Forty thousand

Joining the two comma club

Today marked a milestone for Missus and I, as today’s rally put our net worth over one million dollars. On paper, anyways. Most of our assets are in our retirement funds, and the house, but even counting our mortgage debt and my student loans we’re over the line. It’s nice to be able to realize this goal, even though it seems a bit late considering my younger ambitions. Still, it’s a good milestone, and we’ve got a ways to go. I won’t be quitting my job yet, of course, but I can already see the end of the tunnel.

Market wise, BTC pierced forty by a couple hundred dollars and dumped down to the low thirty sixes in a matter of minutes. I managed to buy the dip on Voyager, while Coinbase, Kraken and others were down, apparently.

Binance finally did a “sweep” and nabbed my American IP, so now I have to get funds off of it. That’s what I get for not using an VPN. Got most of my funds off there but need to setup some wallets for a couple of them that I can’t trade. That’s life.

Of course everyone was up in arms about the insurrection yesterday. The house down the street, the one with the TRUMP 2020 sign in front of it for like three years now, had it’s flag at half-mast. And then once Trump was let out of Twitter jail an hour ago, he put up a concession speech. I guess someone threatened him with the 25th Amendment, or jail. He’s still got two weeks, I wonder if there’s time for him to be the only president impeached twice. Here’s hoping. Hopefully this will be the last time I ever need to give a shit what he says. Done, next.

Lastly, I just want to leave this Stone Ridge 2020 Shareholders’ Letter. I’m forwarding it to some people cause I think it does a great job explaining bitcoin and our current macroeconomic situation. The last third is about Stone Ridge, but everything else is pure gold.

Thirty seven thousand

Insurrection in the Capital

Well, I’m not even sure what to say, other than this day will live in infamy for some time. Trump supporters storming the Capitol building today, trying to stop the Electoral College vote for Biden. Shameless. I went to bed last night feeling slightly neutral about the Senate elections in Georgia, and woke up to see a big ATH spike in the bitcoin price around the time that the results came in for Warnock. Ossoff was favored as well. It was another busy day at work, markets were up, everything was pretty good around the house, and then MAGAts started swarming the Capitol. The afternoon and this evening were taken up. Even now, Missus is on the couch watching Senate remarks on PBS.

My Twitter feed has been a complete clusterfuck. Kinda hard to shitpost about crypto when the President is inciting violence in the street. We are in full-on Fourth Turning crisis mode now. There’s a part of me that thinks that this is too far, that Trump isn’t going to get away with it. Most of the establishment Republicans are condemning the violence, with the notable exception of Ted Cruz, so maybe all this talk about the 25th Amendment and impeachment might have some teeth. Early indications is that Pence has broken from the President, finally, so it doesn’t seem like Trump will be getting any pardons. We’ll see.

I’ve stayed off my normie feed today. I don’t feel the slightest urge to engage anyone right now. I’ve been holding back to urge to message my quaranteam dad down the street and ask him if he’s still a “Trump fan”, or to berate my dad and brother that “this is what we get cause you couldn’t have a woman president.” It’s too much. Missus said it feels like 911, so she’s going to be up all night watching the news and staying on social media.

Every day we ask why we’re working. Like seriously, what the fuck is going on? I haven’t spoken to my boss about bitcoin since before my vacation. I’m sure he’s seen the news. He must be thinking about my comments about retiring this year. I wonder if he’s realized that I’m not joking. We’ll see how tonight goes. I may not even bother working tomorrow. Maybe I’ll put in a half day and take Friday off. I just feel like striking. I feel pretty angry right now.

