Make America The United States Again

In a nation that has never felt more divided in most of our lifetimes, it is important to remember God’s Country exists in every state - even if other “religions” have consumed that state. Take it from two freedom loving people from New Jersey and New York, God’s country can be found even in the blue states. Every American state has a slice of heaven.

The armpit of America, New Jersey, my home state, is beautiful on the shore, in the pine barrens and in the Skylands. Most of the northeast & central part of the state is truly an armpit but theres still incredible beauty to be found all over the state. Would I ever own a piece of property in my home state of NJ? Very unlikely - unless its down the shore in Ocean County. A County with decent governance and a personal nostalgia for me that is hard to replicate.

The past few years off the boat we’ve spent a lot of time exploring the Southern Tier of New York. Affectionately, we call NY, Medium Sky Country. We got engaged on a snow capped peak near Mt. Marcy during the total eclipse in the Adirondacks then spent a few days in one of the most American towns - Lake Placid. There are also parts of Medium Sky Country that feel almost as remote as parts of Big Sky Country (Montana & Wyoming) with towns that feel just as western to boot. Check out the NY town of Callicoon if you don’t believe me.

Now would I ever own property in the state of NY? Absolutely not. New York’s governance is on California’s level without the unparalleled beauty of CA. California is objectively our worse governed state while simultaneously being the most beautiful. No state compares on either front. In a way, the Newsoms being the rulers of the woke west is a perfect corollary. Beautiful people on the surface, morally gutted on the interior.

Montana is almost as beautiful as California. Same with Hawaii. Ultimately, California has it all from the snow capped Sierras to Pacific Beach in San Diego. Now if the Honokaa Cowboys of The Big Island of Hawaii stood up and told their government to tone down the rhetoric and get out of their lives, well then there might be a conversation there. Big Island’s diversified beauty is as close as you can get to California's, but it has the same governance problems of CA just on a smaller scale in the middle of the Pacific.

California’s beauty ranks highest in America so why aren’t people moving there? More importantly why are so many people moving away?? Why is CA as well as NY & NJ in the bottom 5 for net migration according to the 2023 census? It is because of governance. CA, NY, IL, NJ & MA all have high taxes, woefully inept government services & these are not states under God, they’re under something pretending not to be a religion.

Our chosen home states of Pennsylvania & Florida are due to governance, proximity to family and weather (FL). The laws of the land matters most to us and according to the data, to the vast majority of Americans as well. This line of thinking is not exclusive to Americans, it is simply more prevalent here since our country is a melting pot of immigrants who all fled somewhere else in pursuit of a better life here.

As a non-Italian native New Jerseyan with a high affinity for pizza, I am grateful for the Pisans leaving behind the rare beauty of Italy for the freedom of the states.

Is Pennsylvania as beautiful as New York? Is Florida as beautiful as California? I’d say no from a nature perspective but every year these naturally beautiful blue states operate under this new religion that answer becomes more convoluted due to homelessness, crime, riots, etc. I am convinced, if given enough latitude and time, the landscape eventually becomes as ugly as the governance regardless of how well intentioned or “compassionate” it was in the first place. Results matter. No one with even the smallest hint of objectivity can look at California & New York and say they’ve had good outcomes over the past 5 years.

Being progressive and fundamentally anti-growth results in less growth. Who would’ve thought?

Where this all comes to a head is when you realize the fact that your state is either growing or dying and thus will lose or gain power via electoral votes due to its populous increasing or decreasing. With the 2024 election in the rear view and the majority of Americans having voted for a clear mandate for change, the thing that matters most is voting with your feet and $. Live in a state that embodies your beliefs. Support businesses that align with your values. With regard to your home state, stay and fight for your beliefs if it is of your chosen political affiliation or a purple state. We personally prefer purple states because we like to not live in an echo chamber. Unfortunately for us, NY & NJ are about as blue as the ocean.

The other option is flee your home state for one better suited to your beliefs and tell the locals you’re a political refugee. That is what we’ve done as both of our states embody beliefs far removed from our own. With having lived in red parts of NC, FL and PA and coming from a very blue part of a blue state, NJ, trust me it works. If they still don’t believe you, regardless of which side you’re fleeing from, hit them with our favorite quote from a favorite show of ours, 1883 - “To import the traditions of the place you fled, the place that failed you, is to condemn the place you seek with the same failures.”

With that I’ll say this holiday season, try to be kind to your friends and family regardless of their political views. There is no perfect state. There is no perfect political party. Life is far more nuanced.

Nothing is worse than walking on eggshells but we all experience it. Under our first amendment, we should foster and encourage speech of all forms. Hate speech shouldn’t be a thing policed by the state. It should be laughed at by normal sensible citizens who don’t allow it to have any prevalence. We should debate openly, even with family and friends. Who better to try and understand their perspective? We’re starting from the basis of loving one another. We can always agree to disagree afterwards and say to each other that we understand our beliefs come from our individually lived experiences.

