October 2021 Early Retirement Update – Spooky Time Edition

Fall is in full swing here and I’m loving it! We enjoyed a fun October and look forward to more of the same in November as Thanksgiving approaches. Throughout the month we spent lots of time lounging outside, going on long bike rides, and plugging away at our travel planning for 2022. 

We ended the month with some trick-or-treating. It’s nice to see all the old holiday traditions coming back to life after a rough 2020! 

Financially, last month was a great month. Net worth spiked upwards by $77,000 to end the month at $2,764,000. Income during the month totaled $3,049, which was only $2 more than the $3,047 we spent during October. 

Let’s jump into the details from last month.

Income

Investment income totaled $349 in October. Our equity index funds and ETFs pay dividends quarterly at the end of March, June, September, and December. As a result, we had a low investment income last month. Here’s more on our dividend investments.

Blog income totaled $945 for the month which was a little lower than average. Since I have posted two or three articles the past couple of months, blog revenue will be a bit higher in November and December when the advertising revenues post to my account. 

My early retirement lifestyle consulting income (“consulting”) totaled $1,060 in October. This income represents seven hours of consulting during the past month. That’s about one session of one or two hours per week, which is manageable given my goal to have a ton of leisure time. 

Tradeline sales income was $425 in October. I ramped up my tradeline sales last year and discussed it in a bit more detail in my October 2020 monthly post and in my July 2021 monthly post. Of that $425 total payment, $300 came from referrals that signed up with Boost Credit 101 and mentioned “Root of Good” as a referrer. Thanks to all of you that did so! And good luck making money with tradelines! 

For October, my “deposit income” totaled $133. Of this total, $33 came from cash back and incentive bonuses from the Rakuten.com and Mrrebates.com online shopping portals (some of which was earned from you readers signing up through these links). 

If you sign up for Rakuten through this link and make a qualifying $25 purchase through Rakuten, you’ll get a $10 sign up bonus. 

The remaining “deposit income” of $100 comes with a story. Think of a real-life Monopoly game where I land on “Community Chest”. I draw the Community Chest card and it reads: “Mom sells your family burial plot. Collect $100”. True story. My grandparents bought burial plots for the whole family decades ago.

But none of us in the younger generations plan to get buried in that cemetery hundreds of miles away in the foothills of North Carolina. So my mom sold all the remaining burial plots back to the family church in the mountains. My share of the proceeds totaled $100. 

My Youtube earnings were $135 last month. Here is the channel for the curious. It’s random travel videos, birds, kids, and a couple of DIY videos. There are only two main videos that bring in most of the traffic (and revenue!).

If you’re interested in tracking your income and expenses like I do, then check out Personal Capital (it’s free!). All of our savings and spending accounts (including checking, money market, and five credit cards) are all linked and updated in real time through Personal Capital. We have accounts all over the place, and Personal Capital makes it really easy to check on everything at one time.

Personal Capital is also a solid tool for investment management. Keeping track of our entire investment portfolio takes two clicks. If you haven’t signed up for the free Personal Capital service, check it out today (review here).

Tracking spending was one of the critical steps I took that allowed me to retire at 33. And it’s now easier than ever with Personal Capital.

Expenses

Now let’s take a look at October expenses:

 

In total, we spent $3,047 during October which is about $300 less than our regularly budgeted $3,333 per month (or $40,000 per year). Travel and groceries were the top two spending categories for last month (like many months in 2021!).

Detailed breakdown of spending:

Travel – $1,275:

Travel is back! 

At least we hope it is. 

We are deep into the process of planning our summer 2022 trip through Croatia, Slovenia, and Hungary. Last month we booked our flights to Europe. We fly into Zagreb, Croatia in June. The return trip home departs from Budapest, Hungary eight weeks later. We redeemed 60,000 American Airlines frequent flyer miles per ticket (times five tickets) plus $126 in taxes per person.