Last night, after I finished writing, I went back and looked at my posts from a year ago. One of them was about my 2020 goals. Looks like I’m three for eleven right now:

  1. Finished my degree. +1
  2. Did not get a raise. I suppose that staying home with the kids out of daycare was sort of like a raise. I cut expenses quite a bit with that, saying home and getting rid of the car, so it was almost like a raise. More money in my pocket anyways. Still, I think the goal was to assert myself, so -1 there.
  3. Find a new job. Failed the Sixty Days to Six Figures goal that I set for myself. Gave up looking after I convinced myself that I’m happy working for lower pay with more freedom.
  4. Freelance work. I’m neutral on this one. I did do some work here, but it all trailed off near the end of the year. WordPress management isn’t what I want to be doing anyways, so I don’t feel like this one is too bad. +0
  5. Younger still sleeps in the bed with us, she creeps in during the middle of the night. This year is the year. -1
  6. Elder the defiant: man she is willful. Being home during COVID has been good, overall. I feel like we have a better relationship. We’re not dealing with the stress of morning chores, and getting out of the house so I can get to work at the proscribed time. She, and her sister, still have their days, but we’re coping much better, and I’m not abusing them the way I was abused as a child, so that’s a plus. Actually going to give a +1 on this one.
  7. Meditate: +1. I’ll have to look up whether I did the 60 for 60 this year or not, but despite a lapse, I’ve been doing twenty minutes quite regularly this year. I’ve even been doing an extra evening session the last two days, since I’ve been writing at night.
  8. Exercise: -1. Not enough, not regularly. Need to do something about this since I’m no spring chicken.
  9. The drink: Let’s be honest, -1. I’m still drinking myself to an early grave. It’s a problem.
  10. Piano: +1. I managed to work through four or five Bach pieces, plus re-learned Fur Elise again. And I’m about three quarters through memorizing Claire De Lune. It’s been slow going getting through it, and I’ll probably need another year to play it comfortably, but this year I want to learn how to play Let It Go, just so the girls can play along. Elder has been doing really well learning as well; I’m not pushing her as hard, but she’s starting to push herself. I’m trying how to figure out how to get Younger going as well. That will be fun.
  11. Writing/blogging. +1. I didn’t write every day, but I just passed four hundred posts. My original goal was two hundred words, and I’m easily writing four times that, so I’m going to give myself that one. I wish I had a word count. I started and abandoned a substack, more from fear than procrastination — I’m trying to hype myself up to write. If I keep this up I’ll convince myself I have a book in me. One day.

So it looks like it’s a wash, as far as my planned goals were. Overall, I have to hand it to myself. We were extremely fortunate, and lucky. We not only survived 2020, but we flourished. Our family has grown tighter, and I cannot overstate the level of financial security that we’ve achieved. It’s really hard to overstate. I mean, we’re not multi-millionaires, (yet) but the amount of money that we were able to save coupled with the gains that I’ve been able to accumulate in the equity and crypto markets is life-changing.

It’s really hard to complain about anything. Even on a day like today.

Thirty four thousand

Well, today was interesting. Markets blew up again, I was up six months salary in my IRA thanks to MARA, RIOT, and my various Grayscale holdings. Three more days like this and I’ll have hit a goal that I set for myself that I made when I was in my twenties, to be a millionaire. On paper, anyways. Half of that will be tied up in retirement accounts, a quarter in real estate. Only the last quarter would be liquid, and I dare not sell any of the rest of it, both for fear of capital gains and being left behind. Thankfully lending platforms give us some options.

The main goal remains to work and wait, to accumulate enough assets that can generate enough income-generating yield to cover the bills, mainly the mortgage and day-to day expenses. And there’s the student loan debt, should it ever come due. It looks like the Dems are favored to win in Georgia tonight, so who knows what Biden will do with a Congressional and Senate majority. Print more money, that’s for sure. I’m not so sure about student loan forgiveness, maybe. Permanent stimulus? I’d rather see universal healthcare. That’s the only question for our family. Healthcare remains the biggest question mark in our early retirement plans. What to do? What country with socialized medicine should we move to? It’s hard to say at this point. I still have hope that the US will do the right thing, but probably too late. Alas.

I made a bit of a post-New Years Resolution earlier, that every time I bought alcohol I would buy the same amount in bitcoin. It’s probably my one vice right now, and my worst from a health standpoint, and I figured this would be a good way to stack and cut down at the same time. So when I opened a bottle of Merlot for dinner tonight, I made sure to pull out my Voyager app and sell ten dollars of USDC to buy BTC. We’ll see how this works.