We should hear all ideas regardless of how crazy then naturally allow the best ones to win without interference from the state sponsored “experts”. The people determine the truth, not the media. Every person is different. Diversity comes from diversity of experience and thought, not skin color or sexual preference - two things we have no control over. I also recognize that sexual preference and skin color both shape experience. There is no right or wrong in these personal political beliefs. Only the desire to be better. This is the pinnacle of American excellency.

Time to defund the federal American bureaucracy and Make The United States great again.

Merry Christmas

Happy Holidays

Boomers Wait Too Long, Millennials Don’t Wait Long Enough

We weren't made to pay bills, save for our glorified 10-year retirement, and die.

We also weren’t made to live for the present, aka YOLO, and never plan for tomorrow.

Being purely hedonistic, as millennials have a very strong tendency to be, results in a life devoid of long-term wins and hard-earned purpose. I learned this while pursuing unfettered happiness as opposed to some form of happiness derived from satisfaction. Satisfaction typically happens after some duration of suffering that leads to happiness in the suffering being finished.

Boomers are obviously hedonistic as well; all Americans are, but boomers have a much higher likelihood of having long-term discipline due to a stronger propensity to be religious, committed to raising their children, and their long-duration oriented 401ks. The boomers as kids were the partying hippies, while their parents, the silent generation, fought two world wars. Millennials as kids were the student debt-fueled, digital flexers while their parents, the boomers, flexed IRL with the white picket fence and big house. Every subsequent generation becomes less ascetic and more hedonist. A shorter attention span = a shorter duration of enduring self-discipline, and a lackluster ability to play the long game.

Easy life, hard choices. Hard life, easy choices.

Proof of life for Kelsey

Millennials could take a page from the boomers’ playbook and be loyal to their profession while saving for a rainy day decades later. The issue with this is millennials saw their boomer parents go through the self-discipline of saving for their retirements before being around to see the fruits of their labors in their golden years. As kids, we grew up hearing the exhortations of boomers to “never do what they did.” I heard this more times than I could count while playing adult beer league hockey in my teens. Perhaps it's also just wanting to not do what your parents did as a form of rebellion - either way, the result is the same. Live for today - tomorrow is tomorrow’s problem. Book the trip to Tulum, Eat, Pray, Love, YOLO.

Choose your suck.

There are always actionable truths in generalities and broad sweeping statements that allow us to avoid the plight of the commons. Boomers, by and large, buy into the system, put in their decades at their 9-5s, and save. The generation before them, the silent generation, was even more ascetic. The partying boomers in their younger years looked even crazier than millennials or zoomers do to boomers nowadays. Of course, I’m speaking in generalities, so please allow me the space to say the obvious, which is there are always exceptions to the rules. One such exception is the Pardeys.

Lin & Larry Pardey, both of the staunchly traditionalist silent generation, set sail on Larry’s 31st birthday after having stocked away all their savings from mostly selling nylon rope in years prior under a boat services company they built in California . Their business was really starting to pick up right around the time they completed Seraffyn, their Lyle Hess-designed 24’ channel cutter. By some accounts, they were stumbling on solving the same problem that Randy Repass, the founder of West Marine, was solving with his business around the late 60s - the same time in which The Pardeys were operating. The timing was there, and the Pardey’s had the knowledge to scale the company into something massive to compete with West Marine. We all know how this story ends with The Pardey’s completing 2 engineless circumnavigations, living a life of consummate adventure. There is something to be said about their consciously deciding not to scale their business and sticking to the plan of sailing their newly built boat as far as it’ll take them, “as long as it’s fun.”

Build your own boat - then go small, go simple, and go now.

As Dr. Andrew Huberman would say, grow your anterior midcingulate cortex by doing hard things. There is so much beauty on the other side of discipline and struggle. The key is not to let it lose its sting, or else you’re not actually growing anymore. That’s when you embody the boomer mind and just stock away your 40+ years for a promising golden decade. Routine is undeniably powerful - we just can’t let routine become routine. As David Goggins says in the podcast link at the start of this paragraph, there is no carrot - it’s just the dangon stick.

Abandon Comfort.

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For the past 5 years, 90% of the time, Kelsey and I have lived with no running water or heat all up and down the East Coast. Southern Appalachia to Northern Appalachia to the heart of the city, calling full-gut construction zones home. All while we are making 5x more money than we did while working our corporate 9-5s, living in far worse conditions than we did back then. Our income has risen substantially while our living expenses have gone down as low as they possibly can. This is all temporary, voluntary, and in pursuit of our shared dream. Our current life is some weird masochist combination of Goggins-lite suffering, Into the Wild extremist freedom, and Pursuit of Happyness monetary drive. Perhaps we might miss out on our own version of scaling into a West Marine level business but no offense to Randy Repass, the Pardey’s stories are a lot more interesting to us.

More on that next post once we’re back to a more sunny, southern place…

A Rich Man Works His Whole Life to Retire Like a Poor Man by the Sea

It’s not generational wealth. It’s not to keep up with the Joneses. It’s not an arbitrary 7-figure net worth.

