Well, hello there dear reader.
It’s been a little while. A little over a month to be exact.
This has been my first break from blogging since I started and I’ll be honest, it has been nice. Much more relaxed and recharging than I had anticipated.
I did miss the writing in the beginning, it felt really weird skipping that first Sunday, like a piece of my life had been tossed away and gone missing. Almost like I had let down all my readers – both new and those few that have been with me since the beginning.
But then you remember who you write for… yourself (or at least that’s what we tell ourselves when we look into the morning mirror and want to feel good enough).
And you get over it.
Move on. Turn the page. Begin anew.
Also, taking a step back from the blogging community (my miniscule hidden corner of it shared among the happily unknowns) wasn’t easy either, you crave that instant feedback, the comradery and commenting on all my favorite blogs. These digital online characters have become a central part of your life, whether we like to admit it or not as online personas. Although whether real or imaginary, is a debate for another day. Haha.
However, as each week pressed on, the more comfortable and settled in I became.
It seems weird to type this… but it’s felt really good not writing.
No deadlines. No commitments. No looming self-imposed anxious stressors that just really don’t matter in the grand scheme of things.
Yet, that’s how I thrive. How I push myself. Always balancing on the edge of a knife point like the world is ending. I guess that’s just the addict in me incessantly screaming to break out of its cage of flesh and bone.
Life is short. Gotta pack it all in, right? Or not.
Haha. Negotiate the balance.
Negotiate the balance… *(whispered)*
Because life is dynamic, not static. Active, not passive. The tilting of the scales will always be an ongoing struggle.
There will always be tradeoffs.
So, let’s negotiate together.
It will be interesting to see how the spool of threads for 2022 unravel, each string a single day and each loop a new attempt at abandoning structure and slowing down.
Haha. Alright, so let’s have at it!
2021 reviewed.
Q-FI style…
2021 Goals – Progress Update
I gotta say, the missus and I slew our fucking 2021 goals like slamming the Malice (that’s a Vagrant reference to those in the know) into some medieval dragon’s bursting skull.
Here was the list from the end of 2020 and my status in parentheses underneath each.
- Complete foster approval and get a baby!
Killed it. October 29, 2021 we had our first placement – a 10-day old baby girl (she is still in our care as of this posting) arrived on our doorstep at 9:30pm on a Friday night from LA County DCFS like stork style out of some cartoon. You sign some papers and then it was game on. It was a trip to say the least.
Related Reading:
- Purchase that new home – plan out furnishing and any necessary remodeling.
Closed on our first property 3/12/21. Have it mostly furnished but are delaying some purchases because we know little ones are about to tear things up. Already learned there is no stopping baby slobber and spit ups no matter how hard you try. Haha. The remodeling will have to wait as well. I’m thinking of maybe making some large improvements down the road in the 2023-2025 timeframe. (Don’t hold me to it though, life is roller coaster) Nothing is necessary, but more cosmetic and additional wants if it fits into the big picture.
Related Reading (If you couldn’t tell, this was a big topic for me in 2021):
Adventures in House Buying – COVID Style
How Old Were You When You Bought Your First House
We are First Time Homebuyers – Part I – The Reasons
We are First Time Homebuyers – Part II – The Process
We are First Time Homebuyers – Part III – The Move-in
To Kill or not to Kill the Mortgage
- Have Mrs. Q-FI leave her job and toxic work environment to become a stay-at-home mom in Q1 or beginning of Q2.
Mrs. Q-FI left her job in April 2021 and has been a stay-at-home foster parent ever since. On a FIRE life-style-design blog she would be considered fully-retired ignoring any spousal support. Just saying. So you can say she beat me to retirement if you want. Ha!
I’ll comment here that losing that extra salary is no joke. We made our decision and sacrifice, and it has been an adjustment to switch to a single income household for the sake of raising kids ourselves. This was a personal choice, but the decision was still a challenge for me. Although I’m the breadwinner in the family, losing that extra salary/cashflow does hurt. Plus, the additional costs of adding her to my benefits, etc. But planning and saving ahead of time, made it doable.
Related Reading:
- Continue saving/investing (max out Roths and 401Ks, contribute to after tax brokerage).
Yep, checkmate on this one too. I’m not going to list this as a goal anymore because it’s pretty automatic. Plus, it almost sounds like narcissistic bragging. Which, when I think about it, I guess it is. But you all already know I’m a shameless pre-Madonna ego-tyrant, so who gives a fuck? Hahahaha.
2022 Goals (more like hunches/assumptions)
You know, for the first time I can remember, the wife and I sat down and we don’t really have any goals for 2022. This will be a year of resting, responding and reacting to how our fostering journey progresses.