I was inspired by talking to my friend, E., yesterday. He had told me that he wanted to quit his smoking habit so he could buy bitcoin a few weeks ago, and I followed up with him to see how that was going. He was scheduling a doctor’s appointment to get a prescription to help him. I told Missus, and she said that if he follows up with it and does it then he’ll literally owe me his life. We drink a lot, and she remarked how much we would save if we stopped drinking. I said I’d start buying bitcoin every time I bought beer. Either we’d wind up too cash poor to get drunk, or maybe too rich to care.

I also talked to my friend T. for the first time in several months to catch up. I told him I was almost ready to retire. He laughed, I said, no, I’m serious. He got quiet for minute. I told him how things were going and he disclosed that he’d been into crypto as well. “I had the chance to buy a couple coins back when it was two thou and I didn’t. Really regret it now.” He told me he had a Kraken account now and I was impressed, so I asked him what bags he was holding. Bitcoin, Ethereum, some Chainlink, and Polkadot, he told me. Now I was really impressed. Proud, really. He told me he was sober for four years, it was probably about how long since we had really hung out.

I finished another Expanse book last night, and since Missus was reading Ready Player Two on my iPad, I picked up the copy of the Almanack of Naval Ravikant. It put a lot of things in perspective, and said some things that I’d been trying to get out of my head, much more eloquently than I’d been able to. It was the part about work, of course. Optimize your work for freedom, not money. It’s one that I’ve been living by for some time. Every year that goes by without a raise, and I take my raise by decreasing the amount of time I spend working. Basically, I’m increasing the internal wage that I feel I’m worth, and decreasing the amount of time I spend working. That’s not to say that I’m not getting things done. I’m just separating the inputs from the outputs, which is another big concept that he talks about. It’s about finding leverage, always learning, and building a unique skill set that places you apart from others. It also explains why I hate support calls so much. The inputs are bound tightly to the inputs. The problems they fix aren’t easily replicated; it’s hard to build any sort of leverage that can scale. It’s got me thinking though.

I think that’s part of the reason I’m so frustrated recently. I’ve been unable to make that trade. I took my current job out of necessity – I was unemployed and my first daughter was three months old. It’s been eight years, and I haven’t been able to bring myself to leave. I told Missus I had been looking at various opportunities out there and that I might be close to finding something that would give me a raise at a part time schedule, and she basically told me I was full of shit. I keep trying to tell her that there are opportunities out there for her as well, but she remains convinced that she’s not going to find a job that beats her cushy gov’t post. She feels that she’s already at the top of the pay scale in her field, she doesn’t want to take on the responsibility in a management role, and no private firm is going to match her benefits package. She might be right, but then again, I might be also.

I keep thinking about this chart from @vgr, and thinking that I see way too much of myself in the ‘dark’ column. “Fail to launch,” is me. Not in my personal or professional life, quite the opposite, really, but more from the position that I’ve never launched anything, despite all my idea. Lack of execution. I’ve got that @jason quote in my Twitter bio: starting is easy, finishing is hard,” and yet it’s hard for me to think of anything that I’ve actually shipped. Sure, I’ve finished lots of implementation projects for clients over the years, but when it comes to building something that people want to use and actually shipping it, I’ve failed miserably. Maybe that’s why I get such a fulfillment from getting Github commits on projects that I use, it’s my way of adding a little stamp to a project. I haven’t stuck around for anything though, I always move on to the next thing.

Maybe this writing will help change that. Maybe I can continue to hone my ideas and use this as a way to drive that habit home, focus my ideas and figure out what to leave behind so that I can finish something. I honestly don’t see how that happens unless I’m willing to make a drastic change. Between the job and the kids, something has to give. I’m doing too much. Maybe Twitter is the problem. I spend a lot of time there, but I justify it by saying that I’m getting a lot out of it. I think I know I’m lying to myself. Maybe it’s time for a reread of Atomic Habits and Digital Minimalism. Maybe it’s time for me to shut all that shit off until I work on my own project for x hours a day. I’ve been working on this recovery project for work for two days now, so it’s not like I don’t have the drive or ability. I think it’s just that the reward is so immediate. Ten hours at double the hourly rate, payable to Bossmang, to pay my salary for two and a half weeks. Meanwhile my personal net worth goes to the moon with every tick of a green candle.