It’s subjective. It’s hard to define. It’s always evolving with age.

It's freedom.

Freedom means something different to everyone. The man dying on the hospital bed might view freedom as simply awaking to see another day. Another might view it numerically as a $2,500,000 net worth. To the average client during my previous life as a financial advisor, it was them outsourcing their thinking to me, the licensed professional, to handle the inputs to my corporation’s trusty freedom calculator. If only it was so easy. To think a retirement calculator that is just the corporatized version of Mr. Money Mustache’s 4% rule can give you a holistic answer to the boundlessly complex question of, “When can I achieve freedom?” is a tragic product brought to you by some soulless corporate entity. We shouldn’t outsource the most important question of our lives.

Imagine someone you just met asks you - What does freedom look like to you? What do you say? “No socks, No alarm clocks.” I had this answer ready to go throughout most of my 20s. I had it preplanned since I was usually the one asking the onerous question of, “What freedom looks like to you?” in the place of small talk. Nowadays my definition is largely unchanged although I might throw in the ability to own my struggle as another piece to the ever-evolving freedom puzzle.

Up until 2019, the vast majority of the jobs I held were in knowledge work or underway on a boat. From a Sales Manager running a small team at a Vitamin Store in my late teens to Poker Player to Financial Advisor, all of these roles were mostly mental and largely sedentary. My time trading my brain for money greatly outweighs the time I spent trading physical outputs for money.

Since 2019, I have spent 6 days a week doing some form of construction renovating one of our 3 old houses. The first couple of years renovating our 1862 rowhome required every ounce of concentration as I was very untrained working with my hands. Being 4+ years into my new role as an accidental General Contractor, nowadays its much different. Whether I’m repointing some stone, running water lines or redoing a load carrying beam, it doesn’t require me to do much mental work. At the cost of my physical body, I’m allowed the daily space to explore my mental curiosities. This is a freedom I had never experienced but now I never want to be without again.

This is why I consider freedom to be a perpetual puzzle. A puzzle that can’t be solved by a calculator or any static piece of technology.

If you asked me in 2019 what financial freedom looked like to me I would’ve told you an investment property that brings in $2,000 per month in passive income and allows us to stay there anytime we’re off the boat. We achieved that a couple years later. Unfortunately during that time period our $2,000/mo income lost a whole lotta purchasing power due to inflation. The goal posts were then moved to building an all-weather portfolio that is domiciled in geographically and politically diverse areas that produces $5,000/mo in income. Our bet is still very concentrated in short-term rentals for the time being so we don’t want to have all our eggs in one geographical basket and then fall victim to changing rules and regulations. By this Fall we will have achieved our $5,000/mo goal mostly due to the fact that the income is largely residual - not passive - and we are simply being repaid for our 5 years of grueling renovation work.

Having had a good go at playing the part of the rich man working his whole life the past ~5 years, I’m more than ready to be that poor man by the sea again. A “poor man”, who has no need for alarm clocks since he rises with the sun, has no need for socks since they’ll only get soggy and slow him down while he toils away maintaining his much too-small, brightwork laden traditional bluewater boat that can take him and his family anywhere.

A dying man’s wishes are to be healthy and live. The longest years of my life were the ones I spent living aboard. I long for simplicity by the sea again. Call me a poor man by the sea or consider me a dying man. Either way my days of playing the rich man working away his whole life are numbered.

The Truth About Not Coming From Money

Do you want freedom but don't come from money or status?

Then boy do I have the product for you! Ingredients: blood, sweat, tears. It's called bootstrapping in startup circles. Real estate folks call it sweat equity. It's sour at first, but savory later. It's the short-term suck, long-term win of delayed gratification. Unfortunately you can't buy an online course that'll teach you this. Gurus will tell you not to do it because it can’t scale. It’s not entertaining and it probably won't be fun but make damn sure it'll be worth it...in the long run.

Chances are if you don't come from money, you don't come pre-wired with the knowledge to acquire wealth either. Everyone has differing levels of financial education imbued in their DNA which stems from their parents and guardians. For me, I was lucky to grow up in a frugal household that understood basic personal finance but unfortunately, doesn't have a clue about what a good investment feels like. I was told you get a 9-5 because its safe. You then max out your 401k that invests in safe assets according to your trusty, non-fiduciary advisor and hopefully you retire in your mid 60s.

My best friend grew up in a household where you can sometimes miss car payments and you learned how to hide your car from the repo man. In her household, credit card debt was the norm. You do what feels good in the moment without much concern for future you. Bad personal finance habits and - investments? Why invest for tomorrow when you can live for today. After all, you only live once.

For me, having debt-loathing parents kept me from going into tons of student debt because in my household, all debt is bad. Well, almost all debt, unless it buys you that new Ford. Growing up I was taught you don't spend more than you earn. You work hard. No real reason for working hard, you just do. This is a recipe for a simple, prudent life with a nice truck. This life is You vs. the clock. You vs. the 45-minute commute to work. You vs. office politics. Then the one that stings the worst of all, You vs. your 9-5's bottom line. This unfortunate reality is usually discovered when times get tough and corporations enforce mass layoffs, like the ones we're seeing now.

