Learning how to save, five years later
Once a year, I like to look back on the financial decisions I’ve made and think about any changes I anticipate making in the year ahead.
Last Year
Financially speaking, not much happened during the first eleven months of 2011, besides the steady evaporation of my travel savings. I did, however, accomplish the few financial goals I set for myself in my last “Learning how to save” post: I increased my exposure to international equity—predictably right before the eurozone economies slumped, I sold off my managed retirement funds, and I rolled over my Roth 401(k) to my personal Roth IRA.
When Stephanie and I returned to the United States in August, we had $10,000 as a post-travel savings buffer, an arbitrary amount that seemed like a reasonable amount to restart our lives. That estimate turned out to be prescient, as there wasn’t much left of it when our first paychecks showed up in the middle of October. It goes without saying that we were both exceptionally fortunate to be offered jobs within a week and a half of our return to San Francisco.
That would be the end of this post, if it wasn’t for something I wrote way back in 2007 (and subsequently acted on), shortly after starting this “Learning how to save” series. In my post, Thinking ahead (about real estate), you’ll find this little gem:
My 31-year-old self would probably want to take my 27-year-old self out for a beer and thank me profusely if he looked at his savings account balance and found $50,000. Of course, between then and now, there’ll probably be a lot of plane tickets and other spontaneous large expenses to account for. So saving $50,000 might take a little longer.
The 2011 Photo Book
By this, our fifth photo book, I pretty much have the process down to a science. The code I wrote in 2007 and revised in 2009 still works, Viovio still exists and accepts custom PDFs. But that didn’t make the process any easier, considering that 2011 encapsulated the bulk of our travels—pretty much everywhere we went except New Zealand and Bali.
The front cover of our 2011 photo book is a photo from Varanasi
Somehow I managed to go through the more than 11,000 photos we took this year, and distill them to a mere 96. My blog was a lifesaver—keeping it updated forced me to filter through the photos as we traveled. Since returning to San Francisco, we’ve been too preoccupied with new jobs and home-buying to engage in any particularly photogenic extracurricular activities.
Sample layout with photos from the Philippines
For the geeks reading: I decided to put the code I wrote to generate the photo books up on GitHub. Not because it’s the most awesome code I’ve ever written, I just wanted an excuse to play with GitHub. And who knows, it might help someone out there working on a similar project. Maybe I’ll generalize it next year.
A quick peek inside with photos from Corsica
Check out my neck tat
49 Mile Scenic Drive Sleepy Seagull from SFlocal.net (thx Kim!)
The stubble gives the tattoo a certain je ne sais quoi, dontcha think? For more Sanfranciscanalia, check out 3 Fish Studios’ Scenic Drives paintings and my Park at 90 Degrees t-shirt.
God, Chris Dodd, get a clue!
Dear Chris Dodd,
What happened last week was your ass getting fact-checked.
Perhaps you missed Salman Khan’s plain English analysis of SOPA and PIPA?
Or Fight for the Future’s PROTECT IP/SOPA Breaks The Internet from way back in October.
Or Clay Shirky’s brilliant TED Talk on Why SOPA is a bad idea.
Even Stephen Colbert came out against Stop Online Piracy Act (in his own, inimitable way).
That not enough? How about Our Internet and Save Innovation by Engine Advocacy.
Or perhaps you need something in plain text. Check out Reddit’s technical examination of SOPA and PROTECT IP.
And don’t forget the umptybillion SOPA/PIPA posts on Boing Boing you made the Internet suffer through.
Finally, for something a little different, check out World Covers’ Rolling In The Deep, a video mashup of 71 different people all covering Adele’s hit song, which is “illegal” on so many levels, it will probably make your head explode (with any luck).
Update: Sign a petition at Whitehouse.gov to Investigate Chris Dodd and the MPAA for bribery after he publicly admitted to bribing politicians to pass legislation.
Our container ship voyage across the Atlantic written up in Neue Presse
One of the four passengers on our transatlantic container ship voyage was German journalist and radio personality, Björn Stack. Besides fulfilling his lifelong dream of traveling to the “new world” by boat (just like in the old days), he was also writing a newspaper article about the experience for the German press.
