Wed, Jan 12, Still tired and some accomplishments

 This week has felt fast but also long and tiring. We got early paid today, so that was awesome!

Took another look at my expenses comparison.

I spent over $300 in gas this year. I know people complain about gas, but the cost is so nominal to me. The thing that was funny is I spent a little more in gas this year working remotely, and not even living here for 3 months than I did in 2017 when I was working full time out of the house. How funny!

I guess I can keep an eye on it. I don't want it to skyrocket to $500/yr or something, but I hope the cost stays low. 

So another point for my small town. My Food Lion and McDonald's are walking distance, I just never walk to them. 

Even though I don't have prospects for friends even for my Seattle trip when I was clicking around looking at place to see if I felt anything, I did! It was exciting to look at all the cool apartments. I think APL said it best about getting to stay in much nicer apartments with these rentals. I like that part alot.

I wasn't sure when I was first making Travel Plans for 2023 if I would want to stay by the lake or downtown. I think since it'll still be cool outside, I want to stay downtown and have a really nice view, preferably of the water. 

A balcony would be nice too.

So far, the prices don't seem to differ too much. But because my friend prospect is zero, I think 6 weeks is looking more likely. I just need work to cooperate. 

I discovered that when I have to create content, I much prefer working in my own home office with multiple screens. But for more operational tasks, I can manage on one screen. The original plan was to get a second screen that's portable but we shall see. If the Seattle trips are something I plan on doing yearly, then yeah, it'll be nice to have the tools, but as it stands, it'll probably be my last trip this year. 

The Burning Desire to build a community has sufficiently waned to zero. So returning to Seattle doesn't make sense after this year.

That realization is a bit of an accomplishment. Although, I hesitate to postulate too far into the future. But I think I will do more cooking this time around since I won't be focusing on dating.

Did I tell you I already bought series iBonds for the year. I really wanted to reach out to Dan to talk about it but with money stuff, I didn't want to get feelings involved. And when I thought about it more, the FIRE Cash Stash is okay being in iBonds since I can access the ones from 2021 and 2022 without missing out on the expected gains. 

Plus the iBond rate was a bit higher than the current brokered CD rate, so the math made sense. I think I was a bit concerned that the CD rates would go way up past the iBond rate. I don't know the math on the likeliness of that happening.

It's just recently that I learned that with high inflation comes high savings interest rates because the government wants to encourage you to save money! I'm happy to oblige! It seems it's all inversely related. When "feds raise rates", it means it cost more to borrow money but you tend to see higher savings account interest rates. I'm sure there's some rationale behind it but it's not really my concern. 

Maybe banks need to offer high savings rate to get more of our money. Fine by me!

I really like listening or reading to PF media where people are settling into their financial plans and not chasing more because I feel like that's where I am. 

It would've been really cool to have a real person to benchmark stuff with, but I guess the online community was the next best thing. 

I'm so glad I'm out of the fire with FIRE. 

It feels good to just coast to the next milestone without despair.

(I'm a woman living with depression.)

I've been looking for a tool to track my time. Not sure why yet since most of it is spent online watching TV or reading posts. 

But I'm trying it out on Google Calendar for now. After adding a few entries, it felt silly to include just how much time I spent on "Leisure" since that's the bulk of my time! So I just left that as the default white space. 

I guess maybe I'm hoping measuring things will help me gain and keep perspective the same way it does with my finances. Although, I will say, I have not done much reflection on my expenses lately.

As long as it's kind of within my means, I'm not spending as much time trying to hit any specific goals or targets. 

Oh so for Egypt and the fact that I'd be traveling six weeks after I fully recover makes me feel even more affirmed that an international trip in March is not a good idea. I might table it for anytime after March to December.

But I did kind of like the idea of spending my birthday somewhere. Since I have no friends to consider, I decided to just go ahead and use my 1 week Landing stay at one of the rentals in Wilmington. Beach vacations aren't really my go to, but I wanted to burn the free-stay and not fly anywhere or drive more than 3 hours.

It'll still be cool here so I'm not putting any expectations on the trip.

I haven't contacted Landing yet, but I'll add it to my mental to-do list for after I recover. 

I think I'll give myself a loose budget of about $500 in case I feel like eating out a bunch. But likely, I'll take some snacks and a few ebooks. I hope I get somewhere with a balcony and a view of the water. That'll be nice.

I think I've been enjoying this idea of a pretend beach/lake house... so I guess waterfront house. If Landing had a rental in Asheville, I'd be more tempted to do a nature house, but oh well. I didn't want to spend too much time thinking about it.

I'm hoping my projects will be in a good place that I'll be able to relax. I think that's another good reason to wait.

My current 2 projects should be wrapping up around mid-Feb, so I hope by then I'll have a better idea of my workload.

I'm still figuring out my credit card hacking/ award travel scheme.

It wasn't really in my plans for 2023, so I think for now, I just want to loosely see if I can get 100k miles for this year to use in 2024.

Since the cards were harder for me to obtain than I thought, I'm still trying to figure out how to best focus my energy to remediate my credit worthiness. 

As for this year,  any sort of bonus would be nice, but I am just loosely trying to stay in or under my budget for last year. I think I should easily be able to cut my airfare expenses in half vs last year because I shouldn't be taking 4 trips to Seattle. 

So yeah, at the very least I'll qualify for some kind of card or cards this year and just plan to keep them open. 

I don't want to stress myself out too much trying to figure it all out right now.

But yeah, friends, that's my week so far. Eventhough I was off sick a lot of last week, I am so happy we get Monday off. This week was really draining. 

And I can't believe I already got paid for this year. Life is good!