Year 3 of Sorta-Retirement!!

Good news, just repaired our knock-off EZ-up (non-affiliate link; really don’t give a fuck) which we broke on our last camping trip during. Took about 45 minutes, and used some parts I had on hand. Though we’re multi-millionaires (just barely, only if we include the value of our house, and who knows for how long given current market fuckery, lol), I still enjoy repairing shit. Sure, could throw another 100 bucks at Bezos, but A. think he doesn’t need any more money B. I sorta care about the environment or whatever, and buying more crap/throwing away mostly good crap seems like a giant waste and C. I actually do enjoy repairing shit-if there were a way for me to do that everyday I’d be one happy camper.

Oh wait, you probably don’t care about the status of my penny-pinching repairs which channel my hillbilly legacy. Maybe we should do a legitish update? Been a minute. Here goes:

Fuck yeah it’s been three years since I left full time work!!!! Many things have changed in the past year, but the core remains mostly the same. 

Changes:

We moved.

Totally worth the relative amount of FI we sold. 

Lemme explain: Before leaving work, my wife and I had separate individual finances and split family expenses; by myself I was FI with investments alone. My wife was close to FI, but took a healthier approach to money with less saving but less crazy work. At the time, she figured she’d keep working until it wasn’t fun anymore. I also had a fair amount of passive income in the way from the VA in the form of a pension which compensated me for various physical and mental injuries I incurred doing Army shit. Adding this to our combined investments, and assuming a CAPE adjusted SWR, meant we didn’t actually need jobs. 

As I planned to leave work, we realized it’d be stupid for me to incur the taxes from selling investments to cover my half of our expenses, while my wife’s income from her part-time work plus my VA pay could cover our combined expenses. So we finally got around to fully combining our finances. 

My wife=smart. 

Last year, we sold a bunch of investments to buy a new house in Eagleton. With the VA and the remaining investments, we still have enough passive income to not work. But I’d be lying if I said selling a few hundred grand of stocks to buy a similar sized house in a nicer area was not stressful at all. The amount of associated stress was surprisingly less than I thought it’d be. Which is a long way of me saying the move has totally been worth it. This new area is amazing; being able to walk and bike places makes every day so much better. Living in a place where we feel safe, and where we don’t worry about the schools our kids are going to is absolutely worth the money. 

My wife left her job.

Selfishly, this has been incredible for me. I think my wife has liked it too, and so have the kids. She used to get a fair amount of satisfaction out of work, with a little bit of occasional stress. The last year she worked there this ratio flipped, and her part-time workload crept up to full-time bullshit. Having both of us around for school breaks has made them more enjoyable and less hectic than before. That said, it’s been almost a year since she left work, and despite her aggressive volunteering, it seems she’s missing the intellectual stimulation and connection she got from her old job. She’s considering going back to work, but in a position that would be hopefully less stupid. The only constant we (or anyone?) have is change 🙂

Social.

The above two are the easiest to quantify, but this one seems like the biggest. It’s also linked directly to the move. During the first year of retirement, I noticed the lack of social interaction was bringing me down despite me being super introverted. So I went back to part-time work, and proactively scheduled getting coffee/lunch with friends. This meant I was talking to someone that didn’t live with me about once a week, which felt much better. I thought I was good, and everything was fine.

Then we moved here.

On a whim, I joined a men’s group which uses working out together as an excuse to hang out. I had no idea what I was missing. I now see the same guys 3-4 times a week. We get coffee together most weeks, play ultimate frisbee, and do random service projects around our town. Many of these guys are completely different from me in multiple ways, which has been super fun as I learn a lot from their different perspectives. Some dudes are for sure religious AF, but some are not. One guy occasionally tries to convert me, but he does that to everyone, and we all just laugh at him. I can now confidently report that F3 is not a cult. Well maybe a little, but in a fun way.

But that’s not all! The guy who took over our local Choose FI group started organizing monthly lunches last year. Before he came along, our Choose FI group met maybe once or twice a year. It was lame. 