I don't dislike 9-5s or 401ks by any means. Nothing is better for providing seed capital for freedom than a 9-5. My 9-5's old 401k plan offered me an 8% match that I happily contributed to over the course of my 3-year cubicle adventure as a financial advisor. That old Roth 401k gave me the seed capital to launch my first startup, Spared. My post-college 9-5 gave me the cash flow to stock away 35k to buy our first boat and ultimately start Abandon Comfort. 9-5s are remarkably powerful if used appropriately. Especially for those of us who don't come from money.

What I don't like is pretending something is safe when in reality, during times of panic, all correlations go to 1. 9-5's aren't safe. 401ks aren't safe. In a 9-5 you have no pricing power. You can't adjust your pay to match inflation without job hopping or constantly asking for raises (which will make you first on then chopping block when things turn down). This is abundantly true even in today's labor-constrained, wage-price spiral world where the employee has the most bargaining power they've ever had! A 401k staple, the 60-40 portfolio, a bellwether of "safety" in financial markets, has been decimated this year (see image below). Friends who work at prosperous tech companies have had their tech startup equity destroyed via equity markets popping yet another tech bubble over the past 18 months. This is what a correlation of 1 means. When the economy goes down, it all goes down.

2022 - 2nd worst year on record for the 60-40 portfolio

The truth is everyday is a gamble. Nothing is safe. The goal is to not be blind to the risks you are taking and learn how to effectively manage them. If you have a 9-5, your greatest risks are job security, your commute to work and losing to inflation since you can't mark-to-market what your time is worth. How do you manage those risks? You build on the side. You make hay while the sun shines. You reduce or remove your commute. You create other streams of income that rely upon the market and not office politics or corporate earnings.

If you have a 401k, your greatest risk is not identifying your time horizon and hopping off the rollercoaster at the wrong time. Don't call your financial advisor when you see Markets in Turmoil on CNBC and command them to move your account to something conservative. Don't call them when the DOW goes up 1000 points to move your account to something more aggressive to capture more upside. To the advisor, it doesn't matter. They'll make commission regardless. Don't look at your Robinhood account everyday. They want your eyeballs. They want your attention. Mr. Market ultimately always wants one thing - for you to act on emotion. If you panic, panic early or don't panic at all.

The hardest thing for me to learn was what a good investment felt like. What managing risk felt like. What delayed gratification felt like. What sweat equity felt like. These things require careful thought, subjective analysis and ruthless execution. Not seeking confirmation from loved ones who have little-to-no investing or entrepreneurial experience is still hard for me to this day. More often than not, being a contrarian and fading the direction of the collective wisdom of the crowd pays off in the long run. Like owning your own company, buying a fixer upper direct from owner with no inspection, or riding your bike to work. The crowd deems these as risky. A lot of the times, the thing you're taught is risky is in actuality risk-adverse because it offers multiple streams of income, exit plans, good defensive strategies or ways for us to create sweat equity/take ownership.

The democratization of information via the internet has allowed easier access to breaking the wheel of generational bad financial habits compared to previous decades. The worst thing any of us can do, is to rely upon the crowd to determine what is and isn't risky. Or worst of all, that we should avoid risk entirely. This is a fallacy. There is no avoidance of risk. There is only management and mitigation of risk.

Two Years to Flatten the Fear

There are two wolves in you. One is fear, the other is focus. Which wins?

The one you feed.

I believe the time to feed focus is long overdue. Specifically focusing on something other than fear. Something actually healthy for once. I understand people's concern with what has been going on and I don't want to underplay COVID's risks to certain segments of the populous but at this point it is time for a reset.

These past two years have been a good environment to be putting our heads down and building, like we have been doing. We have been immeasurably lucky with our timing. Imagining our lives trying to travel during the COVID-era within a world operating under tyrannical conditions, with closed borders and forced lockdowns becoming the norm, would've been far from enjoyable. We travel for freedom and the past two years have been anything but that. Couple everything above with us barely scraping by and being "starving" YouTubers sounds like an involuntary struggle perpetuated by scarcity. No thanks. We'd much rather our struggles be voluntary while sacrificing short-term pain for long-term abundance. That is our lives now with building a rental property portfolio to get back to sailing full-time again.

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Our living quarters for 2019-2021

We have multiplied our freedom tickets by over 5x since we left YouTube by way of voluntary discomfort, hard work and luck. We got lucky due to our timing with buying our first property in early 2019, prior to the recent real estate boom, and lucky again with locking in our refinance in the summer of 2021 with interest rates at their all-time lows. Our first property, the one we have called home for 3 years now, we purchased for $205,000 through a combination of cash savings (mostly from our boat sale) and a literal boatload of short-term debt. We lived in the property for near the entirety of the full-gut renovation. It was challenging but not as uncomfortable as living on a boat on land while renovating it.

