Burning Desire For FIRE

Financially Independent, Retired Early(ish) at 57.

Page 62 of 71

The key to success.

March 6, 2019 / / 10 Comments

This morning I got up when my alarm went off at 5:55 AM, let the dogs out and then fed them their breakfast. I fed Scout her chicken neck in the front yard and Poppy and Jeff in the back yard. This started from when Scout was a puppy and was so much smaller than the others and the routine has simply continued from there.

When I let her in and she started trotting down the hallway to get to the doggie door to the backyard, she stopped and looked around at me, her eyebrows raised. She’s been doing this for the last week or so. When I said, “Outside!” she turned and raced up the hallway to the doggie door, tail wagging – the picture of joy.

‘Well, I guess this is a new part of the morning routine,’ I murmured as I went to put the kettle on for coffee.

This got me thinking about how much we humans rely on routines to set up habits – both good and bad – and to get us through the day.

Scout’s new ‘thing’ in the morning is harmless. For some reason unclear to me, her new ‘wait for the instruction and then dash out the door’ is fun. If only all routines were like this!

The best, most productive routines are the ones that you’ve put in place for yourself, knowing that they’re most likely going to get you the results you want.

The routines that work best for me are things like:

  • Taking the dogs for a walk as soon as I get home. If I sit down to check emails, it’s fatal. Once my backside hits the couch, I’m not going to go for a walk. So I try to grab the dog walking bag as soon as I walk in. As soon as they see me with that bag, I have to put the leads on them. Works like a charm!
  • Making my lunch for the next day while dinner is being cooked. Then all I have to do the next morning is grab it as I head out the door. I didn’t do this last night – Ryan23 made pizzas for dinner and I forgot to get him to make me a salad while he was doing the pizza toppings. So today’s lunch is a microwave rice bowl from Aldi. Not nearly as nice as a fresh garden salad, but honestly, it serves me right!
  • Before I go home for the evening, I look at the first 2 classes I’ve got and put whatever materials I may need, in a pile at the end of my desk. In case something happens and I’m running late, I don’t need to get my head around what I’m going to be doing – it’s already organised.
  • As soon as I get paid each fortnight, the first thing I do when I log in is to transfer 1K across to my credit card. This ensures that there’ll be enough to keep running it as a debit card, but I still get points and the lights and water still stay on. Then I decide what to do with what’s left.
  • A glass of wine at 5 o’clock (‘wine o’clock’) as a reward for making it to the end of another day. This may not be the most productive routine, but it’s one of my favourites!

Routines like this are great because they’re aligned with your personal values and there’s an intrinsic motivation to keep to them. I’d love to hear in the comments about any routines that you’ve made yourself stick to.

It’s not quite the same when a routine is imposed upon you.

Work routines are like this. Being a teacher, my work days are defined by bells. Classes start at set times and finish the same way. I know that Mondays and Tuesdays will always begin with my year 7 classes, while the last 2 periods of the week will always be with my year 12 Theatre Studies kids. Unless there’s a fire drill, there’s usually no surprises.

Lunch is at the same time each day, as is recess, whether you’re hungry or not.

It takes a month or so before I know which classes I have on which days and which rooms they’re in. The working week takes on a familiar ebb and flow for all of us. But these routines are dictated to me by the timetabler. She has decided that Wednesday and Thursday are my frantic days, while Monday and Friday are cruisier. Personally, I prefer to start off the week busy busy busy and then ease off as the week goes along. But I have no choice in the matter.

To mix things up a bit, because I’m a wild and crazy rebel, I drove a different way to work this morning. It took 5 minutes longer but I got to nod hello to ‘Maisie’, a beautiful little tree on a nature strip on a busy road that I used to see every morning until I found a more optimised route to school. Tomorrow? Odds are I’ll be back to the usual routine. It’s quicker.

There’s nothing so wonderful as when a bolt of inspiration hits, or you get into the flow of doing an activity and time seems to vanish. Moments like this are golden. But, as William Golding, (above), said; it’s a matter of getting into the habit of hammering out the material. Every day, making sure that you’re doing something to advance you along the way to where you want to be. Stephen King, the novelist, writes about this in his fabulous book On Writing. He writes 2,000 words every day, without fail. He won’t switch off his computer until those words are done… and coincidentally, he’s completed over 65 books.

Remember my chart of productive habits that I started at the beginning of the year? It’s now March and it’s working like a charm. It’s become a habit to mentally tick off the categories as I do them. For example, in today’s first lesson, I used the 10 minutes silent reading/writing to read from an actual book. *details at the end of the post. I can now tick off the ‘write every day’ box. I wiped over the bathroom before I left home this morning, so the cleaning one’s been done too.

It’s now become part of the dogs’ routine to expect a walk when I come home from work. Their delighted expectation makes this one easy to tick off.

The chart is a simple way to make sure that the habits I want to instil in myself are going to be formed.

