At the end of 2020, I was hoping for the next year to be more relaxed. 2020 seemed pretty intense for a lot of reasons, and while I am firmly on the side of not wanting to go back to what used to be considered “normal” in many ways, I was hoping vaccines and other developments would bring back some of the things I liked about the old way of things. Maybe more time with friends and some international travel?
Needless to say, that was not what 2021 had in store for us! The year kicked off with political turmoil and upheaval and continued full bore ahead with new waves and COVID variants seemingly around every corner. The year also included a lot of challenges, illness, and loss of loved ones on a personal level. Despite all this, 2021 was also an amazing year packed with exciting and sometimes unexpected adventures, massive personal growth, new friends, and eclipsing financial milestones.
Thankfully, along my journey so far I have picked up mental and emotional tools that have helped me cope with the challenges, an amazing support group of family and friends, and a framework for financial wizardry that keeps us nimble, adaptable, and antifragile in the face of challenges. I’ve had the luck to be dealt good cards and take advantage of many of the opportunities life has thrown my way or learn from those I missed. I’m deeply grateful.
This is my fourth year posting my annual review publicly. As usual, I’ll follow this format:
- What went well?
- What didn’t go well?
- What did I learn?
Here are the highlights:
- The pandemic has been great for us financially, and we’re on the brink of retirement
- I started grad school (the main reason I haven’t been posting)
- Began hosting live yoga events and teaching again
- Went on some amazing vacations
- Health challenges and the loss of loved ones
- Missed some valuable opportunities
- Tremendous learning and growth
What went well in 2021
Nearing Financial Independence
One thing that’s been a bit surreal during the pandemic is to see the huge disparity in economic outcomes for people. Especially during the beginning of the pandemic, many people were desperately struggling and seeing wealth and stability evaporate before their eyes, and many people are still experiencing this or dealing with the repercussions today. At the same time, many people have seen their wealth climb to new heights. Thankfully, our story has been the latter, and 2021 ushered in unprecedented growth.
From January 1st of 2021 to January 1st of 2022, our net worth increased by over 40% and we reached 90% of our retirement goal! At the zenith, it was well over 50% growth and over 95% of the way to our goal. This is despite the fact Mrs. Wallet still hasn’t been able to find a job due to the pandemic. So even having our income reduced by roughly one-third for two years, we’ve been able to continue to live frugally, save and invest heavily, and continue and even hasten our sprint toward financial independence. This is truly remarkable and a source of deep gratitude. Building a frugal, adaptable, and resilient financial lifestyle and saving and investing a massive portion of our income is paying us huge dividends in terms of freedom and security.
A lot of factors have played into this success, many or even most of them beyond our control. Government benefits over the last two years have been very helpful, and in 2021 we were able to take care of COVID Mortgage Forbearance. This has allowed us to supercharge our savings and investments in a way we wouldn’t have been able to otherwise. There have also been many other exciting milestones like being promoted, deepening our investments in crypto and decentralized finance, crossing over a year of solar ownership, and crossing over three years of homeownership and landlording, but those will have to wait for another post!
Starting Grad School
While I hadn’t expected to consider grad school until after retirement, I also didn’t expect a global pandemic or many of the other things the last two years have thrown at us! Through a confluence of events, I ended up applying to and enrolling in the MS Analytics program at the Georgia Institute of Technology. I already work as a data scientist, so the primary goals were to polish my mathematical and statistical pedigree and convince upper management that I’m still learning, growing, and (most importantly) worth promoting! 👨🎓🥳
My first year of grad school went well, and Georgia Tech has a great program. Thankfully, my job mostly finances the venture, and I love learning! While it’s been great to dive deeper into these areas, grad school is also a lot of work (surprise!), especially if you haven’t actually learned all the prerequisite math. 😅 This has kept me incredibly busy in 2021 and absolutely led to some lost sleep but also a lot of learning. Unsurprisingly, this is the primary reason nothing got posted to this blog in 2021.
A Return to Live Events
Prior to the pandemic, one of Mrs. Wallet and my primary pursuits was learning and teaching Tantra (a form of yoga), which has had a profound impact on our life. Sadly, as with most live events, we stopped meeting in person during the pandemic. This continued for about a year and a half, but in the last quarter or so of 2021, we began hosting live events again.
We had deeply missed these events and the growth and connection they offered, so this was a joy and a relief. We reconnected with the community and had our own profound experiences and growth. While Mrs. Wallet and I had taught smaller events in Houston and helped throw larger ones in Austin, we had only been the primary teachers once before. 2021 saw some radical changes to the structure of our organization, we made new friends, and brought on new teachers.
