My main goal* was to build an investment and cash portfolio of $1,120,000* ($1,000,000 to retire on and $120,000 to pay off the house) in 1500 days**, starting from 1/1/2013 and ending in February of 2017. I made my goal in 2016, my 1500 Days are over, and I’ve left my job. In the interest of openness, I’ll continue to share my numbers.
Quick note: I’m on the Mad Fientist podcast again! Doug and I recorded a Mile High FI Takeover episode and it just went live:
Pivots
In January 2020, I started to finish my basement. Back then, there were just cement walls, leaky metal windows, and no plumbing rough-ins. And mice. Lots of them. Ewwwww!!
Much has happened since then; a riot at the United States capitol, a pandemic, and the death of my father. Also, lots of dead mice. Fun times! Not at all, especially for the rodents. But life goes on. Until it doesn’t.
That was a helluva way to start the post! Let’s talk about happier things.
Earlier this month, I finally closed the basement permit and the work is mostly done. How long did it take you ask? In the video clip embedded below, I foolishly predicted that the project would take “a month or two”:
A better estimate in normal times would have been 12 months (working on it part-time and stopping completely when children are out of school).
But, the world turned against me and 12 months turned into 26. Materials shortages, home-schooling, and other projects drew my attention away. It’s all good though. I may sound like Mr. Complainy Pants, but I’m thankful that I was able to complete this job with my own hands and for around $15,000. If I had paid to have this done, it would cost well over $50,000. Life is good.
And we completed a lot of other big projects. I’ll write about them soon, but in the meantime, here’s an update I recently published on the 1500 Days YouTube channel (basement is at 15:14):
I have a hard time with life balance. When I’m deep in big home projects, I let other things go. Now, it’s time to refocus.
Health
Is there anything more important in life than good health? You wouldn’t know it if you watch me! I’ve been a poor example in that I let myself go during the past 2 years. Before COVID, I weighed in at around 150 which is a good weight for my slim carcass. I was 25 pounds heavier at one point last year. Oof!
I have found that my weight drops off when I walk very fast, so since the start of February, I’ve been aiming for 20,000 steps per day (thanks David for keeping me accountable):
I was pretty silly to prioritize home remodeling above health. Dead people can’t enjoy a nice home! But, I’m on a better trajectory now.
Investing
I believe that most people can find investments that will beat VTSAX. It may be real estate, a business, or in rare cases, even individual stocks. However, there is a big trade-off:
time
Unless you really love whatever your market-beating form of investing is, you’ve just found another job. The main point of FIRE is to free up your life, not add more stuff.
We’ve had all sorts of semi-exotic investments during the last 5 years including a trailer park, syndications, and even a coworking space. None of them brought me joy except for the coworking space. We have since sold the trailer park and most of the syndications have now ended. I won’t be looking for an investment outside of index funds unless it can help a friend or it’s something truly fun to be involved with.
I don’t want to spend time researching deals and reading quarterly reports. I’d rather be outside. Keep it simple. I’m incredibly thankful that Mindy and I have reached a place where we can choose not to think about money. This is an incredible benefit of wealth.
February
After a decrease of $358,195 in January, our investments took another hit in February. We were down another $190,379:
2021 (as of 2/28/2022)
- Days elapsed: 59
- Net worth gains (actually losses): –$548,574
Since the Start of The Experiment (1/1/2013)
- Days elapsed: 3345
- Net worth gains: $3,628,025
The main reason for my suboptimal performance in February was Facebook. Mr. Market was unhappy with Facebook’s latest earnings report:
Social networks are trendy. They come and then they go when a shiny new one comes along. My children think Facebook is for old people. Mindy and me.
I bought it at IPO because I thought that it would turn into an advertising powerhouse. It did, but now what? It will decline. All empires die. But when? Or has it already started?
But back in 2016, I thought I was smart and sold Apple. That was a bad idea.
Is selling Facebook now a great idea or will I look back in 10 years and curse myself out?
Index funds free your mind from having to think about these things.
I’d rather write.
I’d rather build.