We all have routines that are placed upon us. But if we have the self-discipline to impose routines that are meaningful and relevant upon ourselves, we’ve immediately optimised our chances of success.

*The book I was reading is called ‘The Gay Galliard’ by Margaret Irwin. It’s about the relationship between Lord Bothwell and Mary Queen of Scots. 

Yes, I know that the title hasn’t passed the test of time well, (it was written in 1944), and it’s very long-winded, but I’ve wanted to read it since I was young. 

It’s a shame that Ms Irwin has the unfortunate gift of turning the Interesting into the Dull-as-Ditchwater…

The daytime people…

March 4, 2019 / / 9 Comments

I chucked a sickie the other day.

It was a Grammar Monday, so the kids would be working from their grammar books, which is easy for another teacher to set up. I had Things To Do that I’d been putting off, so it all seemed right. Plus the meeting that was scheduled to start at 7 PM that night might have had a little to do with it.

Every time I take a day off, the same thing astounds me.

The number of people.

People walking, people shopping, people sitting in cafés as if they have a perfect right to be there.

It’s insane. How can so many people not be working?!? Don’t they realise that everyone should be locked up in an office or a school somewhere, earning a living?

It’s funny how quickly your paradigms change. A couple of decades ago, I was one of these strange people who could roam at will during the daylight hours. I was at home with my four boys and I didn’t start working again until Evan5 was at school. It was perfectly normal to go to the supermarket in the middle of the morning, or visit a friend for coffee and a chat in the afternoon. We’d visit the park on sunny days with never a thought for people stuck inside, working.

Now, after 15 years of being in the classroom?

The paradigm has completely shifted the other way. Now it seems perfectly normal to be unavailable to the outside world from 8 – 4. The Real World is right where I am and any awareness of an alternate way of living is pretty slight.

Sometimes, when I’m teaching upstairs in ‘A’ Block, I’ll stand by the window and see someone casually walking down the street, seemingly without a care in the world. Or I’ll see one of the neighbours serenely working in their garden.

It gives a little jolt to my brain. It’s a reminder that life doesn’t always have to be like this. People can and do live their lives on different rhythms than the traditional 9 – 5 work day.

It’s a reminder that one day I’ll be one of those people.

Blogless Sandy, my best friend, has paved the way a bit for me with the whole retirement thing. She and her husband retired nearly two years ago and it’s interesting to hear about the patterns of their days. They’ve chosen to delay any travelling while they still have their old dog with them, so their days are very much ‘in place’ with nothing tying then down except the things they’ve chosen themselves to include.

I had no idea there was so much on offer for people to do when they “should” be at work. It’s almost outrageous! Blogless Sandy gallivants around doing bushwalking, yoga, picking up litter on their beach, walking dogs in shelters, while her husband has picked up some art classes. They have a couple of grandchildren and they look after them a couple of days a week while their daughter picks up teaching work.

They’re on the peninsula, so they regularly choose a winery and they go and enjoy a leisurely lunch. Because they are there in the middle of the week, they have conversations with staff who, on the weekends, either aren’t rostered on or who are too busy with the massive influx of Melbournians who make the drive down to enjoy their limited weekend fun time.

A few months ago they were lunching at Montalto, where the restaurant uses produce from a large kitchen garden.

After lunch, there was no pressing need to go home straight away. Their time is their own. They went for a walk around the kitchen garden and struck up a conversation with one of the gardeners. They were looking at all of the heirloom vegetables that were growing and talking of all things gardening. At the end of the day, they went home with some heirloom bean seeds from the garden that the gardener gave them. Without the leisurely time and space that they had, that encounter would never have happened.

I’m writing this on a Sunday. It’s nearly 9:45 AM. It’s a glorious sparkling summer’s day. In a second I’ll pop the dogs’ leads on and we’ll go for a gallop. This time tomorrow, I’ll be telling the kids to start putting their grammar books away because the bell is about to go. When it goes, all 28 kids and myself will leave the room and go on to our next class.

The weather will still be the same. The dogs and their leashes will still be here. But I’ll be 27kms away, writing a Dad joke* on the board and telling a new batch of 28 kids that it’s ‘Grammar Monday – open your books to the next unit.”

*sigh*

How strange to think that one day soon(ish), if I keep doing the things I’ve set in place, I’ll be able to do whatever I want on a Monday. How strange to think that I’ll be able to stride around in the daylight hours with confidence and surety, instead of scuttling to the doctors pretending to be sick, just to get a medical certificate for work. Stranger still to think that one day, it will all seem perfectly normal, and that my memories of the classroom will slowly fade.

The world outside work, in the daylight hours, is one that we workers tend not to think about a lot. But it’s there. It’s teeming with life, with sunlight and opportunities.

Every now and then, maybe it’s good to chuck a sickie just to be reminded.

*The Dad joke for tomorrow is: I’ve been reading a horror novel in braille. Something bad is going to happen – I can feel it!

