Selling a Rental We've Never Seen

We're finally back from our trip to northern Europe: three and a half weeks of travel hacked goodness spent with our good friends from Phoenix. We'll have some posts and plenty of pictures to share from the trip in the coming weeks.

But we first wanted to tell you about the sale of one of our rentals, that we managed to accomplish mostly via email and digital signatures, from a smartphone.

Let's start at the beginning. How did we come to even own this house?

Hard Externalities in a Long Supply Chain

USA Today recently put out a great in-depth report on short-haul trucking out of LA, called "Rigged". These are not the 18-wheelers you pass on a cross-country road trip, but rather trucks that take goods from a port in Southern California to local warehouses and rail yards: "one small step on their journey to a store near you." 

After taking on unexpected debt at the behest of their employers, these short-distance truckers became embroiled in what has been described as a modern day form of sharecropping: coerced into debt by employers who then used that debt to exploit them, and to keep the workers captive.

Our Trip to Asia

We're about to leave for our next travel hacked trip, thanks again to the help of Brad at Richmond Savers and ChooseFI. We're making a little loop in northern Europe, from Denmark, to Germany, then Sweden, Iceland, and Scotland. It'll be our last hurrah before we settle down and try to make Baby Done by Forty.

And I'm realizing I never bothered to write up a post on our last trip to Asia. We'll keep it short on the words and heavy on the pictures this time around, for some easy Monday morning scrolling.

Interview on LifeHacker

The sun has shined on our little blog, as Kristin Wong, she of LifeHacker and New York Times fame, asked to interview me recently on a post I wrote back in April: "Boredom, Cognitive Ability, and the Mental Retirement Effect". After Mrs. Done by Forty and I danced around the living room like children, and I texted every person I know to brag, I said yes.

You can read her piece, "Why Early Retirement Isn't as Awesome as It Sounds," along with all the rest of Kristin's excellent work, on the Two Cents section at LifeHacker.

Spending is Arbitrary

I really like the ChooseFI podcast. 

While I love me some Marketplace, Planet Money, and Stacking Benjamins, the ChooseFI show is the only podcast in my rotation where the specific issues impacting financial independence and early retirement are front and center. Plus, their opening music is indistinguishable from 1970's porn music, so it's got that going for it, which is nice. 

Stagnant Wages, Inequality, and Early Retirement

The other day the missus and I were browsing through our wage history on the Social Security Website, ssa.gov, because we are nerds. Or, at least I am, and my wife loves me enough to humor my personal finance oddities.

My first wages? All the way back in 1994, when I was earning $4.25 an hour busing tables on the weekends at King's: Pittsburgh's crummy version of a Denny's. (Our good version? Eat'n Park. If you have the opportunity, by all means try the salad bar, a coffee, and a smiley cookie.) Since then, it's been a fairly steady march towards higher and higher wages, with some big jumps coinciding with big life choices (leaving the public sector, turning my back on teaching, and selling out to become a corporate shill).

Boredom, Cognitive Ability, and the Mental Retirement Effect

Anybody bored these days? Me, neither. Things have been moving a good-but-hectic pace the last few months. Between all our house stuff, making a farmhouse table (credit to Mrs. Done by Forty for the cool stain and finish and our friends for all the distressing), work deciding to pick up out of nowhere, and learning how to maintain a pool on the fly, I don't have the gall to feel bored. At all. Every day has a list of things to keep me occupied, and I kind of like it.

Should I Stay in My Lane?

Sorry again for the long haitus. We have been juggling a lot with unpacking, getting ready for our housewarming party, which was lovely, building a farmhouse table in time for our party guests to distress with random tools, and selling our house. In case you were wondering, we went with option 2, selling to the investor for $225k, with them paying for all the closing costs.

There are never any good excuses for not writing for three whole weeks, but I suppose these reasons are better than most that I give. We're settling back in to a normal routine and I'm aiming to publish something new every Monday until our next trip in July. Here's to making it happen.

We Up and Bought a House

Cayenne doing her favorite thing: chilling in the yard.

It happened: we bought a new home. And we freaking love it already. Through nights of packing boxes, selling things on eBay and craigslist, and bringing carloads of donations to Goodwill, we've managed to get all our worldly possessions from one house to another thanks to some good friends, a couple pizzas, and a lot of hoppy beer. I'm writing this post from the back porch with my dog and a beverage, and it's downright idyllic.