For lodging, we spent $389 on various gift card deals to obtain $425 worth of Airbnb gift cards. Chase had a $25 Chase Offers cash back deal on $250 of Best Buy purchases. And Raise.com had promotions that we took advantage of during October to snag even more discounted Airbnb gift cards (included in the $389 total spending on Airbnb gift cards).

We typically use several thousand dollars in Airbnb credit during a normal summer vacation, so these credits won’t go to waste. Right now we have accumulated $1,800 in Airbnb gift card credit. 

In early October, we applied for new passports for our two teenagers. One kid is over 16 so she was able to get an adult passport for $145 that is valid for 10 years. The other kid is just under 16 so she got a youth passport with 5 year validity at a slightly lower cost of $110.

We heard horror stories of multi-month delays when applying for our new passports. The US State Department even warned us that it would take 16 weeks for standard processing. Fortunately, they got our kids’ passports back in lightning fast time. It only took two weeks to get the youth passport and four weeks to get the adult passport. 

Groceries – $689:

Our grocery spending is slowly trending back down toward the $600 per month that we used to spend a year or two ago. I don’t think we’ll ever get back there given the recent food inflation, but at least we aren’t seeing the ~$900 grocery bills from August and September! 

I’m mostly seeing higher prices on meat. We still buy it because we can afford it. Prices for bread, pasta, and dairy hasn’t gone up too much (other than the price of milk). Fresh produce seems to have gone up in price. And I don’t see as many good sales on the stuff we routinely purchase. 

General Merchandise – $426:

This $426 in general merchandise spending consists of random things we buy throughout the month from Amazon and Walmart. Included in this catch-all category are things like bird food, toys, and cosmetics.

As part of the “general merchandise” spending, I bought $385 worth of Walmart gift cards at a discounted price of $354. Some of that total was spent in October. We’ll spend the rest of these gift cards in November and December most likely.

Utilities – $278:

The total utility spending was $278 last month.

We spent $117 on the electric bill, $44 on the natural gas bill (I paid two months of natural gas in October), and $118 for the water/sewer/trash bill. 

We are already seeing lower electric bills as the air conditioning usage dropped to zero by the end of October. Natural gas expenses will increase throughout the winter as we use the heat more frequently (including a few days so far in November!).

Healthcare/Medical/Dental – $187:

Our current 2021 healthcare premiums are $1.15 per month thanks to very generous Affordable Care Act subsidies that we receive due to our low ~$45,000 per year Adjusted Gross Income. The benefit of being “poor” on our tax return. For some reason Personal Capital rounded the $1.15 up to $2. 

The “American Rescue Plan Act” passed in March 2021 makes the Affordable Care Act premiums even cheaper through 2022. Households with modified adjusted gross incomes (MAGI) below 150% of the federal poverty level get some silver-level health insurance plans completely free. We opted for a slightly more expensive silver plan that comes with $1,000 in cash back incentive rewards. Our total cost is just over $1 per month now!

The bulk of the medical/dental spending last month came from a $186 dental visit for Mrs. Root of Good. Dental care is one area where we are noticing a lot of inflation. The days of the $99 cleaning/x-ray/exam special are long gone! I’ll be looking much more closely at dental insurance during the annual enrollment period this fall. In the past the cost of 2 cleanings per year was about the same as the cost of insurance. With rising prices we might actually save quite a bit by buying insurance.

Clothing/Shoes – $123:

Time for new shoes for the three ladies in the house. The total came to $123 for three pair of Saucony shoes. 

Restaurants – $34:

I spent $22 for a $25 gift card for a pizza place from Raise.com (discount was almost $3 plus I got cashback on the purchase).

Mrs. Root of Good and I took a mini-vacation in Raleigh one fine fall day. After strolling around downtown, we headed over to the NC Seafood Restaurant at the nearby State Farmer’s Market and split a big plate of fried popcorn shrimp and hushpuppies for $12 total.

It was such a beautiful day, we ate at a picnic table outside. Our kids really don’t like seafood so we didn’t feel too guilty about enjoying a quiet meal without them. 