Fast forward to today. After spending $175,000 on the rehab of our 1st property over the course of 2.5 years, we were appraised at $600,000 allowing us to cash-out every dollar we spent on the home and a nice chunk of cash on top. All of this was tax-free and at a 30-year rate of 2.5%. We then took the extra cash we made from our 1st DIY BRRRR property (Buy, renovate, rent, refinance, repeat) and bought a 1920s fixer-upper log cabin in the mountains. Our plan is to do the same thing again but this time around at much smaller $ figures with less short-term debt. The reason for wanting to size down is due to 2 factors.

Our 1920s Log Cabin

The first being conviction. Buying in late 2018/ early 2019, it was easy to formulate an investment thesis surrounding an eventual supply squeeze happening in the future as we haven't been building enough homes for a decade. Couple this with demographics showing Millennials coming into prime buying age and you have the market we are currently dealing with and likely to deal with for the coming years. Demand is far out weighing supply. The second factor being trying to scale our real estate business. We are under contract to buy a 3rd property, in close proximity to our first. This is all terrifying to us trying to buy multiple fixer-uppers for cash but we know this beats the hell out of the fear resulting from analysis paralysis and scarcity. We've been there. That was us in 2017 doing YouTube full-time, building no wealth and surviving. Back then we were feeding fear. Now we’re feeding focus by buying property for 70 cents on the dollar and force appreciating our properties through extensive DIY renovations.

Hard for housing prices to go down when we can’t meet demand.

Being rational throughout this whole Clusterfuck-19 has served us well. With the gift from nature that is omicron providing long overdue herd immunity and, on an individual basis, vaccines helping protect those who need it against serious illness and hospitalization, there is no reason we can't get on with our lives again. The question that takes up way too much rent in my head everyday is why haven't we gone back to normal yet? I don't have these answers because I'm not interested in trusting the "science" nor am I interested in engaging in most conspiracy. Although some conspiracy tastes a lot like truth nowadays.

I take issue with the current state of things because I want the average person to be able to pursue freedom. I know having daily fear shoved down our throats from our institutions results in the same world of scarcity as having your money lose 10% of its value each year. Inflation & COVID are massive freedom reducers. These two force you to feed fear and forget all about focus.

How hard have they made it for us focus on anything other than dodging COVID the past 2 years? With daily death counts thrown in our faces on every screen in our lives, how could this all not negatively effect us?

I think the past decade has painted the most convincing picture of what the most cherished commodity of the modern day is - attention. Think about the media playbook for 2020 until now. We went from WW3 with Iran to Covid to BLM back to Covid and now to Ukraine. Eventually we have to ween our corrupt media/social media off of our constant attention.

In a world heavily overdosed on fear, it pays to be the focused one. It’s long overdue to flip the script. It’s been two years. It’s time to flatten the fear.

60 Years Vs. 6 Months to Live

I'm always imagining what my life would look like if I ended up in a hospital bed under hard white LED lights. Then after having my body scanned by foreign machines a doctor I've never met before comes in to tell me I only had 6 months to live. It's up for debate if this is rational or if it'll worsen my millennial need for instant gratification, but regardless, it's an exercise I do often. Where it originates from probably has something to do with almost losing my brother to a traumatic brain injury at 18 years old and a best friend to cancer at 21 years old. Experiencing an event like the one I'm describing above really sharpens and refines what actually matters in our lives. The amount of focus you get after enduring something tragic like this can bring about a dramatic shift in our lives to living for the day.

By nature I’m eclectic. I love pursuing new ideas and starting new adventures. I'm afflicted with the shiny-object syndrome, so the idea of saving for tomorrow and investing for some future I may not even get the chance to enjoy doesn't come naturally for me. The issue is what I want most in life is the freedom and space to let myself wander then pursue whatever new thing I want to hunt at the moment. So how does one get that type of freedom? By doing the opposite of what feels natural - investing for tomorrow. By putting your money to work now so you can earn time in the future. Avoiding instant gratification and instead, learning to enjoy the rollercoaster of delayed gratification.

The issue is there's a fine line between an intentional amount of delayed gratification vs. just following procedure working 40+ years at a job we don't love for some financial advisor curated promised land in our 60s we don't even know we'll enjoy. Following procedure is not delayed gratification, that's life on autopilot. We all have a different tolerance for how long freedom and fun can be delayed. Some people can't delay it at all and that's a big reason why credit card debt exists, that's FOMO. For others, they can delay it for decades and a 1 week per year vacation is enough to hold them over. Either way, it's personal, and for us in the in-between of FOMO and Life on Autopilot, its a dichotomy.