This dude came along, and now there’s so many people involved that he had to split the lunch meetups into multiple groups so they’d stay conducive to good conversation. He and another incredible guy also organize a monthly combined meetup for everyone, which I’ve heard is glorious. I’ve been getting lunch with a group of other guys who are FI for months now. While F3 is great at connecting me with local people to hang out with, there’s still that missing component of finding other FI people to talk money about. This lunch group fills that gap, and I learn stuff every time I see them. All the guys there are smart, and have non-standard ways of looking at things, which seems to be a constant among FI peeps. 

On top of those two components, we now live in a smaller town where the parents are way more active in the local schools. In our old ‘hood the school would beg for volunteers for class parties and field trips, here the interest is so great the school has to draw lotteries to determine who gets to volunteer. Between meeting all the parents and the F3 group, I usually run into someone I know anywhere we go in town. Ten years ago I’d have cringed at such familiarity. Now, oddly, I absolutely love it. 

I still proactively arrange meetups with friends, and work on average of a few hours a week, which has its own inherent social aspect. Social scarcity defined my first year of retirement. Since the move, I’ve now had a few weeks when I’ve gone too far in the other direction and I end up bedridden from overstimulation for a day or so. I consider this a good problem to have, and it’s helped me bracket in my own level of what I need social-wise for good mental health. Even though I occasionally overdo it (which has been a constant throughout my life in every other domain), I am significantly happier with all the additional social stuff, and the corresponding feeling of being part of a community. Again, I had no idea what I was missing. 

School.

I totally understand my wife’s desire for intellectual stimulation and maybe a little structure, because I felt it too. Grad school has for sure rectified that. I’m finishing up my first semester of a MSW program now, and man….if I spent the rest of my life reading things then writing papers about them, I’d be one content motherfucker. Seriously. Full on nerd-alert here.

There are parts about school which are a drag, and it’s occasionally annoying. But it feels good to intellectually struggle for something. From my last grad school experience, I know that eventually I’ll grow tired of academia and want to finish the damn thing already. But I’m trying to enjoy it while I can, and also keep my course load low so I can drag out the good feels as long as possible. I do 3-4 hours of school work on most week days, and take a day off here and there. The program is all online, which is just fine given the fullness of my social reservoir. 

EMDR

Each one of the above could be a post in itself, but as you’ve probably noticed, I don’t write here that often. May have something to do with all the school stuff above. Yeah, so last year before we moved I wasn’t doing bad mental health wise, but I wasn’t getting any better either. And that was after over a year of consistent Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). 

A year before I left the cop job, I went through an intense 3-month program through the VA’s trauma center called Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT). Along with Prolonged Exposure Therapy (PE) and EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing), CPT is one of the primary evidence based modalities which the VA uses to treat PTSD. I went through it with the hopes of laying a foundation for managing all the shit my move back to operational policing would likely dig back up. 

Looking back, I think doing CPT did the opposite by making shit worse as I dug up all the crap from Afghanistan. I had a hard time coming to terms with it at the time, but I think the mental shit storm which occurred during my last year on the job had a lot to do with CPT, and was a major contributing factor to why I bounced from policing. Despite that not great experience, my experience with therapy as whole has been a net positive. The consistent CBT after CPT helped calm shit down, and got me back to my version of okayish. 

So stuff was okay, but like anyone else, I’d like better. It’d be nice not to be a mess on the regular, if not for me, than for my family. I ended up stumbling on this book:

It’s written by a combat vet turned therapist; super relatable for yours truly. One of the main things I got from her was this: It’s totally normal for one of the VA’s Evidence Based Therapies to not work for some people. If that happens, don’t give up, try another one. Keep doing this until one of them does. Everyone is different, and some people benefit more from one type than the other.

Well duh, I should have thought of that. Which is how I found myself in EMDR last year. 

For me, it was waaaaaayyyyyyy better than CPT. This good experience planted the seed for me wanting to embark on my current scholastic journey. 

