I realised who each other way and we had a rapturous moment of recognition. Puzzled everyone else at the table but we were rapt. Here was a kindred spirit!
Last April the incredible Mr and Mrs Groovy visited Australia and came down my way. I was on school holidays and we decided to meet up for a day so I could show them around. Unlike most meetings when you have to establish all of the ‘getting to know you’ stuff, we’d read each others’ blogs so we pretty much just jumped straight into a conversation and went from there. Felt like we’d been good friends for ages.
We had such a great day. We walked along the Yarra for a while, then I took them to Doyles in Mordialloc to have lunch by the river, then we came back to The Best House in Melbourne. We went to the Backyard Beach and had fish n chips for dinner before we drove back to the city.
Mr Groovy is one of the most open-minded people I’ve ever met. We three had incredibly interesting conversations over the course of the day. I wish they lived closer.
When they dropped an off-hand comment a while ago that they missed timtams and vegemite, I thought that a little care package wouldn’t go astray. They responded with a care package of their own – a redneck Christmas.
The parcel arrived on Christmas Eve. We have a tradition at Christmas that one person at a time opens a gift, so the whole family was watching as I began lifting these exotic American foodstuffs out of the box and reading the descriptions of them. We were enthralled.
At first, we were eating the desserts and chocolates that were left here after Christmas Day ended so abruptly. But now that Ryan25 is forcing me to watch Breaking Bad from the beginning, it was time to start sampling the goodies. Instead of a redneck Christmas, it’s a redneck new year!
This was the first one. Not bad.
The Chex Mix was good. I was frightened that it’d be really sweet, because the word on the streets is that Americans add sugar to everything. But this was a nice crunchy bag of bite-sized bits that I worked my way through over a couple of nights. I googled and apparently some of the things in it are a breakfast cereal.
Moon Pie. Fatter than a Wagon Wheel and just marshmallow in the middle. No jam.
Next up was the Moon Pies. David26 and I unwrapped one each, then bit in.
OMG!!!! The biscuits surrounding the marshmallow (so much marshmallow!) AREN’T CRUNCHY! It was like biting into a sponge cake. In itself, that’s not a bad thing but when you’re expecting a cookie-like consistency it takes you a couple of seconds to adjust.
Action shot… before and after.
Of course it was sweet but not overly so. After we finished laughing at ourselves for our reaction to the soft consistency, we finished them up and agreed they were ok. There was enough sweetness to make you feel that you’d had a treat and they didn’t leave you feeling full. Definitely handy to have around when you need a slight pick-me-up mid-afternoon.
We’ve yet to try the other delicacies on offer. We have panettone here as the boys are half-Italian, but I haven’t had it for years. (I call the boys Kangaroochee’s, a mix of Aussie and Italian.)
I don’t mind admitting that the dried pork crackling makes me slightly uneasy. David26 was reading the part on the package where it says that it’s ‘great for cooking and snacks.’ He looked at me and said, “HOW could you use this in cooking???”
Safe to say we’ll be eating those bad boys as snacks.
This has been so much fun. It reminds me of when I was in the supermarket in Pyongyang, North Korea, choosing snacks to eat on the train trip home. There was nothing familiar. All I had to go on was the pictures on the packaging. This is a similar experience. “Which one will we try now??”
Anyone who isn’t familiar with Mr and Mrs Groovy needs to jump across to their blog and have a read. Their story about coming later in life to FIRE is absolutely inspiring. The fact that they both have great senses of humour is an added bonus. It’s a fantastic blog written by lovely people. Well worth the time.
I thoroughly enjoyed my day with them and I hope one day to make it over to North Carolina to see Groovy Ranch in person. In the meantime, in case I feel like I’m missing out on being in the American South, I have some authentic pork crackling snacks to tide me over.
Sshhh! Don’t tell my workmates, but they’re getting hand-made soap for Christmas. A couple of months ago I made up a couple of batches of this soap, mixed through some oats that I’d chopped up in the thermomix and let the rustic-shaped bars cure in the laundry, hardening up so they’ll be suitable to be used straight away.
Last week I asked the woman who runs the school canteen how many women work there. On Friday I dropped off 10 cakes of soap for them. It’s only fair. Twice a week I pick up all of the veggie scraps from them, so they deserve to get a little something for helping my garden out all year.