I put up there in the title hunches, because that’s what it feels like. I assume the big life moves we made in 2021 will continue to advance. That being:
- Continue to foster: We aren’t sure how long we’ll have our current placement so either keep taking care of her, take on a new placement, or maybe even add another foster child. That last one was a who-knows scenario. We’re happy with only one placement right now but will consider another as the year progresses.
- Finish my front yard: With the purchase of the new home in 2021, so comes all the upkeep and improvements. I’ve mentioned before that I’m re-doing my front yard into a succulent nirvana/paradise/heaven. I’d like to have that wrapped up in 2022 and move my focus to the backyard for 2023.
- Survive another year with the toil of pretending in corporate wonderland: Haha. This isn’t really a goal but more of a reality. Not much to say here except the clock keeps ticking. We’ll see how much I can stomach and how the year unfolds.
- Spend less than 2021: Pretty self-explanatory here. After a whopping 2021 in the total expense category (new house) and losing our second income (stay-at-home-mom), any spending under this year’s total for next year will be a big win!
- 2022 Mystery Goal: You’ll just have to wait on this one, but rest assured, it’s in the works.
Blog Status Update
My goal for the blog in 2022 is to continue to write, albeit sporadically. Unfortunately, the normal blogger drop-off in year 3 will continue for me. Although, I’d chalk this more up to significant life changes (the baby) than losing interest in writing. Time has been reallocated for the near future as needed.
My new schedule, as readers have already observed, will be posting when I feel like it. I know this is not the ideal schedule for content consumers, but so be it. I think I’ll stick with Sundays when I see fit, but as far as consistency, there is no impetus driving me in year three. I’m going to try the create-when-it-comes-to-you method. Haha. I know this has worked for many other content creators and can only hope for the same with me.
Who says I can’t be a dynamic player? No boxed in stereotypes for kid Q-FI!
Although, keep in your back pocket that I have no desire to stop the blog, this will hopefully only be a temporary hiatus. And to all those bloggers I regularly read and comment (you know who you are), I apologize for my absence. I’ll try to drop in when I can with my usual enjoyment and encouragement of the amazing content you all take the time to create.
Most viewed post of 2021 (by a long shot):
Most commented-on post in 2021 (this was a close contest, but I think “Hiding in the Doing” won simply because it was picked up by some content aggregator sites, so it had more than normal viewing action):
My personal favorite post to write in 2022:
This section was a little interesting for me. After reviewing my list of posts for 2021, even though it was much less than 2020 I couldn’t decide on just one that rose above the rest to be crowned king of the Q-FI kingdom. So here are the three categories that I enjoyed the most for different reasons. Keep in mind this has nothing to do with comments or views, these posts are simply the ones that I had the most fun writing for myself.
From a satirical writing point of view (I had a blast cracking myself up and writing this one):
From a creative writing point of view (this was a theme about bloggers I’d always wanted to write about):
From a cathartic writing point of view:
I’m going to cheat here and do a three-way tie. Although there are many I’d personally like to include, each of these took a lot out of me to write for all very different reasons (teen pregnancy, recovery and mental health stigmas). But sitting down, and working through each one, at the end, just felt right.
When you Have Nothing Left to Sell, You Sell Yourself
FI Status Update
What’s the point of writing a semi-FI blog if I don’t give some updates on my financial journey, right?
Well, 2021 was an expensive year for us. Holy shit it was!
First, we bought the house which was a double whammy. Higher housing costs but more space and freedom. Yet, swapping liquid assets like stocks/ETFs into illiquid real estate equity always makes me cringe, but it had to be done for the down payment.
Second, we lost the wife’s income a little less than halfway into the year, but my company had a prosperous 2020 so her loss of cashflow ended up pretty much being a wash for us after my VC bonus and RSU vesting – which was entirely luck.
I don’t think 2022 will be as financially successful for us as 2021, but since our expenses should go back down to a new normal, I’m still hoping it will be a good year overall. And even with the loss of future spousal cashflow and home purchase, I still think I’m in the 5-year range of saying Sayanora to official W-2 income.
However, as I mentioned earlier, corporate incompetence gets harder and harder to stomach each new year. Plus, I’m not ruling out sabbaticals or trying something entirely new as well. I have flexibility and options moving forward. But as of now, sucking up my company bullshit and continuing to collect paychecks with good medical benefits will be the modus operandi.
So, who knows?
I’ll also have some posts coming out this year addressing the myth of the “FI number.” Without getting into a never-ending diatribe, I think a lot of people confuse the difference between cashflow and net worth, plus nominal vs real returns (inflation, taxes and the time value of money are real things). FI is entirely about cash flowing – turning future assets into dividend streams by timing future outflows with inflows.
