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.