Create – don’t simply consume.

March 1, 2019 / / 15 Comments

When I was 7 my Gran taught me how to knit. I still remember the wool she used. It was bright red. Gran’s hands moved effortlessly as she showed me what to do, while mine wrestled incompetently with the wool and the needles. We were in the dining nook, she was to the left of me, while Mum was in the kitchen, where she could keep an eye on what was going on without being in the way.

My brother and sister weren’t interested in learning, but for some reason it stuck with me and I’ve been knitting ever since. 

Years later, long after Gran died, Mum and I were talking about her, and Mum said something that I’ve never forgotten.

“Mum said to me, when I left work to have you, that I needed to learn a skill,” she said. “Something that I could point to at the end of the day and say, ‘That’s how I spent some time today’. Something that will LAST. When you’re a young Mum at home with kids, so much of your time is spent on work that will need to be done again tomorrow, and the next day, and the next. It’s disheartening. You need something you can hold in your hand and know that it’s not going to go away any time soon. You need something for YOU.”

Gran’s ‘tangible thing’ was knitting. Mum’s was sewing. Many’s the time I’d hear her swearing at the sewing machine when I was a kid. She made our clothes, but she also made aprons and other things for sale. She sewed the curtains for our family room and dabbled with embroidery as well. 

These women from the past were motivated in part by frugality – back then it was cheaper to handmade clothes, not like today! – but they were also satisfying that innate human urge to create.

Maybe this is why so many people in the FIRE movement are drawn to blogging? Many jobs are essentially the same as being at home with children. Every day the kids need feeding. You can’t cook the perfect meal and say, “Nailed it! I never have to do this again! Behold my perfect meal!” 

Or you vacuum and dust the lounge room and it looks terrific. “Hooray! I never have to clean this room again!” said no-one ever. It always has to be done again.

It’s the same with our jobs. We pitch the perfect proposal/write the most wonderful report/teach an amazing lesson and we feel great… but it all has to be done again tomorrow. And the next day. And the next day. There are few jobs, particularly in office environments, where the work you do today is still around years from now.

No wonder people get burned out.

So much of the advice about retiring early revolves around the money, but there’s also that recurring advice of “You already know what you’re retiring FROM. Work out what you’re retiring TO.”

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that many early retirees find that they’re drawn to work that they do with their hands. Creativity is deep within the human psyche and making something appear that would never have been there without you is deeply satisfying. Once people free up the hours each day that were once spent commuting and working, it’s not surprising that many are drawn to scratching that creative itch that was left neglected for so long.

So here’s the crazy idea – what if you built in some time before you leave work to develop these skills you’re drawn to?

Surely it’s got to make the time we spend between finding out about FIRE and finally being able to pull the pin on the job a little more pleasant. Learning how to work with your hands, or practising a skill like songwriting or sketching doesn’t have a time limit on it. It won’t matter if you take a year of weekend/after work time to master a basic skill, or 2 years or 10. Who cares? You’re doing it for YOU. There’s no ‘Skillz Boss’ looking over your shoulder.

I’m guessing most people would already know what they’d spend creative time doing, but some people may not. Sometimes it takes thinking outside the box a little.

For example – what if you really love cooking? Each meal or dessert you make gets eaten and enjoyed, but you might feel there’s nothing tangible left for YOU. What about putting a book of ‘Family Favourite’ recipes together? Or maybe a collection of ‘Incredible Dessert’ recipes or ‘Excellent Meals to bring to Pot-Lucks’ to give to your friends? That’s creative.

What if you enjoy playing an instrument, but you have zero interest in songwriting? I live with musicians and I know for a fact that it’s never been easier to record yourself and create a video or (if you want to delight your Mum) make a CD of you playing your favourite songs. You don’t have to write your own songs to be able to create beautiful music that makes people feel good.

Me? Obviously, I have my blogs, but I also knit small, deliciously soft cowls and hats for people, made from skeins of Peruvian alpaca wool hand-dyed by virgins in large kettles over open fires. (If you believe the advertising.) I have a queen-sized quilt on the go for Tom27. The squares are 2.5 inches each, so he’ll probably be known as Tom58 by the time he gets it. I write the (very) occasional poem. I garden.

It’s too easy to get lost in spreadsheets and projections with hideous Maths and numerals when we’re racing towards FI/RE. Every one of us needs to nurture that little creative spark within us, so that when we reach FIRE and we can choose to spend our time in whichever ways we want – we actually have a few clear desires to follow.

No one wants to be that persnickety guy in socks and sandals worried about those pesky kids coming onto his lawn. If we’re putting in all this work to reach our personal freedom, let’s be running TOWARDS something that will give us joy. Life’s too short to die wondering.

Let’s find out what we enjoy and get going on actually enjoying it. Could be fun…

How much financial help should we give our kids?

February 27, 2019 / / 10 Comments

Kids.