I probably spent a little under $20 to buy the materials, so that (and my time) was the only cost for nearly 40 presents. It’s something that’s a little bit different to the usual chocolates or candy-canes-sticky-taped-to-a-card and people seem to appreciate them.
You may have noticed that to the side of the soaps on the rack, are jars full of bean seeds. People who have been following along to the blog for a while may remember that when I put in the hideously expensive wicking beds last year, the landscaper put in horribly poor soil. Just about every plant I put into the beds died a slow and yellowy death, aside from my peas, beans and tromboncino zucchinis.
A little while ago I put together some seed packets of the Lazy Housewife and Purple King beans and gave them away to anyone at work who wanted some, particularly the people who’d given me compost materials. After all, they helped contribute! I told them to save a couple of beans, dry them out and then they’ll be able to plant next year’s bean crop. Essentially, I’ve just given them free beans for the rest of their lives.
And who doesn’t want to grow something called ‘Lazy Housewife’?
Like investing or working towards financial independence, gardening is a process of doing little jobs, one after the other. These jobs are nothing momentous when viewed on their own, but over time the cumulative effect can be huge.
The good thing about a little project is that it doesn’t take much to gain success. I just finished one on Sunday, out in the garden, and it made my day.
(Here’s another lot, just springing up. You can see they’re all from the same tomato. I’ll have to thin them out this weekend.)
Last year I was wandering around Bunnings in the gardening section and I saw a plastic frame to grow beans/cucumbers or whatever. It came with a thin plastic bird netting to throw over it. I thought it’d be perfect to use for the Purple King beans that Bev gave me in 2012.
I set it up and yes, it worked pretty well. This was the first year that my veggie garden was operational and I had yet to realise how poor the soil that the landscaper had used was. Pretty much the only things that grew last year were beans and zucchini.
(Last year’s Purple King beans, just starting out. The actual beans are purple as the name suggests, but they turn green when you cook them.)
At the end of the season the netting was full of holes. Actually, that’s a stupid sentence to write because, by definition, netting is already full of holes! But this netting was so delicate that it was ripped to shreds. I packed away the frame, thinking vaguely that next year I’d cut down some more bird netting or something to use with it. Maybe even position it in a couple of the wicking beds so it’d form an arch???
So exciting!
Fast forward to this year. I was wasting time online, looking at the Diggers site when I saw brown string being used as netting. OMG!!! It was marketed as being compostable, so you just tear it down at the end of the growing season and whack it in the compost, but you and I both know that’s not going to happen in the Frogdancer Jones household! I’ll get at least 2 growing seasons out of it at least. You mark my words.
I didn’t know whether I’d need one or two of them to fit the frame, but they were only $9 each, so I ordered 4. I figured that I’d be able to use them somehow. While I was waiting for them to come in the mail, I dragged the frame out of the shed and set it up over the middle path between the two wicking beds, then planted some Lazy Housewife beans I’d saved from my crop last year. I figured they’d get a week or so to grow before they’d reach the netting.
I had a vision in my head of a green arch over the path, with beans hanging down ripe for the picking. The shade of the arch would shelter at least 2 worm farms in the wicking beds and the path itself would be a shady spot. In the middle of summer those brick paths can get hot. The bean archway would be functional as well as pretty.
I didn’t think to take a photo of the frame before I threw the jute netting over it. So here’s an ‘after’ shot.
Sometimes in gardening, along with investing, you find that you can do things by yourself that you didn’t think you could. Learn about shares? Compound interest – what’s that? How do I invest? There are numbers involved and numbers are scary; surely I’ll have to hire someone???
Can I put this netting over this very tall frame? Surely I’ll need help from a tallish son?
We have a problem with birds here, so I’ll have to manoeuvre the growing bean and cucumber plants out from under the bird net and onto the jute netting.
But no! I was able to do it all by myself. Some of the beans had grown tall enough for me to thread them through the lower parts of the netting, so the project is already underway. I stepped back after setting it all up and felt proud.
I was reading on Rhonda’s blog about how nice the white cucumbers are, so when I saw a punnet of them I brought one home. Ryan24 loves cucumbers and the twine netting is certainly strong enough to support them, so if they take off they’ll be a handy addition to the garden. The mixture of beans and cucumbers would also make for a more interesting view, too.