This shit cannot continue.

New Year

I can’t believe that we’re already four days into 2020, and I haven’t written a thing since Dec 30th. That’s not a very good way to start the New Year, that’s for sure. My vacation is officially over, as hard as it was to go back to work today. I don’t have fuck you money yet, so I still have to call it in every day. We’re close though. Last time I wrote, BTC was at twenty-nine thou, and in the days since it almost topped thirty five, bounced back to twenty-seven, and is now already back almost to thirty three. Oh, and ETH is at eleven hundred dollars. So we’re looking really good. Just a simple 2x from here outta do it, promise.

New Years was fun. We bought thirty dollars worth of junk food and party favors from the Dollar Store, then tuned in a YouTube feed of a countdown clock to ring in the new year along with Germany, so that the kids could celebrate it here 6AM local time. Friday we drove up to Missus’s dad’s (FIL) house up at the ski resort. The weather was bad, so we didn’t plan on skiing, although we did gear up the kids and let them putter around by the ski lifts just to get acclimated and comfortable for about half a hour. We’ll come back up in a few weeks when they’ve got some fresh powder, the man went crazy and stocked up on skis and equipment, with close to two dozen pairs of skis and half as many boots. What can I say, the man does nothing half-assed.

FIL asked me “how was work”, and I unloaded on that one, I tell you. A load of shit that I deal with when I’m not doing the stuff that I really want to do. The same story I tell myself, that I’m just there to save up as much money as possible so I can quit in the next couple months and do something where I don’t have to deal with the same trivial-ass problems that are other people’s emergencies.

Missus warned me not to “talk about how rich we are” with him, which is ironic considering how the man throws his wealth around. I couldn’t hide it, I had thousand-dollar alerts setup on TradingView, I woke up Saturday morning to thirty thousand, thirty-one hit like an hour later and just kept going. I was in a bit of shock.

Then I found out my dad’s sister died unexpectedly. I’m not sure I even know how to start unpacking all that right now. We weren’t close; I had estranged from her some years ago due to some bad decision making on her part, and I don’t talk to the clan back home very often. I think it messed me up a bit, considering that my dad just got out of the hospital and I talked to my grandmother for the first time in a year the day before. I think I was mostly feeling selfish for the news interrupting what was otherwise supposed to be a relaxing getaway. I called my dad, sent text messages to my cousins and brother, but didn’t call anybody. Couldn’t be bothered to since I was away, and have kept finding excuses since I’ve been back. Last time someone in the family died was my grandfather, over twenty years ago, and it’s not like I can just pack up and drive eleven hours for a funeral in the midst of a pandemic. Everyone back home was trying to be so careful, avoiding Thanksgiving and Christmas gatherings, and then she just drops dead on New Years Eve.

It seems almost absurd to go back to talking about my day and what the markets did and blah, blah, blah, following that, but life goes on. I meditated, shed a tear, then tried to get on with things as best I could for the rest of the trip. Leaving felt like a dream, I was having a bout of hyper-realism when we took off for the three hour drive. And back at the house today, trying to go back to my regular routine, like this is life, this is all there is.

I’d like to do an annual retrospective or review. What did I do well this year? What did I do badly? What do I hope to improve next year? That sort of thing. I’m not sure I have it in me to do that today. I know I increased my wealth by an staggering amount, even if most of it is in an account that I won’t touch for another twenty years, and the rest is something that I dare not sell until I’ve got the balls to do something radical like quit my job.

As if to drive the point home, last night I get a text message from someone. Ex-client, quit us two years ago cause our services were too steep. Is this el? Server down. Need help. I almost said nope, sorry, but didn’t. Bossmang still needs the business, and I still need the job, even if I would rather sit on unemployment for a few weeks, stacking sats and spending more time with the kids. So I took the call, and spent most of the day dealing with his emergency on top of everything else that happened while I was on vacation, trying to maintain my calm while all of that was going on and the kids were doing their best to destroy the house and make skunk-faces at me every time I asked them to do something.

Just another day in the life, I suppose.