A lot of us have them and in general, we tend to be reasonably fond of them. We take pains over what we name them, we feed and clothe them at regular intervals and we ensure that they come out of school being literate and (at least a little) numerate. We tell them Dad jokes, we pay for music lessons and we cuddle them when life gets hard.

In short – we look up after a few years and realise that we’ve actually made our most favourite humans. At least, that’s what’s happened in my case and I’m guessing I’m not alone.

A huge proportion of FIRE bloggers are young parents. They have babies or primary-aged kids, with a lot of bloggers’ children still being ‘a twinkle in their father’s eye’ as the old saying goes. I’ve gone through that stage and I’m now out at the other side with my boys aged in their twenties. We all made it through alive, but when the boys reached secondary school I had to make up my mind about how much I’d help the boys financially once they were older.

When children are small, as in pre-puberty, they cost as much or as little as their parents decide. The parents have full control. It’s a beautiful thing.

In my case, I said to the boys when they were in primary, (and secondary school, come to think of it), that they could have ONE after school activity each. Swimming lessons were non-negotiable – in Australia everyone needs to know how to swim so I took care of that when they were toddlers, before ‘after school’ activities were a thing. In other words, I staggered the outgoings. It wasn’t their fault that we were a one-income family and I didn’t want them to miss out completely on things that their friends were doing, but I wasn’t going to pour thousands of dollars into classes just to keep them busy. Our financial survival was at stake.

David was easy. When he was David3, he asked if he could learn how to play the piano. I couldn’t afford lessons at the time, but when he asked me 2 years later I took notice. For David, two requests two years apart is tantamount to nagging. He started learning piano when he was around 6 years old and is now in his last year of his Music degree.

Tom tried football, cricket and then decided on guitar. He writes songs now and plays for a football team on the weekends. Ryan started with piano, then after a year switched to guitar and continued with it right up to year 12. Evan follows the beat of his own drum and didn’t end up taking any formal classes. He decided to teach himself musical instruments, write scripts and make videos and is currently doing an Acting degree.

Limiting their after-school activities hasn’t seemed to hurt them at all.

Keeping the costs to a reasonable level when they were at school meant that when opportunities for things like travel came up, I was able to take them to places like Bali, Thailand and Singapore – or send them to places on school excursions like Central Australia, Tasmania and the USA. I’ll never forget the elation in Tom16’s voice when I picked up my phone to hear him say, “Mum… I’m on the top of Ayres Rock!!”

(Nowadays everyone calls it Uluru and we don’t climb it anymore as it’s a sacred site, but things were different a decade ago.)

But what was the tough decision I was talking about?

It was about whether or not to help the boys pay for University.

As my boys were heading into secondary school and going through the ranks, I started to think. Tertiary fees aren’t as expensive as in America, but they’re still pretty exxy, especially for the more creative-type courses I could see most of my boys ending up in.

My dilemma was a simple one. I only have one wage coming in and I have no-one to provide for my old age except for me. Do I help them pay for Uni or not? There’s a finite amount of money that will be coming in. Where would it be best deployed?

When I was wrestling with this decision the older kids were in high school, with the younger two hot on their heels. I’d paid off the house a year or so before, back in 2013, and I was staring down the barrel of what looked like it might be an indigent old age. I’d neglected my retirement savings to pour all of my money into paying off the house, which was a deliberate move. Mathematically, it wasn’t the best thing to do, but I valued our security over my retirement. Once the house was paid for and our security was assured, Old Lady Frogdancer suddenly became a lot more real to me…

So I had to think: Which would be the best long-term prospect for the boys?

  1. For me to pay for their degrees, but then later down the track, just when they’ve presumably got young families to provide for, to possibly have to ask them for financial help?
  2. Or for them to pay for their own education, while I save like crazy so as not to be a burden on them?

When you lay it out like this, there’s really only one way I could go. My situation, with no one else able to prepare for my retirement other than me, meant that the money could only go so far.

So, the financial help I decided to give my kids is as follows:

  • I raised you and supported you all the way through secondary school. My job here is done.
  • I want you to go on to further education, so if you’re a student, you can live with me for free and pay no board. However, you’re responsible for paying for any books and other materials. You’re an adult now.
  • If you live with me and you aren’t a student – you pay board. Even though I love you more than vegemite on toast, I’m not cut out in the shape of a doormat.
  • If you choose to move out, then you’re on your own. You’re definitely an adult!
  • The ‘Bank of Mum’ is there if you need to buy a car/fix a car/ pay some tuition not available with HELP loans from the government. It’s interest-free BUT MUST BE PAID BACK PROMPTLY. Any defaults – the Bank of Mum is closed to you forevermore.

I’m hoping that these rules allow enough of a cushion to fall back on, without weakening them and keeping them as ‘kidults’ indefinitely. Currently, I have the middle two sons living at home with me as students. Tom 27 has been out of home and fully independent for around 3 years now and works full-time as an accountant, while Evan22 is studying at a country campus.