For the past year and a half, 6-7 days a week I've spent working on our first investment property with Kelsey joining me when she gets off of work. It's been incredibly challenging mostly due to the fact we've never done any of this before and I'm naturally not very good with my hands. To date, this has been our biggest bet and toughest endeavor we've taken on. There have been mostly delays without much gratification at this point. We've been overwhelmed, beat up, and so far outside of our comfort zone with rebuilding an entire 1920s addition, doing foundation & structural work, and hauling over 40 tons of material from the house over a full year of demolition - and we still have 6 months of work left! When all is said and done, it will have taken us 2 years to finish this full-gut rehab of an 1862 row-home that we bought for 205k, put 150k into it, and will be worth ~550k when finished. 95% of the work that's been done has been done by us. Framing, coating the walls with over 7500 lbs of plaster, repairing our steel cornice at 32 feet in the air, moving 3 sets of staircases, opening up a 3-story load-bearing brick wall with a metal beam, pouring a new foundation - needless to say, we’ve had to use YouTube a lot. You can say we've come a long way in terms of handiness from our aft cabin conversion days.

Its Always Sunny in Philadelphia

Here we come to the crossroads of living for today vs. investing for tomorrow. Option 1: Sell and realize our gains in early 2021. After 2 years of us calling our construction zone home we will have the option of "flipping" and not paying anything in capital gains. In that scenario, we will have roughly 200k cash to our name, a 22' sailboat, zero debt and zero income. Option 2: Our original plan - rent it out and get a mortgage on it. If we did the 2nd option, we'd have around 125k in cash, no debt outside of a mortgage on our rental, plus $750 in monthly income from our renters. $3000 rent - $2000 PITI - 25% contingency for capex, maintenance, etc.

With 30 right around the corner for both of us, our wants are evolving, as they always should be. We still want to be self-reliant more than anything and are always going to be pursuing freedom over everything else, especially comfort. The issue with our previous lifestyle which was so heavily based on freedom is when vagabond became vagabum. When the mind shifts from an abundance of time, thought, and energy to a constant hoarding of money and resources in order to survive. Where your lack of resources steals from your freedom of doing whatever you want. We'd be the first to admit we were living the vagabum life at times, most notably in Key West on our boat with $1,000 to our names. We were "boat rich" and everything else broke.

Roo telling me to keep my eyes in the boat. Stay the course!

Our constant yearning for adventure will never cease but at the same time, the last thing we want is to end up where we were before, being mostly reliant on our passion, AC, for income. Granted this time around, if we did sell our property we'd have 200x more in savings compared to last time but still, neither of us is suffering enough (yet) to abandon our pursuit of financial freedom and get back to the location independence hunt just yet. So waiting until 60 for freedom isn't in the cards for us, but neither is going back to our lives 2 years ago, traveling full-time with a ton of freedom and next to no resources. Our pursuit lies somewhere between the two.

Happiness for us is to live in abundance, not scarcity. You can call it abundant minimalism or freedom maximalism. In order to live in abundance, one needs resources and money. The key is in knowing when we've made enough and not getting caught up in the insatiable pursuit of luxury & comfort. Knowing when we've sacrificed and delayed gratification enough then being able to flip a switch to say now is the time to go enjoy the fruits of our labor is something we're always going to be intentional about. We're constantly tweaking our blend of freedom and comfort. Its our constant iteration to form a perfect balance of living for today and investing for tomorrow. I'll let ya know if we ever figure it out.

The Death of The Middle Class

Once again, America is on the fast track to becoming a feudal society. A society in which there are two classes - the landlord and the tenant. The shareholder and the worker. The same wretched society in which our founding fathers fought to escape 250 years ago. The sad thing is it’s happening right in front of our own eyes as the stock market is up nearly +40% since mid-March while the economy has spiraled down to levels not seen since the Great Depression. There are over 40,000,000 Americans unemployed and last week the stock market printed a new all-time high. A society of have and have-nots. We all feel this happening but most of us don’t understand how or why.

America’s wealth and income inequality gap have substantially widened since the Great Recession in 2009. More people are unable to afford their deemed 'necessities' for living and thus the working and middle class share of debt has since exploded while the middle-class share of income has been reduced by a third. The middle class has been trading more debt for less income for the past decade and continues to do so at an alarming rate. If only our expectations adjusted at the same rate our income declined, we might not have ended up where we are today, trading status for freedom.

In 1970 the middle class’s share of income was 62% of the total pie. Now it is down to 43%, while the upper class's share has risen from 28% to 48%. The lower class is virtually unchanged, falling from 10% to 9%, meaning the upper class stole 20% of the middle class income over the past 40-50 years. While the middle and lower class had their share of debt rise, so too did the upper class. The difference between the two is the middle class has been using debt to maintain their status or previous lifestyle and the upper class has been using debt (or as they call it ‘cheap money’) as leverage to buy discounted assets. I wrote all about this debt dichotomy when I said there was a recession coming. So “they” bought appreciating assets to offset debt and the middle class bought depreciating brand-new hunks of steel we all need to have - vehicles of our own demise.