Björn and Justin in the Hanjin Palermo’s engine room
He let us know that the article ran last Saturday, appearing on the front page of the Reise & Urlaub (Travel and Holiday) section of Hanover’s Neue Presse (and several other German papers). I haven’t found it online, but conveniently he sent us a PDF.
Here’s a close up, highlighting a paragraph that mentions us:
It reads:
Dem amerikanischen Pärchen Sophie [sic] und Justin, beide Anfang 30, gefiel die Vorstellung, sich Zeit bei der Atlantiküberquerung zu lassen. Sie haben ihre Jobs gekündigt und sind ein Jahr um die Welt gereist. Bald sind sie wieder zu Hause in Texas, sie wollen die letzte Etappe ihrer Weltreise in Ruhe genießen. Eine Reise auf einem Frachtschiff ist der ideale Ort dafür; keine Hektik am Flughafen und kein Jetlag, die sechs Stunden Zeitverschiebung nach New York geschehen gemächlich: An jedem zweiten Tag wird die Borduhr eine Stunde zurückgestellt.
Or translated to English by Google (and cleaned up by me):
The American couple Stephanie and Justin, both in their early 30s, liked the idea, to allow time for the Atlantic crossing. They have resigned their jobs and are spending a year traveling around the world. Soon they are back home in Texas, so they want to enjoy the last leg of their journey around the world in peace. A trip on a cargo ship is the ideal place to do it, no hassle at the airport, and no jetlag, the six hours time difference to New York happened leisurely: on every other day the clock is changed by one hour.
WTC
I didn’t fully appreciate how the twin towers of the World Trade Center dominated the New York City skyline until I saw this photo.
WTC by Steven Siegel
Stunning.
Steven Siegel’s other photos of New York in the 80s are well work a look.
New year, new gig
To hell with New Year’s resolutions. How about New Year’s actions!
Remember that post I wrote about “planting a flag”? Well, I kind of expected it to flap aimlessly in the wind for a few months, but turns out it really struck a chord. When you boldly signal your intentions, people take notice (which was my hope).
One of those people was Andre Torrez, whom I worked with at Federated Media. We’d kept in touch since my return to San Francisco, meeting up for lunch now and again. I’d tell him stories about what it was like being back at work after traveling, and he’d tell me stories about the ups and downs of running his own business.
Then just before the holidays, he let me know he was on the cusp of landing a pretty big contract, one that he almost certainly couldn’t tackle by himself. An opportunity was there for me, if I wanted it. This generated a lot of reflection and discussion while I was in Austin. Upon returning to work, I decided with heavy heart to part ways with Kiva. In the end I decided this was an opportunity I did not want to pass up.
So last Monday I joined Andre at Simpleform, the company he started shortly after leaving FM. It goes without saying that I already owe Andre a lot. Not only was he responsible for hiring me at FM, but I can say with complete seriousness that “he taught me everything I know”—about being an engineer on a team at a start-up. Later, when I felt like I had more to offer than just coding, Andre gave me the chance to lead the team.
The Sign On Our Door by Andre
Now we’ll see if we can start over again. Andre has a genuine interest in rebooting Simpleform, learning from what worked and what didn’t over the last two years, and I’m looking forward to wearing multiple hats again, contributing in both engineering and management. In the short term, I’ll be coming up to speed on some new technology, and we’ll be working together on this big contract. Over the long term, we’ll be on the lookout for a steady stream of contracts to keep our mental tools sharp and revenue consistent. Given our collective skill-sets, we’ll probably be leaning more towards data-heavy, back-end web work, as opposed to front-end design projects. (This sound like something you need? Please get in touch.)
The big vision is that with regular client work, we’ll be able to fund internal “research” projects that either become revenue-generators in their own right or simply help us work more efficiently. To be honest, I don’t have any single outcome in mind. Kind of like traveling, I’m in this to see where it leads us.
Does anyone out there know anything about Pinterest?
I’ve recently seen it show up in my referrer logs, and it turns out a bunch of people I don’t know have “pinned” a bunch of photos from my blog. I feel like this site came out of nowhere.
Screenshot of pinned images from my blog
You can imagine my surprise when I discovered my sister-in-law browsing Pinterest over the holidays with her new Android-based Toshiba Thrive tablet! When did everyone get so high-tech?