Toward the end of the year, it looked like we would begin leading as primary teachers again early in 2022, but before that happened, we had a Tantra festival to put on! This event ended up being incredibly powerful and led to massive breakthroughs for both Mrs. Wallet and me as well as our relationship. I hoped to teach at the festival in 2022. However, as luck would have it (for me at least!), my mentor lost his voice, and I ended up teaching at the largest Tantra festival in the history of the United States! This was truly a powerful experience for me, and I can’t wait to see what 2022 holds in this realm!
Travel & Adventures
Finally, no Financial Independence/Early Retirement blog would be complete without a section on travel hacking and vacation, even during a pandemic! After a year of almost no international travel in 2020 (a rarity for us), we were hankering for some international trips in 2021. Unfortunately, there was still the matter of COVID, with all its waves, lockdowns, and uncertainty. So our expectation was that we’d likely have another year of mostly domestic travel by car, as in 2020.
The year started off mostly as we expected, and in March we took a road trip to Big Bend National Park for a week with two of our closest friends, which was a blast. However, shortly after our return, my brother surprised us with a call asking if we would be interested in staying in a private villa designed for 10+ people in Cabo San Lucas in Mexico, for free. He had been about to attend a bachelor’s party for a friend there, but the bachelor got COVID and it was too late to get a refund or cancel. The only catch was that it was Tuesday, and the stay started on Thursday.
As someone who gets off on traveling for free, this seemed like a no-brainer! We had been sitting on a massive pile of airline points that we’d mostly been unable to use during the pandemic, and we were itching for some international travel and much more comfortable with the risks and tradeoffs of COVID at this point. Thankfully, I have been working fully remote since the beginning of the pandemic and Mrs. Wallet still didn’t have a job to tie her down. After sleeping on the decision, I booked our flights, and within 24 hours, we were in Mexico, for exactly $0.00!
The stay in Mexico was a blast! We made friends, extended our stay another week after meeting a friendly hotel owner and finding a cheap place to stay comfortably, and generally lived it up, although juggling some work due to the last-minute nature of the trip was interesting at times! The rest of the year was mostly as we expected, with some time in Louisiana to visit family, a month or two in the mountains in South Carolina, and some trips to Austin to host events. Despite the difficulties and uncertainties introduced by the pandemic, this year’s adventures won’t easily be forgotten!
What didn’t go well in 2021
Health Challenges and More Loss
Prior to Mom dying in early 2019, there hadn’t been much loss in our family. All our grandparents were still alive, and we’d only recently lost our last great-grandparent! Fast forward a few years, and we only have one grandparent left and multiple other family members are dealing with serious health challenges or cancer. To top it all off, I am having strange issues with insulin sensitivity/resistance, and our dog Flo is having liver issues that the vets can’t seem to figure out (although they’re happy to keep charging us thousands for more tests and medication!).
Needless to say, this has been an extremely challenging aspect of the last year (and few years). It can be difficult not to feel like everything is dying and decaying around you in the midst of so much illness and death. However, death is an integral part of life, and we’ve also learned a lot about relating to it healthily, integrating, and letting go. Once again, I feel profound gratitude for the amazing support we’ve received from family and friends and the tools we’ve picked up along the way to deal with this type of stuff. I also feel extremely grateful that we are mostly extremely healthy. Even Flo is still acting like a spriteful young pup in his old age, despite what some test says.
This surprisingly almost feels too small to mention given the weight of the other things I’ve been discussing, but we did finally get COVID during the Omicron wave. I didn’t expect this, but I feel relieved, especially given how mild the experience was for us. I feel like my immune system got a free booster and workout, and I feel extremely unconcerned at this point and ready to see people more often again. Given my feelings about it, it feels a bit weird to put this in the “What didn’t go well” section, but hey, getting COVID is supposed to be bad, right? 🙃
Missed Opportunities (Yet Again!)
It’s pretty embarrassing that I have to include this YET AGAIN (🙄), but I once again failed to take the time at the end of the year to take advantage of tax optimization opportunities. This probably cost us up to tens of thousands of dollars (especially depending on your time horizon), and sadly has been a part of this section every year since I’ve started publishing annual reviews in 2018. 😬 This is literally a personal finance blog! For shame.