I’d love it if the boys could come out of Uni with no debt dragging behind them. That was the way university worked when I was young, when courses were fully paid for by the government. But sadly, life in the real world isn’t like this any more. In order to do the best for us all, I have to take the long-term view.

My worst fear is to be a financial burden on my boys when I’m old. By putting a priority on my retirement, rather than their university courses, I hope that I’ll be giving them the gift of never having to worry about their mother’s financial stability.

I think that’s probably one of the greatest gifts I can give them. I already gave them LIFE. This will be the next best thing…

The FIRE Quilt.

February 25, 2019 / / 6 Comments

It’s funny how the things you see every day, without really noticing them anymore, can suddenly hit you in a different way.(

This quilt lives on my bed during summer. I made it at least ten years ago, back in the days before my side-hustle of selling thermomixes stopped me quilting. 

Being slightly frugal by nature, I liked the idea of using scraps that most people would throw away to make a useable-sized quilt, so as I made other quilts, I’d save the tiny scraps. Every now and then I’d have an afternoon where I’d sew these scraps together into squares. Each square is 5″. (I know it’s weird to talk in inches, but that’s what quilting deals with, probably because so many Americans do it, those wild and crazy people!)

Some of these scraps are only 1/4” wide. I liked the idea of randomly coming across a sliver of material and making it part of the larger whole. Most strips are wider, but few are wider than 1”. I wanted to use the scrips and scraps and create a riot of colour. 

This quilt was definitely a long-term project. It took me 9 months to complete. Yes, it was the baby I made when I didn’t want to make a fifth actual baby!!

I didn’t buy any extra fabric for this one; I just used what I had. This means that there are recurring fabrics throughout, but no square is the same as any other.

The funny thing is that you could point to any strip in this quilt and I’d be able to tell you where it came from. The doll quilts I made and sold on Etsy to try and earn some money when I was stuck at home with the kids. The quilts I made for the boys with a sewing machine I borrowed from Blogless Sandy, because I couldn’t afford to buy one for myself. The quilts I made for friends and for my family. The quilts I made for David25’s friends who supported him when he was a teenager and dealing with debilitating depression. They’re all there and I remember them.

It occurred to me this morning that our collective hike towards FI/RE is put together a little like this scrappy quilt. 

We begin with the big picture in mind. A life free of any commitments that we don’t want to do. A life where we can build our days as we please. 

But there are So Many Days between when we find out about FI and when we reach it. 

On its own, each day seems insignificant. Just a scrap of time, neither here nor there. We move through our days, sometimes almost sleepwalking through them as the day-to-day routines swamp us. We realise this is happening only when the end of the month comes as a shock – “Where did February go?!?” – or “OMG!! Christmas is nearly here! How did that happen?”

And yet, every day is a strip of time that’s building a bigger whole.

I have to admit, I get impatient when I think about retirement. I like my job but it seems that my days of freedom are so far away. My job and the commute become irritants which are standing in my way of living how I want to live. A little bit of this thinking is good, because it keeps you moving towards your goal. Too much of it, though, isn’t good. It sucks the fun out of life.

I think that the whole concept of FIRE appeals to long-term thinkers. We’re really good at focussing on the far-away goal and moving towards it. This is a terrific trait, but we run the risk of letting it ruin the very thing we’re striving for – improving our quality of life.

Certain sacrifices need to be made in order to reach the over-riding, lofty goal. But just like the quilt, the goal won’t be reached without every strip of time being included in it. What a waste if all we do is focus on the future!

No one on Earth has a quilt that is the same as this one. 

Do I need to make the obvious comment about our lives?

Make each strip count. Do something every day – no matter how small – to bring a smile to your face. We all have a ‘FIRE Quilt’ – it’s just that mine is lying on my bed and yours is your life. On the way to bringing your ‘quilt’ together, take the time to let those colours sing.

****** For those who’d like an update on how Scout is doing after her brush with death, I wrote about her on my other blog.

Here she is, looking sleepy, but alive.

Mindfulness

February 22, 2019 / / 9 Comments

This year our school is rolling out weekly Mindfulness sessions throughout the whole school. Every Monday morning after we mark the roll, there’ll be the sound of a Tibetan bell and all the kids will be guided for a 10-minute Mindfulness/meditation session by their teachers. We start next week and I’ll be guiding my little year 7s through it. They’re going to love it.

The school has had mindfulness classes for a couple of years now, but these were optional classes at lunchtime. Now, after more data has been collected, particularly by Monash University, everyone is going to get the benefit.

Blogless Liz, the woman I sit next to in the staffroom, has been a huge fan of meditation and mindfulness for years. She’s talked a bit about it but I’ve never actually done a session like this until we started the teacher training when term started a few weeks ago.

