July ‘23 Check-In
It’s been a while since I put up a blog post. Since the last one, I traveled around Colombia, hit a few cities in Spain, went to Lisbon, bummed out at home in Jersey, and right now I’m at a coffee shop in Palo Alto. I’ve got a lot to write about and a lot to update you on. But that’ll come soon. This post isn’t going to be about anything specific. Just a check-in. I’ve been procrastinating and I figured I needed to get something down. And not just blog-wise. I feel like I’ve fallen off in a lot of areas so this is a brain dump about the get back. Getting started again.
Some friends of mine and I check in occasionally on the three f’s: fitness, finances, and friends (community). It’s an easy way to bucket my self check-in so here it is.
Fitness:
Since January 2022, I’ve been a little bit of a fitness nut. Even when I tore my Achilles in December, I still kept up with calisthenics. Don’t need both legs to do push-ups and pull-ups. But after being consistent for about 16 months, through different US cities, road trips, and even countries, I finally fell off while traveling around Spain and Portugal. I worked out maybe twice over the course of May while traveling. Didn’t want to be the guy doing push-ups on the hostel floor. Plus a lot of the days were packed with exploring and walking and I didn’t prioritize working out.
Habits are hard to build. And if you take too much time off, they’re easy to lose. After a month off, I got back to Jersey and despite having basically nothing occupying my time day-to-day, I kept putting off working out. Not to say I didn’t at all, but doing a core workout here and there was a far cry from the workouts I was doing. And with Jersey being so car-centric I wasn’t getting any steps in. Might be the least active I’ve been in years.
But it’s nothing like a change of scenery and catching up with the people that got you started to get you back on track. Last January when I started the journey to getting in shape, my friends Mike and Charles were huge influences on the workouts I was doing. Now, being out here in Cali with them has reignited the spark. Last year, when we were living in LA, Mike and I would randomly tell each other we got 50 push-ups. Or we’d race to 100. Maybe more. Then we visited Charles and he’d say we had 300. Plus. We were working. And to some degree, we’ve all fallen off a little since then, so getting back to it with them around feels amazing.
It’s also a lesson to me about the tradeoff between my expectations of myself and being kind to myself through the process. As much as I feel like I’ve fallen off, I can still do a single set of 20 pull-ups. And I can still knock out 70+ in a session. Those feel shitty because just 3 months ago I could rep out sets of 20 and a single session could end with 200+, but I had to remind myself those are still great numbers. I would’ve loved those numbers last year. And in the grand scheme of things, the numbers themselves don’t matter. The work matters. Getting back into the process matters.
One more thing on fitness. Last year I set the goal of completing an Ironman race. My Achilles tear set me back on that, but I will complete one. At this point, my Achilles is healed, but I still have some discomfort occasionally. I’ve been using that discomfort to justify not doing any cardio. But I’m bs-ing. I have to work through the discomfort to get it back to normal. And maybe hooping is a stretch, but there’s no reason I shouldn’t be swimming and biking. So I’m getting back to it.
Finances:
I haven’t had a corporate job since April 2022. Given the travel I’ve been doing a lot of people have asked me how that’s possible. If anyone is interested I can write a post with specifics, but the summary is that I saved really really aggressively while I did have that job. There are some other details in there like selling my car, my tax refund, distributions from a business I own, and some little gig jobs, but for the most part it was just savings and keeping my cost of living really low. I gave myself a long runway.
I want to be as transparent as possible on this blog. I figure if other people have all the information, it could help them with whatever situation they have going on or help them think about what it would look like to change their current situation.
That being said, here are some numbers. I got fired towards the end of April 2022 with around 36k between my savings and checking account. I have more in standard investments (like ETFs and index funds) and non-standard investments (like businesses that my friends and I have purchased). I’ll go through those in more detail in another post, but I’ll keep it high level in this brain dump.
I decided that 10k was the end of my runway. Some of the things I mentioned like selling my car helped extend the time of that runway, but this month I finally dipped below that. And one of the most frustrating parts about that is that traveling reset my expense expectations. Traveling, in any given month and any of the locations that I went to, costs about the same as going out a few times in NY. It’s egregious. But I like NY. And having the financial ability to be anywhere I want is important to me. So it’s time to get serious. For me, plan A is buying another business before the end of the year. Plan B… I don’t even want to put in the air (whispers *corporate*). I’ll keep y'all posted on that.
Friends (Community):
This section is short. It’s going the best. I have amazing people in my life. I’ve been traveling a lot in the last few years. That has meant having friends all over the world. Connections and community in a ton of different places. An ever-growing network and a constantly shrinking world. I wouldn’t trade the experiences for anything.
But it has also meant distance. Keeping up with everyone I want to is difficult. And I have to do a better job with that. But if you’re reading this and we haven’t talked in a while just know it’s all love! Always.
