June 1st, 2024 paycheck

Created:

Closed the M1 Finance account. This increased my short-term assets, and removed all low- and negative-correlation assets. For all intents and purposes, this puts me in the barbell strategy position. However, if you’re familiar with The Universal Portfolio, this is mainly recognizing that we always have short-term assets.

Moving away from Wave will take a bit longer since I’m writing code for that one. On that score, I have the registration, sign-in, sign out, and forgot password her flows in place. Believe it or not, for the most part, that’s the hard part. Money and accounting, at their most basic, are just the same things done over and over.

Welcome to Earth (see Time: Mastering the Mundane page and hold on for Money: Mastering the Mundane).

Learning Reaper has been fun, and still learning. It’s also been frustrating, but that’s just how learning goes. I appreciate that it’s a well executed non-destructive audio workstation. The hard part was figuring out a simple path for organizing, editing, and rendering in a way that will pass Scribl’s requirements, which mainly follow the ACX guidelines. Think I have that sorted. Think I’ve optimized the process to a point where I’m not debating on throwing my laptop out a window.

As with most things when I’m first learning, it was way over-engineering. But, I’ve been learning how to do new things long enough that I know the best way for me to go about it is to accept the first few attempts as false starts, and try again.

Eventually I’ll publish something on the 8fold site, which I’m also dedicating a little time to when I can. My focus is on writing the Mastering the Mundane collection, and it gets the biggest chunk of focused work.

Let’s talk tactics

Section titled Let’s talk tactics

I appreciate the three layer approach of categorizing expenses:

  1. Keep the lights on (or base)
  2. Convenience (or utility)
  3. Extravagances (or conveniences)

The ones in parentheses are from Tiffany Aliche while the others are from Frank Vasquez.

What they both refer to as conveniences and extravagances can be cut out or reduced entirely without you feeling it. Utility specifically are expenses that increase as your use of them increases; the more you drive, the more you pay to refuel or recharge your car. Keep the lights on and base are basic needs and wants, and might be harder to reduce without losing quality of life.

One thing I learned from living in poverty in general and being homeless specifically taught me is the difference between need and want. One thing meditation taught me is to emphasize what I have, not want I want. One thing being a character-focused human taught is the danger of comparison and living by other people’s scripts.

But enough about that…

For the most part, housing, food, and transportation are the highest proportion of your expenses (barring chronic medical conditions).

This is one reason I don’t regret giving up my car in 2012. And, why I told myself if either have a car or rent, but not both.

Within housing, the most expensive utility thing is electricity. A few appliances tend to contribute the most to the electric bill. Heating and air conditioning unit, dishwasher, dryer, oven, stove, and microwave. For the most part, I don’t use ovens, and stopped using the stovetop last year (or the year before). I stopped using dishwashers years ago, and Becca will be joining in on that. I still use a microwave for 6 minutes a day, and will be seeing if I can cut back on that. We’ll also consider increasing temperature in summer and decreasing in winter. That said, our average electric bill is around 100 USD; so, we can’t move that needle much more I don’t think.

The price per pack of cigarettes has gone up again. So, I’ll be cutting back, if not straight up quitting eventually. Beyond dining out, cigarettes are a holdover in the convenience, extravagance, or utility category depending on how you wanna do that.

With that said, compared to food in general, it’s not even close. I break food into three categories: food, dining, and snacks. Getting rid of my car made it less convenient to go to convenience stores; thereby, reducing how much I spent on snacks. That said, I spend almost double on dining out than I do on cigarettes, so, that’s going to be cut back more than I did last year (Becca and I have started going Dutch or splitting a single order); the goal last year was to make during dining was less than just food, which it has been.

That leaves housing. So, we’re planning to cancel the parking space, switch to using the provided internet service provider, and look at potentially moving to a smaller space.

I’m hoping we can replicate or get close to replicating van life level costs, but we’ll see.

Baselines are interesting. Further, they can often be adjusted with the proper motivation and outlook.