“Think what you do when you run in debt; you give to another power over your liberty.” - Benjamin Franklin

The middle class is deteriorating and is now on a path for certain death amongst the Millennial generation, the most indebted generation of all time. Congrats guys - we did it. If you know anything about our story you know we had over $50,000 in debt, consisting of mostly student debt, which we paid off in under a year and a half. So fellow millennials, don't expect too much sympathy here. Yes, we got dealt a bad hand by having to sign up for $10,000s of student loan debt at 18 but if we stop drinking and eating away all of our discretionary income every weekend having #experiences, and instead pay off that stifling 7% student debt we can take back our freedom. We can create our own middle class. Experiences > Things means actual experiences. Not eating at the same restaurant every month exploring some new item on the menu. How we create a new middle class is less bar money and more freedom bucks. Buy things that appreciate. Create. Consume less.

The recent rise of “The Shareholder Class” is the very definition of taking ownership. Buying shares in a publicly-traded company means you are an owner of a company, albeit a very small owner. Publicly traded companies have a newfound affinity for trading debt, ahem cheap money, for buying back shares of their corporation. This works because when you reduce the number of slices in a pizza, your slice becomes worth more - a win-win for everyone who has a slice. In this case, the pizza is the company and the slices are shares of stock. The key here is you have to be involved by owning a slice. Especially now since the Federal Reserve has more interest in bailing out publicly traded companies using your taxpayer money than they do in bailing out Main Street Americans. Corporate socialism is our sad, new reality but it isn't going anywhere.

Now for some, once they understand what is happening on this level they get all up in arms and demand America goes back to the gold standard or declare we need to embrace socialism. Buying gold now in the short run (>1 year) isn’t a bad investment at all but going back to the gold standard will never happen. Over the long run, pet rocks (precious metals) don’t appreciate, especially looking at a time period as promising as the next 5+ years once we’re done with this recession. As for socialism, our whole series is centered around our pursuit of freedom so I’d hope you understand where we stand on that. Either way in both cases we’re focusing on things we have zero control over. How can we change modern monetary theory? How can we change our oligarch-centered democracy by demanding socialism? I believe we can’t, at least not anytime soon. What can I say, I’m a poker player. Betting against the house isn’t something I believe in. Blaming the dealer for the hands we've been dealt with doesn't result in actual growth. Looking back on our past decisions does. Taking ownership and admitting we played our hand horribly is how change actually happens.

“The history book on the shelf, is always repeating itself.” - the always insightful ABBA

How we fight feudalization is how we fought against it in 1776. By embracing minimalism, self-reliance, and ownership. All the things we have 100% control over - how we spend our freedom bucks. We vote with our dollars. Demanding change from our fearless leaders will result in nothing but empty promises and a subtle playing on our heartstrings. A middle class won’t just magically re-appear, we the people must create it. In today’s world, freedom isn’t simply handed to you, you have to take it. Own it or keep betting against the house. I know where I’ll be placing my bets.

Why We Quit YouTube And Sold The Boat

‪It’s a shame how many people don’t like to hear about reality. Everything is romanticized nowadays from thought leaders on every side of media. Social media influencers, politicians, and celebrities are the guilty parties who love conjuring up emotions in pursuit of social media engagement. The disconnect between what we see on our screens and what we experience in our real lives, day-to-day, has never been wider. ‬We consume a diet of daily distractions that consistently steal from our ever-decreasing attention spans. The majority of the content we view breeds divisiveness and feeds irrationality to the most irrational species of them all, us humans. Everything is either black or white according to our screens and nothing is grey area or nuanced, like it is in reality. The issue is nothing is engaging about being in the middle. Nothing is engaging about our day-to-day real lives. So its hard to fault media and social media influencers for focusing on entertainment when all of their metrics are based on getting viewers to "engage”.

Our reality a year ago was to continue making $2,000/month with $3,000 in savings while sailing south from the Tortugas on a boat that we just funneled close to $50,000 into fixing up. Our other option was to take another leap of faith after thriving during the first 1,000nm of our sailing experiment and design the boat of our dreams while focusing more on our pursuit of financial independence. If we continued south from the Tortugas our series would’ve sailed down the usual entertainment route. We would have had the need to be cranking out fluffy, weekly content in order to survive - living in a mindset of scarcity. By this point in time, you'd be seeing videos of us on the hook probably in the Caribbean where our content would be 95% entertainment and 5% useful, actionable content. Simply put, we’d be adding to the entertainment overload that got us pissed off enough to start sharing our lives on the internet from the get-go.

An email from Jim (pictured in middle) asking for an AC update is prompting me to write this. We miss ya Jim!

My mindset over my short 28 years has been shaped into that of an entrepreneur. So before I start anything, I write down a mission statement. No, I don’t treat AC as a business, clearly, but these are tenements ingrained in me that shape my decision-making for everything I do. A mission statement serves as a lightship for when you’re reacting to the daily chaos that is running a business. Abandon Comfort’s “mission statement”, if you will, is to provide an actionable guide to living a great adventure. So you tell us what’s more actionable? Us sailing our $75,000 sailboat romanticizing our lives to a camera daily for you to drone out to after finishing another workday or us building a rental portfolio that allows us to not have to produce entertainment-based content while traveling on a $25,000 sailboat producing content to help you to accomplish your adventure dreams. Don't get me wrong we started watching YouTube travel channels as an escape from our unfulfilling 9-5s and theres a ton of merit in producing entertainment based content like most do on YouTube, but thats just not us. Nor will it ever be.