Basically, it’s a little like meditation but with no mantras. You sit or stand quietly, noticing sounds, smells, your breathing, the way your feet feel on the floor etc. Any time your thoughts start to wander, when you realise it you bring your attention back to the ‘here and now’. It’s incredibly grounding and refreshing.

When we finished the first session, Blogless Liz asked me what I thought.

“I’ve been doing this for the last 15 years – I just didn’t know it had a name!” I said. ” I’ve been calling it ‘Noticing the little things,‘ “

This was brought to my mind today when I was listening to a podcast, where the Mad FIentist was interviewing Grant Sabatier about his new book. Towards the end of the podcast, they talk about the first times they were ‘in the moment’, truly contented and enjoying what was around them, instead of constantly thinking and hustling and striving or the next goal.

Mindfulness.

The choice to focus inward, with no judgement, to centre yourself and focus on what IS, not what you’re working towards and planning towards. This is a novel experience for FIRE people – we’re always looking to optimise habits, earning capacity and spending to get to where we want to be as fast as possible.

For anyone who’s interested, Monash University is running a free online course, starting at the end of April. I’ve signed up to it, along with everyone else in The Danger Zone (our section of the staffroom.) Monash Uni has made mindfulness a core part of most of their undergraduate programmes, particularly the high-stress ones like Medicine and Law.

Here’s the link. Enjoy! Anything that lowers stress and makes people feel good without doing stupid or illegal things is a Good Thing in my book!

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Please keep your fingers crossed for Scout.

February 21, 2019 / / 13 Comments

As I write this, Scout is undergoing emergency surgery for a suspected intestinal obstruction. She is a very, very sick little dog.

She looked a little off colour when I came home from work on Tuesday. (It’s Thursday now.) David25 said that she wasn’t really herself. Every now and then she’d cry out, but she’s done that before and it’s always been fine. She didn’t eat her dinner though, which isn’t like her.

I went to work the next day after she got up and ate breakfast. I gave her dry food, not a chicken neck, as I was worried that maybe the chicken neck was the problem. Ryan24 was going to be home all day so I knew she’d be under observation, but just as a precaution I rang the vet and booked an appointment for later that day. I figured that if Scout was better when I got back, I’d take Jeff for his vaccinations. He was due for them anyway.

When I walked through the door, Scout came out and jumped on the couch, wagging her tail. She still seemed a little flat, but she was definitely chirpier than when I left that morning.

I decided to give here a test and threw her favourite ball down the hallway. She ran after it, and even though Poppy got to it first, which is rare, Scout looked so much better that I thought she was on the mend from whatever ailed her, so I took Jeff to the vet instead.

Wrong decision.

When I left for the vet with Poppy and Jeff, we could hear Scout barking indignantly from my bedroom where I’d locked her in. By the time we came back she was flatter. She didn’t eat dinner.

The dogs sleep in my room, which turned out to be a good thing when she threw up twice in the middle of the night. It was clear that her stomach hadn’t absorbed anything for at least a day and a half. She lay in her bed, moaning softly.

I was at the vet practically banging on the door at 8AM.

When the vet rang me at 2PM, he said that she wasn’t in a good way. They were so concerned about her that they’d rushed her bloodwork by courier to be tested. The results weren’t great. They’d given her a barium drink, and even after 2 hours the xrays showed only the barest trace had escaped from her stomach. There was clearly something in the way.

I okayed the surgery over the phone, but he insisted that I come in to discuss it. After I got over the phone I said to the boys, “I get the feeling he’s giving us the chance to say goodbye, just in case.” So all 3 of us went down.

I’ve never seen a dog look so sick, and I’ve owned a lot of dogs and been in quite a few vet surgeries in my time. She’s such a little scrap of a thing and dehydration hits little dogs (and humans) hard. She barely reacted to us being there, which we assumed was due to her being sedated, but the vet said that she had only had mild pain relief. This wasn’t sedation. This was how she was.

She looked as if she had retreated into herself.

The vet said it would be three hours until he could ring us. As luck would have it, yesterday was the only day I’ve ever left my phone at work, so he’s communicating with us through Ryan24’s phone. I can’t talk directly to my friends, only through Messenger, so I guess that’s why I’m writing this to you. I have to communicate somehow. Besides, she’s been in so many photos here, and featured in a few posts.

It’s funny though, how even in the midst of intense worry, life has its own weird sense of humour.

About an hour after her operation started, I said to Ryan24, “I just don’t want your phone to ring until about 5:30. That’ll mean she’s made it through the operation.”

I then thought to myself, ‘I shouldn’t have said that. It’s tempting fate.’

Then, not one minute later, his phone rang.

We looked at each other and my eyes filled. Neither one of us wanted to pick up. Finally, I did.

It was a damned salesman trying to sell Ryan24 – a student without a house of his own – some subsidised solar panels. We had to smile, but it was from utter relief.