In my opinion, your net worth really doesn‘t matter at all for pulling the plug. It would be like a company making decisions based off their balance sheet instead of the cashflow statement.
Silence. *Crickets chirping*
Oh boy, that one will get me in trouble.
So, let’s end this post with that cliff hanger. Future financial content to come explaining my position.
I hope everyone had a safe and maniacally self-righteous new year! Wuhahaha!
We all deserve it, right? (wink)
-Q-FI
—
In as short or long as you can fit it in the comments, how has 2021 gone for you mi amigos? Or did you have a favorite 2021 post of mine that stuck out to you? As always, thanks for reading and commenting.
Quiet-FI,
Glad to have the update and hear the fostering is going well.
I’m looking forward to your FI Number posts which sounds like it will take a somewhat divergent path to the 4% rule. I’m looking forward to sharing how my thinking has evolved there too (not 4% or cash flow – tiered/buckets).
Peace.
Thanks for the comment David! I know you like to get into the numbers, so hopefully you’ll enjoy what is to come. I hope all is well with you and look forward to hearing about your tiered bucket approach.
Congrats on quite a successfull 2021. And best wishes for an equally (or more) successful 2022!
Thanks FFTP and for swinging by! Happy new year to you bud!
Sounds like a year well lived Q-FI, and a more sustainable approach to the one ahead.
Good luck slaying those corporate dragons (my kids honestly thought that was my actual job until they were aged about 6, Dad swapping his business suit for a sword and shield once he got to the office each day!).
I look forward to hearing your thoughts on magic numbers, have been pondering the same myself recently.
It was definitely a year of change, then again which one isn’t? But I guess when it hits the pocketbook we pay more attention… ha!
I’m hoping to follow in your footsteps some day with taking more time to raise kids. Your seasonal sabbaticals have always resonated with me. My goal is to make it full time rather than seasonal, but still not knowing how big our family will be, keeps me in planning mode for the near future. But locking in the house finally, has given me my main base to go by.
The thing that really scares me, is I see a lot of the life-style-design types with no financial background throwing around nominal numbers and not classifying risk correctly. To each their own, but when the underlying assumptions are flawed, I think it does more damage than good.
More to come on that one. I need to think about how to convey the message in simple terms.
in 2021 i got fat and that ain’t easy for a naturally skinny guy. i really had to sit around eating bon-bons and not getting exercise. normally we don’t make goals in our house and i don’t think we ever had financial ones. the stuff is just too hard to predict except for the savings part. as you mention that disappearing cash flow ain’t no joke. we adjusted by essentially saving less in ’17 when mrs. smidlap’s job went away. but..we were already 50 something and had the nest egg pretty well under control with a few levers like lower spending on nice things we could pull if necessary.
i agree with not having or needing an FI number. i don’t even like typing that phrase. right now we’re selling shares to fund mrs. smidlap’s bridge to social security and that takes some getting used to. the dividend or bust community can do it their way and we’ll do it this way. it’s a helluva lot more comforting knowing that s.s. annuity is only a few years away for one of us if we need it.
best of luck in the year to come.
Hahaha – I can always count on you’ll crack me up some way every time. Getting fat, huh? You need to bust out those running shoes. I’m kind of the same – got it on my list like every other person in the world to get in better shape in 2021. My foot never really healed from my surgery back in 2020, so I want to do some light running but at least do some weights for strength in my legs and back.
For a long time, we never had goals either. But after rehab, we started sitting down in January every year and discussing what we wanted to accomplish together for the year to make sure we’re on the same page. It’s not necessarily about accomplishing anything, but more making sure we’ve both communicated our visions for the future and they align, regardless if anything really gets done.
I know it sounds like a bunch of mumbo jumbo, but it’s really improved our communication over the years.
Yeah, with losing the cashflow you’re in the same boat as me, though at a different stage. It’s nice you have that SS coming as buffer pretty soon, and I believe your wife will have access penalty free to the IRAs and 401Ks soon as well, so that’s golden.
I can only imagine the adjustment from accumulating to withdrawing. I know I’ll have a tough time adapting. Once you’re used to a certain lifestyle/mindset, you can’t just flip a switch. You’ve developed habits that will take time to adjust.
But man, I’m so excited for you Freddy! Take back that time and enjoy it, which I know you will. Early freedom for you and the wife is going to be great. Have you picked an exit date for yourself yet, or still feeling things out?
Happy New Year Q-FI! You’ve been missed, but I totally understand and so happy for you and your facility. Yep, you killed those goals so good on you. Even more so since they are massive, life changing ones!
