10 Questions with Jeff from Sustainable Life Blog

Today is the 13th edition of our new periodic guest post series called 10 Questions. We have a list of 17 NEW questions we pose to fellow financial bloggers, and they are free to pick and choose 10 or answer all of them. Let us know if you would like to be featured in a future edition of 10 Questions. (If you have already answered the first set of 10 questions, please feel free to answer these new ones.)

Jeff is one of the bloggers I’ve met in the course of my real life. Among other stuff, we’ve talked about investing, home improvement and most important, beer.

Jeff has a solid message; living the right way as a means to achieve Financial Independence. He’s also a big DIY guy. Trust me, I’ve seen his projects firsthand. His newest project is DIY Hard Cider. I greatly look forward to trying this one myself in the very near future.

Hi Readers of 1500 days! Like a bad rash, I’m back again to answer the new questions. If you missed my first interview, you can read it here. Not only have the questions changed (and the pizza place gone away) but the focus of my site has changed as well and I wanted to let all you awesome readers of 1500 days know!

Tell me about your blog and why it’s great.

When I started Sustainable Life Blog in 2009, I was a broke-as-a-joke student still working on a (worthless) masters degree, had a huge amount of debt and poor financial habits. After reading blogs and other financial literature for a while, I decided that I wanted to get out of debt, so that was my sole focus (and the focus of the blog) for 5 years. I was able to pay off my debts by ignoring all the people that told me it wasn’t possible ($@%# you haters), changing my habits, and focusing on living a greener lifestyle. While I was working on the debt pay off, I read a lot of blogs that I never would have read, and learned a lot of new things. I had never heard of FI before, and had I not just spent the last 5 years busting my butt to pay off all my debt, I probably wouldnt have thought FI was possible for me. I ran the numbers (a lot) and talked to my wife, and we have set retiring early as our new goal. Once debt freedom had happened, many doors that we didnt even know existed were opened.

What post are you most proud of and why?

I think the best posts on my site are the ones that have inspired people to take some action. These posts typically are longer, and are very detailed and go into what I did to take a common monthly bill and slash it to the max. I think my favorite example of this is the Guide to Cutting Cable TV. There are a lot of options, and you can easily reduce your cable bill from >100/mo to <10/mo with a few simple tweaks. A few people even bought the antenna I recommended which made me pretty happy (and I earned about $1.25). A few of my other more popular posts are the service review of personal capital and my take on whether or not High efficiency washing machines are worth the cost based on efficiency gains (hint: It’s a wash!) – Sorry, I had to. Soon, I’ll have some more stuff up like how to cut your food and alcohol spending, as well as more on our retirement strategy.

Do you enjoy writing?

I enjoy writing, but I’ve found that if you want a good blog post, there’s so much more to it than that. Even so, writing has been a nice way to get what I want to say on paper and have a look to see if it makes sense. Since i’m typically writing about our financial situation, I can come across problems that I didnt know could crop up with the plan, or something else. While I dont get the opportunity as much as I used to, blocking out 3-4 hours to write a portion of a blog post is a nice feeling, and I’d like to be able to do a lot more of it.

1500 Days is about early retirement. Do you have early retirement dreams? At what age do you think you will retire?

I do have early retirement dreams. My wife & I have an FI goal of 12/31/2025, or about 10 years from now. I’ll say that I probably wont “retire” in the sense that I’ll sit on my porch and watch cars go by all day, but I will probably transition to working less for my employer, working for myself and taking a few month or two month vacations from all of that. I do enjoy doing something productive, but I dont enjoy a lot of the other limits that my full time job places on my time. So my dream retirement would be working about 15-25 hours per week sometimes, and not working at all other times. It’s the freedom to make that choice that I seek. If our plan holds true to form, I’ll be just about 40 years old when I finally walk away, and if it takes longer than that’s not that big of a deal either. No matter what happens, I’d like to be done by 45. No one knows what the future holds though, but we will keep working.

If blogging isn’t your full time gig, what is?

Currently, I work as a consultant in the environmental services industry. I got a degree in the field from university, but most of my learning has taken place outside of the work place, and I’ve gotten interested more in something completely different. At this point, I enjoy my full time gig well enough and it’s really a great company to work for, but I just want a bit more freedom so I’m focusing in on learning one skill that I can use to work for myself.

I’m hoping to make that jump in a few years, but I’m quite a ways away.

How do you handle people with different views on money, ie spendy people?

Most of the people that I know well have spending habits similar to my wife and I. They are fairly prudent, and while a few of them indulge occasionally, no one goes too far overboard, most of my friends are debt free except the house and some still have student loans. Where it really gets interesting are the people that I’m not close friends with, but still know and chat with occasionally. That’s where the real gems come from. A friend that I knew in grad school was telling me how difficult of a time he was having making ends meet and he relied on overtime from his job to get through the year. He didnt always get the overtime though, so it was always a wait-and-see game. I couldnt help but notice the fact that while he lives in a reasonably priced house, he drove a far nicer (and new) car than I do and seems to leave town to go do events like plays & concerts just about every weekend from mid spring until the fall.

Another person I know sort-of kind-of wanted to make some renovations to his house, but then found out that a recent appraisal on his house left him with 40k more in equity than he thought he had. This of course brought about the question “Should I move to a new house” or should I tackle this list of projects that was 3x bigger than 2 weeks ago because now I have more money.

It goes on and on, and some people just dont connect the fact that their habits are the key to long term success. Sure you can live, but if you need overtime to do it, you’re relying on something that’s not there all the time and you could pay for it.

Did your parents teach you about money as a kid? How so?

My parents did teach me about money, but it was all fairly basic, high level stuff that worked up to a point. The thing that they didnt teach me (and I dont really think many people get taught) is how their day-to-day habits connect to their net worth. I was good at paying myself first, but typically by the end of the month I had to transfer some/all of that money back into my checking account to pay the bills. It took a while for that to connect with me.

I did get the “start saving for retirement early” and was able to get quite a bit of money out of that, as well as to buy things that I could afford (like a house) with a reasonable payment. Thankfully, I did a lot of the big things (that are difficult to change) correctly, and from there it was just optimizing smaller (but habitual) things.

We notice a lot of frugal people are into board games – what is your favorite?

I really like ticket to ride. I think it’s a great game to get adults back into board games, as it requires more than dumb luck like SORRY! or Candy Land – there is strategy involved, and there are quite a few different things to keep track of during gameplay. It’s also really, really easy to learn and the rules can be explained quickly. There are a few other games I like (such as power grid or agricola) that are much more complicated to learn and play.

What is the best thing you’ve read lately?

I’m one of those people who reads nothing but non-fiction books, so not everyone will find this suggestion interesting. I’ve made it a goal in 2015 to try and read 2 books per month, and I’ve found quite a few good ones so far this year. Here they are:

• The ONE Thing, Gary Keller
• Built To Sell, John Warrillow
• Vagabonding, Rolf Potts

In addition to books, I also enjoy just about anything I find on longform.org.

What do you do for exercise?

Unfortunately, not nearly as much as I’d like, but here’s what I currently do. I ride my bike to/from work every day, which is about 1 mile. I try to bike for more of my errands, but sometimes it’s too cold/windy and I wimp out. My family & I go for a 4 mile or so walk both days on the weekends, and I try to go tuesday and thursday when I’m watching my daughter if the weather is nice. I’d like to get some resistance training in and we even have a weight room set up in one of our outbuildings, but right now with a 1 year old it’s difficult to make the time.

Jeff
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Thanks so much Jeff! I’m looking forward to chatting over a beer or two at FinCon!