Never Tempt Fate. Fate doesn’t have a very good sense of comedic timing.

Anyway, I’ll press ‘publish’ on this. I should be hearing from the vet within this next hour. Please keep our little girl in your thoughts – she needs all the goodness she can get.

Thanks.

FRIDAY MORNING: I just talked with the vet. He went in to check on her at 10PM last night and said that she was lethargic but stable. This morning when I rang he sad that she’s turned the corner. She’s wagging her tal, they’ve taken the drip off her – I was so pleased about this one because it proves she’s feeling better – and they’ll be test-feeding her today to see if she can keep food down.

If she continues o do well, she might be coming home tonight.

If I wasn’t typing this in front of a class I’m subbing, I’d be dancing for joy.

Why I never had to bother with other people’s expectations.

February 20, 2019 / / 11 Comments

Lifestyle creep. When you start earning more money and everyone expects you to reward yourself. You buy a bigger house, new/er cars, better clothes. You become spendier. People see you advancing along in your career and they expect to see outward signs of this. They expect you to have a more lavish lifestyle.

But do you know the HUGE advantage I’ve had throughout these 21 years?

Nobody expects a single mother of 4 boys to be able to spend money on lifestyle creep. No one even expects her to have it. Nobody!

Everyone knows how expensive kids are, especially as they move into high school and start living with their heads inside the fridge, eating everything in sight. They grow like weeds, while you can almost see their feet get bigger. They have school fees, school books and school excursions. They have outside interests that need to be paid for.

They probably also need braces. For those who don’t know, braces are hellishly expensive. I had 3 boys who needed them. Fortunately, their father paid for Ryan14’s braces, but I had to come up with the goods for the other two sets.

So here was I, with these 4 boys standing around growing ever taller and looking expensive. With straight teeth, though. That’s got to mean something…

If I needed some new clothes for my family, no one raised an eyebrow if I’d shop at the op shops first. If anyone had clothes to give away, we’d happily accept them. I’d grow my own veggies and people nodded.

Travel is also important to me. If a person has no international travel under their belt, their view on life is limited to the place that they grew up in. I wanted my boys to see outside the bubble of comfortable middle-class suburbia in a first-world nation. Documentaries on TV are great, but they’re no substitute for seeing things for yourself. So I took the boys to Bali, Thailand and Singapore, and paid for 2 of them to go on a school music tour to the USA. They went to the US with some of their uniform and schoolbooks being second-hand, but they still got to go. 

(On re-reading this before publication, I realise that I’m inferring that the USA is a third-world nation!! It made me laugh, so I’ve left it in. Though, now that I think about it, the boys were a bit shocked at the level of decay in the infrastructure of Hollywood/L.A… just saying…)

After school interests? With 4 kids to look after, I told the boys that each child could only have ONE class/sport/lesson each. Just one. While every other kid in the neighbourhood was racing off to something after every school day, my boys, after a bit of trying out of various things, elected to do music lessons.

Tom and Ryan did guitar for years, while David learned piano and is now getting his Bachelor’s degree in music. Evan didn’t end up doing anything at all – he was content to chill and do his own thing. Did any of the other Mums at school raise their eyebrows and make ‘tsk tsk’ noises and insinuate that my boys were being deprived? No.

I had the ‘Single  Mother/Single Wage’ card. I could fly under the radar. I have never had to cope with battling the expectations of anyone else.

And it was wonderful.

It left me free to be the ‘Valuist’ spender that I was born to be.

It’s left me free to organise my finances the way that I – and only I – want to. I like nice clothes as much as the next woman, but our security was more important. That little weatherboard house had to be paid for. And it was. One cheap shopping trip to Aldi for all of those groceries at a time, while wearing the same clothes for years.

My big trip to the Uk and Europe that I’d waited my whole life to do? Once the house was paid for and the boys had all finished high school, I quietly saved up the money and went.

I’m happy to keep wearing the same jewellery and drive the same car while I put improvements in place in The Best House in Melbourne so that I can retire with the infrastructure that I want around me.

Lots of little expenses, like daily coffees from 7/11, or doughnut runs to AJs are things I’ve never done. The peer pressure has never happened, though I’ve seen it put to work all around me. Everyone else is fair game for Lifestyle Creep to be expected of them, but “poor Frogdancer Jones can’t afford it with all those boys…”

I guess being a single parent has to have some advantages.

Heh heh.

Geoarbitrage: all the cool kids are doing it #4.

February 18, 2019 / / 6 Comments

Late last year I wrote a post on how I sold my house, with fully-approved plans to build 2 massive townhouses on it, to a developer. I was going to do the build myself, but when I was offered a crazy sum of money to sell the house ‘as is’, I decided that a bird in the hand was worth two in the bush, so I sold it.