For reference, our income was low again this year due to Mrs. Wallet not working, so there were a lot of opportunities like Roth IRA Conversions and Capital Gain & Loss Harvesting. There were also other unique opportunities that I knew I needed to act on by EOD December 31st, but I just didn’t make the time. Hopefully later this year I will have a nifty guide and maybe a calculator or spreadsheet to guide you (and me!) through the process, preferably in plenty of time for the end of the year! More on all this in a minute.
What I learned in 2021
Systems > Goals
As evidenced by me having missed the same lucrative opportunity to optimize my tax situation every year since 2018, having the goal to do it and even publicly shaming myself hasn’t worked. It’s not that it’s complicated, it’s that I haven’t done it before and so I haven’t built a system. I then wait till the very end of the year when there’s limited time and I’m extremely busy with family and other things.
Having goals is great, but what matters is implementing the systems and habits that will accomplish them. This was also really clear to me in my relationship to work this year. I kept falling into ruts of unproductivity and wondering why. Time and again I would come back to a time management system that I know works wonders. At the beginning of re-implementing it, I marvel at the exponential explosion of productivity and how it feels easy and even fun. Once I really get into a groove, I decide I no longer need the rigidity of the system, and over time my productivity degrades until the cycle begins anew.
As I kick off 2022 and clear out some breathing room for myself, I’m particularly focused on my systems, habits, and meta-skills (metacognition, mindfulness, how to learn, etc.). You’ll be hearing more on this soon!
The Downsides of Overcommitment
When I applied for grad school, it seemed like most other things were pretty shut down and I had lots of free time, so why not if it advances my career? As it turned out, graduate studies consumed much more of my time than expected. This wasn’t much of an issue for most of the year, but in the final quarter, our appetite for seeing people increased and we began hosting live events again. Throwing these on top of work and school felt overwhelming. To top it all off, when I was this busy, my work performance deteriorated. I was less creative and thought less critically. Busyness had become a defense mechanism and the good became the enemy of the great.
Luckily, I had some solid friends and mentors that helped me take a step back, evaluate what was really important, and decide what to cut out of my life. I’m taking this semester off, and my creative output has already skyrocketed. This experience really got me to reflect on what’s truly important. I’m good at climbing ladders, but am I climbing the right ones? At best, grad school might accelerate our sprint to financial independence a little, but we’re already on the cusp. Getting there the fastest isn’t the only goal. Especially as we look at how we want to design our lives in retirement, it’s important to invest in the relationships and habits that will sustain us through it. This is literally one of the only steps in the Master Plan!
You should be too busy to “do coffee,” while still keeping an uncluttered calendar.
Naval Ravikant
Naval Ravikant talks about the importance of being “too busy to ‘do coffee’, while still keeping an uncluttered calendar.” While I don’t know if I’d take it quite that far yet, this year I realized the importance of free time for creativity and happiness. I also got some reminders of the importance of things like family, friendship, and community. In the coming year, I will be investing more in these.
Be Do Have
“Be Do Have” is a mantra my mentor ScottieO has been preaching to me since I met him nearly five years ago. However, this year really put this principle into perspective for me in new ways. Be Do Have is about how we accomplish or manifest things in the world and posits that mindset is far more important than one might expect. Most people think that you have to Do the right things to Have what you want so you can Be the person that you want to be (Do Have Be). In reality, it’s the opposite! Be the person you want to be, Do what that new identity naturally does and take action, and you will Have the things you’re desiring.
One of the key concepts implied by this simple phrase is that your state of being dictates the outcomes you experience, much more than the actions you take! A great example of this is when I was feeling particularly overcommitted, overwhelmed, and generally behind on work, school, and everything in-between. I realized that if I kept coming back to these emotions, I was going to keep creating situations where I was indeed behind on my commitments (your subconscious works hard to generate and collect evidence for your beliefs). As soon as I found a way to shift my emotional state and start investing in the narrative that I was in fact ahead on my commitments and had free time, it was true! Almost magically, I found free time in my schedule and quickly not only caught up on my commitments but got ahead. It was a powerful shift and a powerful lesson.
While it isn’t always quite so easy (the subconscious and our emotions can be tricky things, after all!), often it is. As much as we invest in the idea, not everything has to be hard or require a ton of effort. Your dreams can happen much more quickly than you might expect if you just believe and take massive action.
2021 was a pretty amazing year filled with lots of growth, especially towards the end. It feels like the momentum is building and 2022 stands to be even more exciting and fulfilling. I can’t wait to see what twists and turns are hidden behind its corners!
Much Love,
(Your) Wallet