Just like FI, EMDR didn’t make everything sunshine and fucking roses. And while my symptoms are roughly about the same, it did help with one particular symptom. Back in Afghanistan I watched a few coalitions soldiers’ burn alive after their armored vehicle got hit with an IED. It didn’t really bother me at the moment; I was kinda busy with some other shit as we sped out of the kill zone. But when we finally got back to safety and I had a chance to sleep, I woke up in the middle of my sleep cycle having what I now know to be a panic attack. 

For the first time ever, I felt claustrophobic. This was really weird for me, as before then I actually enjoyed being in tight spaces, like exploring caves or wrenching underneath a car.

After I watched some dudes burning after they’d been trapped in their vehicle flipped something, and from then on I was claustrophobic as fuck. I recall crawling through attics in my gas mask on SWAT callouts, tamping down a panic attack so I could do my job, then being useless as soon as I got off my shift. Worse was when my kids would want to play hide and seek. I’d be hiding under a blanket, freaking the fuck out, and finally having to give up as the panic became overwhelming. 

We worked on this in EMDR, and though tight spaces are not my favorite, I can now play hide and seek with my kids without becoming a giant mess. This may seem like a relatively small gain, but for me, it’s been fucking huge. 

On top of that, while EMDR hasn’t made all the symptoms go away, it has helped me not feel guilty about them. A subtle shift, but feels like a big win.

So…yay therapy! Man, when I sat down to write this post, I didn’t think we’d get that deep there. Guess it has been awhile since I done blogged 😉

Bad stuff:

One of my main goals of writing this blog is to accurately document one version of post-FI life, so people don’t fall for the hype and think it’s all rainbow and unicorns. All the above has been pretty fucking great, next we’ll dial it back a bit with the few things that sorta sucked. Spoiler alert, this past year has been stupid awesome, and the bad has been thankfully minimal.

1. Rich yuppie shit: One of the few bad things about living in a super nice area is the plethora of shiny crap. There are about 1,237 more teslas here than we had in our old ‘hood. I know all about the hedonic adaptation stuff, but this constant exposure has increased my desire to attempt to buy some happiness. Luckily the neighborhood we live in is as chill as you can get in this area, but the school drop-off line is like new EV parade. I find myself using logic way more than I used to so that I can talk myself out of selling my 12 year old prius which works just fine.
2. Money scarcity. With my wife leaving her job, we will maybe finally have to withdraw to cover our living expenses. Given, between my part-time gig and the VA, it’ll put us at like a 1.5% withdraw rate. But if you know anything about me, know that as much as I try to be a logical vulcan, I’m naturally more on the Kirk side of the spectrum. This feeling of money scarcity is way less than I felt when I first left behind my full-time income, so that’s nice. It’s just some minor stupidity which lingers in the background. 

Yeah, that sums up the bad things, which are really not that big of deal and greatly outweighed by all the good. 

The Core:

Remains unchanged. Try to be a good husband, father, and human. Put some good into the world. Think I’m doing pretty okay at that stuff, and much of my reading/listening still revolves around learning about this. The local F3 group does a 30/30 every week I usually go to, where we spend the first 30 minutes working out, and the second 30 having coffee and discussing a topic of self-improvement. Last week I led a discussion on hedonic adaptation, and the three previous ones revolved around ways to be a better father. Better husband is always in the rotation, and sometimes we just pick something silly like a rapping on an instagram influencer’s craziness. While my priorities are the same, having outside input from people trying to head in the same direction has really helped. Kinda like the FIRE world. 

Last year I had the goals of 

1. Being cool with good enough and 

2. Not rushing. 

Maybe I’m getting better at laziness; when it comes to getting things done, my ambition feels more reasonable these days. Same can be said for rushing. If I’m rushing, it’s because I’ve made a scheduling error, or I’ve consciously chosen to do something which I knew would result in said rushing but thought was worth the headache. Either way, I’m getting better at accepting it and moving on. 

Overall, this FI fueled sorta retired life has been splendid. This year was better than the last, which was better than the first year I left my job. And all of them together were better than my last few years working. I’m hopeful that things will continue on this trajectory, but if every year is as good as this one, I’d call that a win. 

Hope you’re all doing well out there 🙂