When I look at the little steps it took to see this little project through from start to finish, I feel pleased that I took those steps. It’s the same feeling I get when I log into my Superannuation account to see how it’s going, or into my Commsec account to cast a quick look over my shares. I feel glad that I started the journey to financial independence all those years ago.
Sometimes things in both gardening and investing don’t go to plan. The sharemarket may fall or a landscaper may put in awful soil that kills the plants you put in. But if you quietly keep putting in the little steps… slowly and steadily making compost to nourish the soil/saving a certain amount each pay/salary sacrificing towards Super/ buying an ETF every time your savings reach a coupla grand…
Imagine how this will look in a few weeks? It’s going to be lush and green and shady.
… you’ll be able to look back over time and marvel at just how far you’ve come.
I’m going to do something that I never thought I’d do. I’m going to pull some profits out of my investments and spend them on some projects around the house. In other words, I’ve decided to harvest some profits and lock them in.
Again, this was something that I never thought I’d do. I’m still working, so income is flowing in to pay for my day-to-day needs. That sweet sweet compounding is doing its thing with my investments and I was sure that I’d continue to let them ride. But then something happened.
I arrived home a week or two ago and it was raining. As I got out of the car and turned towards the house something caught my eye. A steady stream of water coming from the left front corner of the guttering. It fell in a straight line right onto the wooden supports of the verandah.
Crap.
I glanced across at the other corner and sure enough, the same thing was happening, but fortunately, this one was falling onto the brick paving. But the wooden balustrade near both corners was needing to be replaced. I was going to wait, but suddenly this looked like I might now have a rotting verandah on my hands.
It seems like it should be an easy fix – just replace the guttering. Done, right?
But look at this shot. The yuccas at the front of the house have grown up past the roof and are dangerous. The leaves are thick and very pointy and sharp at the ends and the previous owner intelligently planted them next to walkways. A couple of times when I was on the way to the recycling bin, I’ve narrowly missed being poked in the eye. So removing the yuccas has been on my list of Things To Get Done for a while now and the guttering can’t be replaced while the yuccas are there.
So it should be easy. Cut down the yuccas, then replace the guttering, right?
But…
If I cut the yuccas down, our big front windows would then be open to the street. Any stray marauder strolling by would be able to see straight through into my bedroom and our living room. Not exactly ideal. So do I put up some sheer curtains for day-time? Or do I put up a tall fence?
I already have a front fence, but it’s rusting. I’m very close to the beach. The dogs bark at every dog that walks past, so it’s been on my list of Things To Get Done, but in some dark, misty future, aeons from now. But that is going to change, it seems.
Our electric gate is broken, so we’ve been opening and closing it by hand for about a year now. If I get a new fence – a non-see-through one – I’d have to replace the gate as well.
It’s a cascading list of repairs and replacements. So! It all starts at the front fence.
Once I get the new fence, I’ll be able to call an arborist to cut down the yuccas and grind out the stumps. THEN I can replace the guttering and fix any wooden bits of the verandah and balustrading, without worrying that the carpenter will get his eyes poked out.
It’s so annoying. I had a really good plan in place to keep my investments in place and to keep a wage coming in to pay for retirement-proofing the house and so far the plan is working. But the good part about biting the bullet and getting all of these things done now is that once they’re done – they’re done. I can cross them off my list and keep moving forward.
My investments have done really well over the last couple of years, so in effect, I’ll be locking in the profits when I withdraw them and use them on the house. Of course, I’ll be losing any future compounding on those dollars, which is a shame, but the more I think about it, the more convinced I am that if I delay this water problem until I save up the money to deal with it, I’ll just be giving myself a bigger, more expensive problem down the track.
Ah well. At least Future Frogdancer will be able to walk out onto her front verandah without risking life and limb (or eyes, when I think of the yuccas.) It ruffles me that I’m changing my plans, but I think that the situation warrants it.
Anyone who’s been here on the blog before would probably know that I’m dropping down to part-time work next year, as a glide-path towards retirement. It wasn’t an easy decision to make, because as a rule I’ve been trying to earn MORE money ever since I left my husband with 4 kids under 5. To voluntarily drop from a full-time wage of over 100K down to working 3 days (but getting paid for 4 days) was stepping outside my comfort zone in a big way.