Eventually we’ll be back on the ‘tube with a whole new layer of financial transparency and a boat that defies all conventional old-salt wisdom for a third of the price of our previous boat. So trust in us that we have your best interests at heart and are always thinking from the viewer’s perspective. That is assuming you’re watching because you’re like us - fed up with the norm and realize you aren’t made to pay bills for the entirety of your life while saving for a 10-20 year retirement that you might be lucky enough to survive long enough to enjoy.

For now, our social media cleanse will continue. As will us abandoning comfort and embracing freedom. We have a handful of blog posts to put up when we get breaks from renovating our rental property/slowly working on our Falmouth Cutter so be sure to subscribe below to receive our posts via email. We’ll see you in 2020 with a couple of income-producing rental properties and our tiny sailboat that can take us anywhere!

The Process

In hindsight, being overwhelmed or in over our heads has never been a bad thing. The results we get from putting our heads down, embracing the suck and keeping the end goal in mind makes it all worth it. Short-term sacrifice for long-term gain is a trade off we will take everyday, especially in our 20s. Once again we find ourselves in this precarious - albeit, voluntarily precarious situation. How did we get here? Well, we first took on a boat that needed a lot of work with only half the year available to work on it (damn you winter). Then 6 months later we bought a 4 bedroom Airbnb investment property in my home city of brotherly love that required every ounce of cash we could muster up. We now have 2 massive projects on our hands, plus the most leverage we’ve ever had in our lives and are voluntarily overwhelmed.

Our end goal of being financially ‘free’ living aboard in the Caribbean and spending hurricane seasons in the mountains is as close as its ever been but for now it’s hard to see the light at the end of the tunnel. This moment - a moment of building, a moment of being entrenched in the process is why we decided to share our adventure online. No one actually shows the building phase of their adventure, just the entertaining end result of sailing or traveling the world. This results in us as viewers keying up a number of biases in our own minds, like survivorship bias and inner dialogue that amounts to self-limiting beliefs about how we can’t do what these people are doing because of...you name it. We’ve personally fallen victim to these biases more times than we can count.

I don't think its by design or the fact that other travel and sailing YouTube channels do this on purpose. The truth is no one wants to film themselves going to their 9-5 for multiple years then spending weekends not drinking their money away or dumping 75% of their paycheck on housing. And unfortunately, the majority of viewers on YouTube don't want to watch that every week. Entertainment is what the masses want and clicks are what creators need so in turn you get content made solely for entertainment, 99% of the time. This is the most profitable route as a creator and the path of least resistance. We’d be lying if we didn’t say we felt this happening with our content once we started to cruise the Keys & Tortugas last Spring.

‘In the end this will be worth it.’ and ‘Who told you this would be easy?’ seems to be our go-to self-talk lately. Spending Monday-Friday ripping out crumbling lath & plaster walls almost 150 years old in our Philly townhouse and then spending weekends making slow progress on new Luci has been a struggle. But it’s a struggle of the best kind. A struggle in which we own, embrace and enjoy.

“If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.” Thoreau

The Things That Matter

Minimalism has some really weird connotations and misconceptions. I think it stems from the word itself - minimalism. It conjures up this image of someone who lives with so little when in reality the opposite is true. The way in which I view minimalism is living a life where one only surrounds themselves with the things that truly matter.

Maximalism, is a much better way of describing minimalism. Meaning - getting the maximum value from the things that bring you the most happiness, or simply choosing to only surround yourself with those people, places or things. The path one takes to get to that level of understanding in their lives is one that is probably all over the map. For me, I think the roots of these ideals that now guide my life came about after almost losing my little brother to a severe traumatic brain injury and a few years later, a best friend to stage IV cancer. Life can be terribly fleeting and it was always so easy for me to forget that while pursuing a ‘successful’ life or career.

Remaining aware of that is something I still struggle with all the time. Whether it be pursuing financial independence or wanting to hit a milestone for our YouTube series or having a better week trading our investment account. But do these made-up metrics and clicks of an arrow on someone else’s screen actually matter? How much long-term happiness does that bring me?

Remembering that scarcity is simply something that has been sold to me has been paramount. I was over the moon to see us reach 10,000 subscribers but now I could easily focus on wanting us to have 90,000, then 100,000 - you get the idea. One milestone leads to another which leads to another which ultimately leads to this pursuit of the unattainable. It’s like focusing on the end goal instead of the process one takes to achieve that goal. There will never be enough with that mindset.

Its a constant, ongoing battle of reminding myself of the things that actually matter. A daily reminder of things to be grateful for helps me escape the clutches of scarcity and the unattainable. Being happy with what you have and not wanting what you don’t need is an age old recipe for happiness. And that’s ultimately all we should be pursuing - happiness.