I’d rather randomly walk around town and observe. I was doing just this yesterday when I spotted my first ballbug (roly-poly?) of 2022:
These creatures crack me up. They’re all over the sidewalks here in Colorado as soon as the weather warms up. They have 16 legs, but don’t move very fast.
I have no idea where they’re going, but I’ll bet they’re not thinking about stocks.
More 1500 Days!!!
You can also find me (and the dinosaurs) at:
Mile High FI podcast:
Also here:
- Facebook: Facebook group and page
- YouTube: My channel is mostly devoted to home improvement, but I have some other material coming up soon too.
- Instagram: Pretty pictures of dinosaurs, sunsets, and nail guns!
- Twitter: Spontaneous, often insane, ramblings
- Coworking space: On the surface, MMM HQ is a coworking space. Look a little deeper and you’ll see that we’re really building community. The members of MMM HQ are some of the finest people I know.
*My goal wasn’t to have $1,120,000 at the end of 1500 days, but at any time before the day count was up. Why? It all goes back to the 4% Rule. Remember that our little friend, Mr. 4%, is nothing more than the most conservative safe withdrawal rate. Since my investment portfolio now sits at $1,550,000, I can spend about $62,000 in my first year of retirement.
**My original goal was $1,000,000 and no debt, I later raised the goal by $120,000 to $1,120,000 because I will have debt in the form of a mortgage and I firmly believe in not paying it off (LOOK at the MONEY I’m MAKING!). My compromise was to have enough money put away to cover the mortgage at the time of retirement.
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First, congratulations on finishing basement. I heard you when you said Mr Brown down the drain/plumbing, I laughed so hard. So you completed a 50k job for $15k. I may sound stupid but I cannot even follow IKEA instructions to build. Huge , Huge respect for that. Just for fun, if I may ask you, how many hours you have put in the basement? That number of hours x per hour charge for yourself. How much that would be?
Walking 20k daily is a huge accomplishment. Respect! I struggle with weight and running is my drug. I wish and try to be consistent.
Rakesh!
I’m not sure how many hours I put into the basement, but it was several hundred. Since I don’t do this work regularly, it took me much longer than a pro. I’m going to pull some numbers out of thin air and say I saved $50,000, but spent 400 hours working on it. That comes out to $125/hour which isn’t bad. However, time is so valuable, I’m not sure if that was worth it!
Thank you for replying. It’s worth every penny. Whatever you built will be there for decades. One more thing: so proud of you.
You mentioned some of the semi-exotic investments and how most did not bring joy. Useful points.
Trying to assess if your self done basement project was a Joy or Not Joy: In hindsight, would you spend the 100k -> 150k to have had basement done professionally in tight 6 week -> 3 month window? Even will allow leaving oversight/small pleasure piece to do with friends over a weekend.
To me it seems you “paid” way INSANELY more than 15k – 2 years of denying family access to completed basement, 2 years construction zone in personal residence, regressions to personal health, and probably tackled a number of pieces that decidedly not joyful. In comparison, in ~26 months it looks like your portfolio grew 2.4 million; a 100->150k HELOC pinch for pro crew to do it seems “on-paper” attractive. However, perhaps your basement remodel gave loads of life value that isn’t captured here, so trying to understand.
Basement: Yeah, you’re mostly right here. I learned a lot and it was fun, but it was too much. And the real problem was buying the home in the first place. We bought it because we wanted to be in a different part of town, but I could have held out for one that wasn’t a fixer-upper. While the basement was the biggest project, it was only a small part of the work that needed to be done.
Like you mentioned, when we bought the home, our net worth was about half of what it is now. I was tempted by the thought of making more money. While we’ll most likely make a lot of money from this home (we bought it for 365K and a fixed-up one just sold for over 800k), we didn’t need anymore. So, I sacrificed my time for greed.
But, life is still awesome! I’m in a good place now with plenty of life left. I never want to complain, just tell people about my mistakes in hopes that they can avoid them.
