The Greatest Investment Of My Life

This post isn't about something intangible like myself or my wife but actual dollars and cents. Friends, let me tell you about Cardano! Just kidding.

PD Mangan (@mangan150 on Twitter) had a few Tweets today about overcoming depression. In one of them he asked a rhetorical question along the lines of if you woke up, just worked out, swam in a cold lake and then had steak and eggs for breakfast, how depressed would you be? One of the replies tweaked that scenario to include hiking up a mountain back home from that lake and said that made him "less depressed" just thinking about it. 

 

There's all sorts of research that has been done about the many emotional benefits of spending time in nature or the woods or at the beach or in the mountains, believe the conclusions about that being positive or not, I certainly do. 

When I read that comment about "less depressed" my thought was, hope that guy figures out how to get to that mountain. I looked out our kitchen window and saw the view pictured above. The best investment we ever made was buying our first cabin in Walker in 1998. It was our second home, I was 32 and my wife was 26. We took some risks to do it. The risks were calculated but risks nonetheless. I took money out of my 401k for the down payment. I refused to take a loan from my 401k though because you can have serious problems if you have a loan outstanding and leave your job for any reason. To access the 401k I had to quit my job at Schwab and roll it over to an IRA. 

It took me a few weeks to get hired at Vanguard and as soon as I did, we bought the cabin. A few months later I went back to Schwab for much higher pay. The dollars involved were very small. The cabin was $87,000 and we put down $30,000. Of course it was more expensive than that because of the tax and penalty. Like I said, we took calculated risks. 

In 2001 I got laid off from Schwab, sold our house in Scottsdale while I went to work at Fisher Investments for most of 2002, keeping our cabin in Walker which we moved into full time late that year and have been living in Walker ever since. We bought our current cabin in 2012 and sold the first one in 2014. We were mortgage free from 2005 until we bought our current place in 2012 (two more payments on the current house and we'll be mortgage free again). 

If getting away to the mountains is good, living there full time must be better, I think it is anyway. 

So return on investment. We about doubled our money in nominal terms on the first cabin but factoring in improvements, mortgage interest for those few years and whatever else, we certainly didn't double our money in real terms. The return on the dollars invested was the lifestyle, the ability to be self employed, to set my own schedule, live where we want, incorporate volunteer firefighting into my life allowing my wife to work as a full time volunteer at the animal rescue. 

In a way we've been retired since 2002. Not really of course but without a doubt we've been financially independent not for having a lot of money, we're quite comfortable not loaded, but for always living below our means avoiding most lifestyle creep and most importantly, figuring out what our priorities were at a young age. 

Even before I had figured that stuff out I knew I wanted to end up in Walker. Joellyn's parents bought their cabin in 1981 and we had our second date there in 1991 and we got married there in 1993. We started to figure ourselves out which led to buying the first cabin when we did. 

I often write about playing the long game. We sort of played a long game landing here in 2002. Back in 1991, Joellyn never saw herself living in Walker but I certainly did even if I didn't know how that would happen. I've referred to getting laid off from Schwab in 2001 as the best thing to ever happen to me professionally. Only two years later we were living in Walker full time and I was managing a few accounts. Being on my own allowed me to find blogging and have the time do it and all the rest. Blogging made my career.

What is your time worth to you? Are you willing to invest dollars to own your time? That's what I feel like we did. I don't know if I could be making a lot more money in a big city but there would certainly more opportunity to do so but my independence and the other benefits that have come with it in our case are not worth the opportunity to potentially make more elsewhere. 

The return on the money taken out of that rollover IRA in 1998, tax and penalty and all, has been financial independence from a very early age. Note, I would say I have been working my ass off the entire time but doing work I want to do. If I'd been an FA at a brokerage firm in a city, I'd have spent most of my time prospecting and having sales calls trying to meet various quotas. That sounds awful to me. It sounds not remotely close to what I do and would not leave time for the other things I do that have made the last 20 years fantastic.

What is your version of this? What steps do you need to take? What calculated risks do you need to take? What sort of long game do you need to play? If you can empathize with "less depressed," what can you do to make changes?

Here's hoping you get after it, it will be the greatest investment of your life.