You’d think that now I’ve made the decision and set the wheels in motion I’d be all set and raring to go. I’ve got permission from my principal and I’ve let the timetabler know, as well as notifying the heads of departments that I work in, English and Theatre Studies being in different areas. I’m colouring squares on a calendar and I should be happy to see the number of days until the end of the year shrinking daily. As days tend to do…
But something’s happening at work. Something that’s messing with my head. People my age are leaving, either for new jobs or for retirement. They’re looking happy, saying things like “A weight has been lifted” and this is all making me feel restless and starting to question my life choices.
Two, in particular, have got me feeling envious. The main one is a woman who is retiring at the end of the year. She’s married to a teacher, they have no kids and for years she’s been one of the year 7 student managers, which is a very demanding position. She’s decided that it’s time to pull the pin and her husband is fully behind her decision, even though he has no plans to retire for a while. The thing is – we were in the same year of teachers’ college together!!!!
It’s hard not to compare. She’s happy. She has a gleam in her eye that I haven’t seen since we were at Rusden together…
The other person has taken a direction that, while I don’t want to do the same thing myself, is nevertheless very clever. She’s also the same age as me and our kids have been through both primary and secondary schools together. She heard about a part-time position going at a local selective secondary school which is all about running the admin for VCE classes, (years 11 and 12.)
In other words: No teaching. No marking. No meetings. No parent/teacher days. No yard duty.
And get THIS – if she stays behind for any reason, she can bill the admin and get paid for her time!!!!!
This is unheard-of in teaching. She’ll be able to leave work and not take any of it home with her. Ever.
I mean, I’m really good at separating work and home life and the only time I take marking home with me is when I correct the year 12 practice exams that they do over the September holidays, so I’ll have them ready for the kids when they get back. I learned how to smash out marking at school when the kids were young and I’d take marking home, then it would inevitably all go back with me to work the next day, untouched. But most teachers aren’t like me, and the thought of having their evenings and weekends being designated a ‘Correction-Free Zone” is intoxicating.
What I find enticing about what she’s done is that it beautifully solves the problem of burn-out. It’s a total change, but it’s an easier job in so many ways. It’ll be a total refresh of her professional life and will make a perfect glide-path to retirement.
When she was in the job interview, she was asked by the principal why she was applying for the job.
She said to me, “I could’ve replied with some high falutin’ thing about personal growth or something. But I just looked him in the eye and said, “I’ve spent the last 35 years telling year 7’s where to stick their apostrophes. I’m getting a bit over it!” “
Me? Well, I’m hoping that only working 3 days will be enough to refresh how I feel about my working life so that I’ll get back to where I used to be. Coming into work with a song in my heart and a spring in my step and feeling glad to be doing a job I enjoy. I hope that only coming in for 3 days a week will minimise the things that are sucking all the fun out of teaching, but still contain the things that I still love doing… the actual TEACHING part of the job.
Having 4 days a week to do the things I choose to do will hopefully be enough freedom for me to feel that the job is adding more to my life than it’s taking away. After all, every year I’m able to delay retirement is another year for my investments to keep compounding without hindrance. Old Lady Frogdancer will be better off in the long run if Present Frogdancer doesn’t start eating away at that money.
Next year will hopefully be like a breath of fresh air. The freedom to do things at home and the freedom of enjoying my job again. As I said to someone in the staffroom who asked why I was feeling so restless:
“I’m in my mid-50’s. In previous centuries I’d probably be DEAD by now. No wonder I feel like I’m ready for a new life!!”
Some of the things that people put in place for retirement are big projects, such as the landscaping I’ve done around the house and the verandah roof I’m currently organising to have built. These things have cost many thousands of dollars, but will reap huge benefits once I leave work and have the time to enjoy them. But not everything has to be a massive project. Sometimes it’s as simple as rearranging a few paintings and pieces of furniture.
I’ve put the house plan of The Best House In Melbourne up on the blog before, when I wrote about how I geoarbitraged my family into it. When we moved in, I had 2 sons in their 20’s still living with me. Naturally, they chose bedrooms 3 and 4 to live in, as far away from their favourite mother as possible.
Evan22, who was at that stage Evan20, chose to keep living in the old house until it was demolished, a move that we thought would only be about 6 months but ended up being almost 18 months. When he came home there was only one bedroom left – bedroom 2.