Oh man, 20k steps a day?! I trained up for a half marathon last Saturday and over the last four weeks I’ve only managed 11k/day. Respect! (The half marathon went fine; I only hit my target pace for the first half, but that’s because an appendectomy in January torpedoed my training schedule. Thirteen miles on closed roads at the height of DC’s cherry blossom season was lovely.)
Thanks for all the ways in this post that you’ve put things into perspective. That’s what drew me toward pursuing FIRE in the first place — the security sounds nice, but the freedom to explore interests and focus on what really matters keeps driving my motivation.
One of my favorite fun facts is that rolly pollies are crustaceans, like lobsters. They contribute to their ecosystems as decomposers of plant matter. Odds are it is looking for tasty plant matter or just got done eating.
Crustaceans first evolved before the Cambrian period over 500 million years ago. The one you snapped a picture of is probably Armadillidium vulgare. The species was introduced to New England in the early 19th century, and has become widespread throughout North America
Also, nice job on basement.
Braeden! Thank you for a little lesson!
Lobsters taste pretty good! I’m not sure about roly-polies! The robins seem to like them enough.
A long walk is the most underrated activity! I take a walk for an hour or two everyday (over 2000 consecutive days!). I mix it up, some days I walk in silence, listen to podcasts or music, catch up with friends far away or walk with a friend. I have made friends from my walks. Even prior to FI, I walked to and from work for 80% of my career. It was a great way to prepare for the workday and wrap up the workday on the way home. I would come up with solutions to problems we were trying to solve on my walk to work in NYC. One of my colleagues complained, he lived to close to the office to think of solutions. His walk was too short!
Hi-
Your January 2022 video led me to believe that you were going to be putting out more videos on topics like how you bent the Trex and how you built the Pergula. When might those YT videos be coming out? I know it’s only a few months before your kids are out for summer break……..
thanks,
Deb
Hi Deb!
Yes, I need to get my behind in gear! Any requests?
I’ve been taking tons of footage, just got to get the time to edit!
Well, I am really, really curious how you bend the Trex. So, if you could do that one first…….
thanks,
Deb
Love how you and Mindy look like you’re cradling the rather large dinosaur like its a baby. Funny you should mention the time factor in regards to investing- I’ve got a phone call later today with a syndication to ask them some questions. OF course I super love doing research, so there’s that.. Not everyone does. There’s profitable investment strategies for every type of person.
As for renovations, you should have said it’d take a couple of years, not months. We are STILL in the middle of renovating, even after I’m fairly sure I told you I’d be done by December. We just got done with the kitchen. Cost us more than what you got yours done for- we dont have an Ikea, and we paid contractors to help demolish, hang cabinets, and put in the granite. The anciliary things we did, and I sourced the sink, new faucet, and venthood secondhand. We have a great secondhand building supply store here-actually we have 3. You’d be in heaven. Next up: flooring and new windows. yay. us.
Carl, how you find time to do the Mile High FI podcast (have been watching each episode, love the little digs you and Doug throw at each other), do home renovation work, made videos, and blog, you seem like a very busy FIeree! Thanks for keeping us in the loop and using your time so judiciously . Looking forward to the next update!
I’ll have to check out the podcast takeover — nice work making that happen. Cool.
And does this mean your visitors don’t get to sleep with the workout equipment anymore? Not cool — so convenient 😉
Sorry about the investment hit. But, to your point, there’s other things to worry about out there. And that’s probably what makes things like VTSAX work so well (and I’m not really talking about the investment performance itself!).
Cheers from out east!
Haha, no the basement is still the guest bedroom. However, now guests get a dedicated bathroom complete with a shower. Life is good for guests. Come on back!
Yeah, I don’t care about the hits. These things happen and since we’re not in withdrawal mode, it makes even less sense to think about it for more than 1 second.
Mr. 1500…I am very impressed by what you do and how you describe them. I had been considering investing in crowdfunded RE, pre-IPO funds, could never get myself to pull the trigger. My issue with problems around tax filing time and getting a timely -1. While I was trouble verbalizing, what you write about pivot and lack of fun, are definitely the underlying causes I can relate to. Keep up the awesome posts.