Last November it was passed in at auction. In the time between me selling and them building, the wildly expensive property market in Melbourne had begun to soften. They had a reserve of 1.6M for the right-hand townhouse, but at the auction they didn’t even get one bid. Standing with my old neighbours watching this unfold, I felt bad for the developers. They’ve done a beautiful job on the build. I was also incredibly thankful that I’d made the decision to sell when I did.

Since then they’ve reduced the price twice and last Saturday it went up for auction again. I was planning to drive down to see it, hoping that this time the developers would get lucky. It’s all too easy to put myself in the situation and imagine how I’d be feeling.

I was paying bridging finance for The Best House in Melbourne at 72% of my take-home pay for 8 months, then when I dropped my gig as a thermomix consultant and went back to full-time teaching it was “only” 55% for a further 8 months or so. Imagine if I was still paying that today? I would be beside myself with worry if it didn’t sell.

The reserve price at the last auction was 1.6M. On the actual ‘For Sale’ on the website, it now suggests a range of between 1.4M – 1.480M. I was interested to see where the sellers’ heads were really at. The lowest suggested price on a real estate board is rarely what the sellers will accept!

But, just as I was planning to get ready to leave, I thought I’d check the website to make sure I had the auction time correct. This is what I saw:

There was no sticker on the board at the front of the property yesterday morning, but when I rang Tom27 he said that he drove past in the late afternoon and saw them putting the ‘Sold’ sticker on it then. You’d think he’d tell his mother straight away, but I guess not…

I sent a text to the real estate agent, asking what they got for it…

… then I waited. Saturdays are a busy time for real estate agents.

The suspense was killing me…


… and then he rang.

The townhouse went for 1.45Million, with the buyer paying an extra 47K for modifications to be done to the house by the builder. Imagine having the money to pay an EXTRA 47K to pay for ‘improvements’ after you just spent just under one and a half million dollars…?

I’m so glad for the builder that he finally managed to sell this property, but the scary thing is that he had a reserve amount of 1.6M back in November and had to drop 155K off his projected profit to be free of it. That’s a substantial amount of money.

Still, no doubt he still made a profit. I’m also VERY glad I took the money and ran when I did. Part of financial success is hard work, attention to detail, making a plan and sticking to it for a long time. And part of it is timing.

Clearly, I’ve benefitted from both. May we all be as fortunate!

“We both spend money – just on different things.”

February 15, 2019 / / 6 Comments

I was talking with a friend a couple of years ago. I’ve known her all my life and we chat nearly every week. Our kids have grown up together and it’s safe to say we’re close.

Our lives have worked out very differently. She’s still on her first marriage of nearly 30 years, whereas I’ve been single for most of that time. I live in suburbia, while she lives in the country. Our spending habits are very different too.

She was over at my place, staying for a few days over the summer holidays and she mentioned that maybe we could go out and grab a coffee one day. This is something that she does every day of her life, always with friends or family.

I don’t. Not because I don’t have friends or family, but because I don’t like doing it as a part of my regular routine.

I have my 16c cup of coffee in the morning before I leave home and usually that’s about it. I spend recess and lunchtimes with my friends at work in the staffroom or common room. Going to cafés to spend heaps on a coffee and a cake just isn’t my thing. It’s probably because I’m lazy at heart, but I’d rather loll around at home than dress up to go out and drink the very same things that I have in my kitchen.

I can’t remember exactly what I said in reply to Sharon, but it was clearly unenthusiastic. She curled her lip at me and said, “What’s wrong? Don’t you like the taste of coffee?”

“Of course, I do,” I said. “But we have a coffee machine right here.”

She rolled her eyes. “My God Frogdancer, you never spend money on anything! Don’t you want to live a little? Get out and do things?”

I laughed. I couldn’t help it. I pointed to Scout.

“Sharon, you DO realise you’re talking to the person who paid two thousand dollars for a puppy last year? And spent around thirty thousand for the Europe trip? I’m going to be spending over 50 thousand on landscaping soon. How can you say I don’t spend anything?”

“Yeah ok, but you never buy new shoes or clothes and you’ve had your car for 5 years…”

I interrupted. “Sharon, I spend money on myself every single month.”

“On what?” she asked, looking around. I think she was hoping to see shopping bags piled up in a corner somewhere.

“The only difference between us is that you buy things people can see. You buy things – I buy time. I don’t give a (bleep) about fashion; what I care about is setting myself up so I don’t need to go to work if I don’t want to. I’m buying back years of my life. “

“What do you mean? How can you buy time?”

“Every month I put money in shares, I salary sacrifice to the max into super and I put any extra into my share portfolio. If everything goes as it should, in 5 years or so I’ll be able to choose whether I want to work or not.”

She sighed. “Yeah, that’s fine for you. I’ll be working until I die…”

I thought she was probably right, but it wasn’t the sort of conversation I wanted to have with her just then. I decided to say something that would make the point and end the topic without actually pointing the finger at her.

” We both spend money on ourselves; it’s just on different things.”

So we took our dogs for a walk instead.

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