Sure, my Sundays aren’t nearly as great without new articles, but I’ll take what I can get. Agreed that you should just write whenever it feels right and that’ll be great. My year was amazing and you can read about it anytime after tomorrow when it gets published.
Happy 2022 and here’s to another spectacular year.
Happy New Year Mr. Fate! And thanks for the kind words.
Hahaha… I’m sure you’ve got a lot to fill your Sundays – lots of nature to soak in and music to make!
I’ll definitely check out your 2021 review post. I’m starting to work through my backlog of blogs to read.
Thanks for chiming in my man and stopping by!
Nice to see a post pop up Q. Hope you guys had a good holiday season.
Right on smashing the goals and more importantly, doing what’s right for you this year. Buying a home and bringing a baby into the home in the same year is no joke. Hats off. I’ll likely be writing less (blogwise) this year too–not that I ever wrote as much or consistently as you did. I have some writing goals/resolutions for 2022 that I’d like to get somewhere close to, and blogging just takes a chunk of my limited bandwidth.
Man, that sounds like an interesting post about the FI number thing. The FI Number concept in itself is a bit abstract, with the so-called ‘number’ fluctuating day to day, sometimes by tens of thousands of $. Then you have people using illiquid assets to tally up the net worth…I agree with the cashflow angle, hence my back-to-back refinancing to get my mortgage down. Just gotta make sure more is coming in than going out.
Good to hear from you man. Here’s to a great 2022
We did have a good holiday season Noel, and I hope you and your fam did too! Just the wife and I spent New Years up in Big Bear Lake with the baby – so as relaxing as can be with a little one. The one bummer was I timed 5 days up there with what was supposed to be a major snow storm. (Which for me living in LA and I’m going to guess the same for you in the Bay, we find snow fun… hahaha!). It was forecasted for 3 feet in the San Bernardino Mountains, but as the days passed by 3 feet, went to 2, then 1. And all we ever got was about 1 inch of fresh snow during a night when I was asleep… hahaha. So that was a disappointment for me, but besides the weather not cooperating, it was still a great getaway.
The balance between writing and managing my time will always be a struggle/challenge for me. I think I’ve finally made peace with, do what is most important to you. And the blogging does take up a lot of time when balancing a career and home life. Plus, man, kids are just another world. So like I’ve mentioned before, I have mad respect for people like you that pump out great content with kids running wild. Best of luck to you with the 2022 blog goals.
The trick will be to see if I ever get around to finishing a post about the FI number… hahaha. My gut is the more settled I become in not writing, the more lazy I’ll get. =)
Thanks as always for reading and the comment Noel!
Home buying, fostering, leaving a toxic job – quite a year for the Q-FI household! It has been fun to follow along on your journey, although I apologize that I don’t pop in for a comment as much as I’d like to. With 2 small kids and a job that’s demanding much more lately, I’m running out of time for hobbies like blogging – but you already know that struggle. We’re in the process of becoming homeowners again after taking a year off, so it feels like our lives are running parallel paths to some degree. It sure would be nice, for our sanity, for one of us to leave the workforce, but still not sure when that’s going to happen. Maybe it’ll be our 2022 surprise?! Cheers to a good 2021, and hoping 2022 is even better!
What’s up Adam and thanks for the comment!
It has been a wild ride of a year for sure and it does sound like our lives are paralleling quite a bit.
It’s kind of funny with the blogging thing. I always thought I never had time to write before but now with a young one, the house and a career, I’ve slowly realized NOW I really don’t have the time. Hahaha. It’s also been a process letting go. I accomplished what I wanted to in my first two year of writing and had been slowing down anyway. Now it’s just learning to be comfortable with the trade offs that time allows. Pick the most meaningful priorities and work on the rest if time or energy ever allows it.
Switching to a single income for us was probably an easier decision than most, due to the toxicity at my wife’s job. She actually loved what she did but it was the environment that had to go. But if she was still in a good place, who knows, maybe we wouldn’t be fostering now. But it’s a tough call between losing an income or picking daycare with work.
I hope you and the fam have a great 2022 in that new house! Keep the projects to a minimum in year 1… =)
I read your post not once but twice! love many points that you touched 🙂 my approach for 2022 is to have my personal numbers on mind all the time. So I calculate them ( for example here https://www.schwiizerfranke.com/en/stundenlohn-berechnen-schweiz ) and from there on I approach financial stuff with my statement in mind. Keep going!
Thanks for reading and the comment Eric. I’m glad you found some points of interest you could relate with. I’ve been on a little hiatus from the blog so always good to see a positive note sent my way. Best of luck with your own numbers and may financial freedom find you sooner than later! =)