Entertainment – $34:

We invited people over to our house for a campfire. 

I ordered pizza for $28 and picked up $6 worth of glow sticks from Dollar Tree. 

Home Maintenance – $4:

I filled the lawnmower gas can with just over a gallon of gas at the neighborhood gas station. I didn’t even check prices before I rode my bike up there.

Gas – $0:

Other than the gallon of gas for the lawnmower, I didn’t buy any more gas during last month. I’ll need to top up the van in November or December, however. 

Cable/Satellite – $0:

We generally pay $18 per month for a local reduced rate package due to having a lower income and having kids. 30 mbit/s download, 4 mbit/s upload. Right now the cost of the internet service is temporarily reduced to $0 due to the “Emergency Broadband Benefit”. 

Total Spending for 2021 – Year to Date

Our spending totaled $24,068 for the first ten months of the year. This is about $9,000 less than the $33,333 we budgeted for ten months of spending in our $40,000 annual early retirement budget.

We are still on track to finish the year under our $40,000 yearly budget. If I were to guess, I would say we will probably end the year at $30,000 to $32,000 annual spending. 

We are pressing forward with our travel bookings for summer 2022 in Europe. We’ll probably spend around $4,000 to $5,000 on lodging and $1,000 for a rental car and some bus tickets. Some of the lodging expense will hit the accounts in 2021 as we hope to start booking places in Europe pretty soon. 

I’m still keeping my eyes open for a second car, but not finding much out there. I have a hard time paying $6,000+ for 14 year old cars with high mileage (my most recent “exciting” car find until I looked up the Blue Book price!). Maybe we’ll spend another $6,000 to $10,000 on a used car this year if the right one finds us. 

Monthly Expense Summary for 2021:

Summary of annual spending from all years of early retirement:

Net Worth: $2,764,000 (+$77,000)

On the heels of a $38,000 drop in net worth in September, our investments came roaring back in October with a $77,000 gain. Our total net worth climbed to $2,764,000 by month end. Another all time high! 

For the curious, our net worth reported above includes our home value (which is fully paid off). However, please note that I don’t consider my home value as part of my portfolio for “4% rule” calculation purposes. I realize folks ask me about that every month so I just wanted to state that here for clarity.

The stock market really took off during October and so far in November it’s continuing the strong upward trend. 

Hitting these new all time highs has me feeling like the stock market is set for a fall at any time. It just feels overvalued. I haven’t really done much in response to my emotional take on the market, however.

I’m notoriously bad at timing the stock market so I’ll just stay almost fully invested (with a ~10% slice of the portfolio in cash and bonds). A heavy stock allocation got me to financial independence, and it’ll likely turn out just fine if we spend a while in a higher-than-baseline inflation environment. 

And if the stock market crashes tomorrow, at least I’ll have that ~10% in fixed income to get me through a six or seven year period of poor equity returns.

Diversification at work! 

Life update

Time flies when you’re having fun! I can’t believe we are less than two months away from the start of 2022. 

Life feels like it’s mostly back to normal. Mrs. Root of Good and I got our booster shots last month, so our worry level is on the decline in a big way. Our nine year old just got his first dose, which helps alleviate any fear that he brings home something unpleasant from school. By the time we depart for our Christmas cruise in mid-December, he’ll be fully vaccinated along with the rest of us. 

Of course, I say life is “mostly” back to normal. Even now, we have had a couple of recent social events with family and friends cancelled because of positive test results.

Make plans, hope for the best, and be flexible. That’s all we can do right now. 2021 has been a blast overall, uncertainty notwithstanding. 

We’re hosting a big family Thanksgiving gathering at our house in a couple of weeks. In November we usually have amazing weather outdoors. We’ll spread out the turkey, mashed potatoes, gravy, stuffing, mac n cheese and cakes and pies on tables in the backyard and hang out in the grass under the trees. That’s the plan at least! 

That’s it for this month. See you next month! 

Are you enjoying fall? Looking forward to the upcoming holidays? 

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