It’s January, so now’s a good time to look back over the year 2021 and post about our total expenditures. There was a time when I did monthly expense blogs, but alas I’ve fallen off these types of posts as my blog bandwidth has narrowed and my blog posts have slowed down. Pursuing FIRE isn’t the easiest in an ultra high cost of living area like San Francisco, but it’s not impossible. This is the land of the $8 dollar... Read More Read More| Happily Disengaged
Summer took a bit longer to reach the Bay Area this year. All summer long, temperatures have been below average as the rest of the country boiled over. June and July in particular are on record for some of the coldest months in 30 years. Summer has come late. The last few weeks have been in the 90’s at my house, nights with no wind, abnormal humidity pressing over the region. I turned the AC on for the first time... Read More Read More The post Fall 2025 Update appeared first on Happily Dis...| Happily Disengaged
Dear readers, I have hit my FI number. Last Sunday, August 24th, to be exact, I reviewed my expenses and updated my forecasted retirement expenses on my spreadsheets. Early weekend mornings are best for this. The house is quiet. My family is upstairs fast asleep. In the summer, early light spills in through the windows flooding my house with the soft current of optimism only morning can bring. I sat downstairs at my dining room table with a cup of... Read More Read More The post I Am Financia...| Happily Disengaged
I get into work around 5:30am each morning. My walk into the office from the parking garage is an easy five minute stroll across two city blocks. It’s down a steep hill, meaning I get a pretty awesome view of the San Francisco Bay and the city itself from this walk. At that time in the morning, the street is deserted. The sun hasn’t risen yet. The streetlights glow a lonely green to empty intersections. It’s usually crisp at this... Read More Read More| Happily Disengaged
I’ve already won the game. Even if I never FIRE. Even if I work till I’m 80 or die tomorrow. I’ve won the lottery of birth and life.| Happily Disengaged
2025 was always going to be a special year for me, solely because it was my milestone marker on this path towards financial independence. This is the year I was supposed to retire.| Happily Disengaged
I have a problem. It’s the worst sort of problem because it’s not a real problem. I imagine most day dreamers and travelers and story lovers have the same sorts of problems that I encounter from time to time. My mind can wander around the edges of my reality. I can get lost in my dreams. Caught in a web of wants. Forks in the road of my ceaseless thoughts lead me to yearn for places and things I never... Read More Read More| Happily Disengaged
As I watch the clock tick to 2:30pm, I hastily leave the office early, dropping what I’m working on to stuff my backpack and hurry home from work. I can’t help but think I’m busier now than any other time in my life. When I was younger, in my twenties and even early thirties, I used to think I was busy. How naive I was. Young kids are tough and take tons of attention and energy, but they don’t have... Read More Read More| Happily Disengaged
I had a job walk the other day with some visitors to the project I’m on. As we neared the end of the walk, one of them asked me how long I’d worked for the company. I told him I’d started in 2004, but came up through the trades, becoming a superintendent in 2015. “You came up the right way then.” He told me, surprised by my answer. I was surprised by his answer too, as he’d gone to college... Read More Read More| Happily Disengaged
Exciting times ahead, I’m heading to Japan in a few short weeks. While I’ve been budgeting carefully, this spring has been an expensive one. I bought the airline tickets back in December for around $4500 roundtrip, and have been sporadically booking and paying for accommodations every few weeks. Since we’re timing vacations with our kids’ school breaks, our options were either April or waiting until June. We’ll be there for around 2 weeks with stops in the tourist triangle of... Rea...| Happily Disengaged
At the turn of the 20th century, there wasn’t a more cosmopolitan city in the world than Vienna, Austria. The city seemed to be brimming with thought leaders in medicine, science, and art. Ideas spilled out from this Central European country like an ever melting ice pack streaming down the Alps and flooding other nations with its ideas. Vienna at that time was the capital of the Austrian Monarchy, then nearly a thousand years old. Intellectuals, artists, outcasts, architects, composers;... ...| Happily Disengaged
Sitting in commuter traffic can do all sorts of things to the psyche. One has time to reflect on life while behind the wheel of their vehicle for over an hour each day. It’s a sort of forced isolation. An education on patience. I used to ponder the inefficiency of it all. I used to try to avoid the insufferable Bay Area traffic. Try to find back roads. A different route home. A faster lane. Traffic made me mad and... Read More Read More| Happily Disengaged
I worked this past New Year’s Eve, so when midnight rolled around later that evening, I found myself fast asleep on my living room couch. My kids came over and excitedly woke me ten minutes before the ball drop. I stumbled over to the room where my family was watching tv and watched as the minutes counted down. Fireworks erupted on the screen. The clocks on the west coast silently crossed into 2025. And that was it. Another year ticked... Read More Read More| Happily Disengaged
It dawned on me on my way to work one morning that I’ve stopped giving a damn about FIRE. Driving through the darkness of the early morning freeways, lights of the San Francisco skyline and bridges glistening out past the windows, podcast on the History of Byzantium blasting through the truck speakers, the thought popped into my mind that I don’t really need an exit off this freeway I’ve found myself cruising down. I don’t need FIRE anymore. What do... Read More Read More| Happily Disengaged
For a few years now I’ve been putting off replacing two columns in front of my house that hold up a roof overhang over my front porch. There’s a big tree in my front yard, a hackberry, that loves to spill its leaves each fall into my gutters. I’ve since screened over the gutters, but years of clogging the gutters, before I even moved here, had allowed water to overflow at times from the gutter. This overflow created water damage... Read More Read More| Happily Disengaged
My beloved 2011 Honda Civic is gone. This wonderful commuter car that hummed along the Bay Area freeways consuming only 35 mpg, proudly displaying 200k miles on her odometer…is dead. I purchased my late Honda in 2014 for around $10k. It was used and had 75k miles on it. I got lucky a few years after buying the car and an insurance company paid off the car early for me. Having two cars paid off has been a joy for... Read More Read More| Happily Disengaged
I was talking to a good friend recently about old times. Reminiscing about things that I hadn’t talked about or even thought about in years. In conjuring up these memories it felt as though I were talking about another person, another lifetime, a forgotten chapter that even myself had somehow tucked away for no good reason. Some of these events are hidden away in my mind and I don’t talk about them with anyone; not that they are all bad... Read More Read More| Happily Disengaged