It’s not a bad space. It has plenty of storage and an inbuilt desk, perfect for putting a huge tv screen on for playing games. It’s south-facing, so it’s bright enough without being too dazzling for a bedroom. It has ducted gas heating for winter and a fan for summer and the room opens up to my main living area, which in summer is cooled by a massive refrigerative air conditioner, so climate control is a breeze.
This was his room until he left to live in Ballarat, a regional town about 2 hours from here. He’s doing an acting degree at the university there. He uses this room as a base when he’s in Melbourne, but that’s only a few nights here and there.
He’s pretty much not coming home for 2 years and will probably move straight out again once his course is finished, so it’s time to RECLAIM THE ROOM.
This will be my guest room/sewing room, at least until Jordan26 moves out and bedroom 4 on the house plan becomes free for me to use as a study. But this room needs to be functional as a guest room.
In years to come, as Old Lady Frogdancer totters towards old age, she’ll have friends and relatives who’ll sometimes want to stay. There’s nothing better than having dinner and then sitting on the couch till the wee hours, telling stories, drinking wine and laughing. It’s even better if people can stay the night and not have to worry about driving or getting Ubers.
Evan22 had covered the walls with photos and the wardrobe doors with pages from a script he was writing. Imagine hundreds of blobs of Blutack everywhere. I used to walk in, take a look at the photos still up there and the blue spots left on the wall from the photos he took with him, silently scream and hurriedly shut the door behind me.
The photos are now gone. He did it without me even asking. There’s one small spot up near the cornice where the paint pulled away, but he says that the rest of the paintwork is fine. I was so relieved! I was certain that I’d have to paint the whole room.
I bought a double bed for him when he moved back in. He’s barely used it and he wanted to take it with him up to Ballarat. The thought of taking it apart, then transporting the bed and mattress up there, then putting it all back together again while still having to buy a bed to put in my guest room was all too much.
I suggested to Evan22 that I simply buy him a new bed, as I’d have to buy one anyway, and we’d get it delivered to Ballarat. He was rapt and he’s already got me to agree to a Queen-sized bed. (What can I say? He’s my baby… plus he’s over 6′ tall.)
This painting was bought in Bali back in 2006. Works beautifully in here.
When I moved all of that in, I looked at the space and thought… “Hang on! My bright ladies from Bali would look perfect in here!”
So the bed is taken care of. Fortunate Frogdancer strikes again for the doona. When we moved here, I bought a new wool doona for my bed and stupidly bought a Queen sized one. You’d think that would be perfect for a Queen-sized bed but as we all know, you really need a King-sized doona for a queen-sized bed. Idiot! But now, I just moved my doona to the guest room, complete with the beautiful yellow and white striped doona cover, and bought a proper-sized doona for my bed.
When the boys and I went to Bali, way back in 2006, we came back with lots of wood carvings, lots of jewellery and LOTS of art. It cost more to frame each piece than it did to actually buy them, but 13 years later, they’re still adorning the walls of our house. The yellow of the doona cover picks up the yellow in the painting and it looks great.
I’ll just need to look out for a mirror to put on the wall over the desk and then the room will pretty much be complete as a guest room. I know it’s only a little job, but it’s one step closer to having the house ready for retirement.
Retirement Reading Quest – Reading my way to ‘free’ council rates.
I’m on a quest to borrow and read enough books to, in effect, cancel out the cost of my council rates per year.
It’s outlined in this post.
Year 8: 2018/2019 – $1,800
I may as well continue back-tracking. I moved here in 2016, so I’ll chip away at all the rates I paid up till then.
Running Total – $1,465.
Year 7: I’m already a year ahead on my rates, so I’m taking a reader’s suggestion and I’m going to go back and start covering the rates from the year before I started. I may as well.
Year 7: Total needed: 2019/2020…$1,800
Finished! 12/12/2025
Year 6 (2025/2026) $2,590 AREADY COVERED!!!!!!
10/08/2015 – I won’t have another rates notice until August 2026, so I have time to kill. Let’s knock over a previous year’s rates, just for fun.
Year 5 (2024/2025) $2,339 and dog rego ($63) = $2,435.
Finished it before I even had the new rates notice ready.
Year 4 (2023/2024) $2,413.
Success! Not sure exactly when I passed the total, because I was waiting on the dog registrations to come through. But yes – I blitzed it.
Year 3: (2022/2023) $2,350
12/01/2023 FINISHED! Not working gives me heaps more reading time – I recommend it!
