Virtue Signaling Vs Effort

There are protests happening across the USA regarding the Israeli/Palestinian war.  

I fully support the right to peaceful protests and free speech.  

I just think it's dumb for the kids to do and especially if my kids were doing it. 

When it comes down to virtue signaling vs putting in effort it seems like virtue signaling wins most of the time. 

Instead of sleeping in a comfortable sleeping bag in the a secure part of the world. Go join the fight, enlist in a foreign legion, or volunteer to be part of the first responders in that part of the word. That moves the needle.  

Maybe it is going too far to ask people who can't open a pickle jar to fight or help directly. There are probably lower non-remunerative cost options. 

Join the PeaceCorp and build stoves for people in need. Join AmeriCorp and help disadvantaged communities right here at home. Instead of protesting for the afternoon, volunteer at a homeless shelter. Build a trail for your community to take walks. There are so many things are are infinitely more impactful and helpful.  

The kids that are keeping their focus, putting in the work to better themselves and maybe even their communities will find this time of their lives to have a high compounding rate of return.  Those that actually want to put in effort vs virtue signal will be in high demand. This has always been the case but it is a lesson that is constantly relearned. 

Failing Small

Human nature seems to abhor failure.  

Paradoxically, failure is critical to our growth.  

People need to try new things, push the boundaries on ability, push the rules both written and unwritten in society. 

This is not the same as breaking the law and ruining your life. Some rules can bend and some can break. 

As a parent maybe one of the bigger struggles is to allow your child to fail small. Sounds easy until you find yourself in the day to day. The want for one's own life to go smooth means micromanaging or helicoptering over your kids. Suppose all of us parents are guilty to some degree. 

As my oldest gets older, the realization that he needs to be pushing the boundaries more before he leaves the house. Life can be a little cold. Boss's don't want excuses, landlords need the rent. 

Allowing our kids to try and fail to see the consequences allows them to not fail BIGGER later in life when the stakes are drastically higher. 

The importance of us individually to keep getting out of our comfort zones as we age and keep trying things that we are likely to fail at but may pay off later. The roots of life have a way to grabbing hold. 

Scott Adam's book 'How To Fail At Almost Everything and Still Win Big' does a good job of explaining this benefit. 

If the goal is to grow as a person or raise a person who will grow - failure is the only path. 

Financial Independence

 A often discussed topic - Financial Independence. 

The definition is highly subjective to each individual. With most coming down to some number multiplied by your salary or yearly expenses. 

But I offer for consideration a more objective umber. $100k.  

$100k number where many things start to compound.  

10% returns in the stock market now are sizable enough to start moving the needle. There are more 20% up years than 10% up years - and that can compound significantly over the decades.

$100k is likely a 2-3 years worth of a persons yearly expenses. $100k provides some base level of freedom that you can float a few months between jobs without much worry. Having that level of stability alone can be life changing as you are not taking a job because you have to but you can wait on a job that is the right one.  A high level of job satisfaction is for most people the biggest professional accomplishment. 

Lastly, $100k means you have set up your life in a way to make it happen. A person doesn't get $100k by accident. You have to earn, save and invest to get there. Habits not easily formed and imbedded too deep in behavior to stop by the time you reach $100k paving the way for the future. 

$100k may not be for everyone. I get that. It is however a good goal to strive for when setting about life if money is a concern to you.  

Prediction In Real Estate Markets

 With the National Association of Realtors market lawsuit now finalized I have an assessment for the future. 

Decoupling the buyer and seller commissions will lead to a 90% destruction in costs in the intermediate future. 

Right now it was ~6% of a price of a house split between buyer and seller agents. What a joke. 

Someone smart is going to come in and drive this price down to rock bottom and drive competition out of the market.  There will be plenty of people out there willing to lose in the short term to dominate the market in the long term. 

If you are a realtor or broker and running a lean operation you will be out soon.  I don't think the realtors that have been in the market for a long time make it out of this. It will be too hard to adapt. They are too acclimated to their overhead and profit margins.  

This is a world most of us have had to live in for a long time. Becoming efficient and keeping costs in check. 

I wouldn't be invested in a realty or broker right now. 

Exciting times!

Easily Slighted (Comedy Bit)

 If I ever do standup I need to have a log of bits to pull from. 

I have a personality that is easily slighted and angered. I imagine most of us do but most people think that 'yeah, if you get rear ended in a car accident with the other driver looking at his phone' yeah that pisses me off. Or if your only daughter is traveling Europe with her friend and while she is talking to you on the phone a international gang breaks into her room, kidnaps her friends while your daughter is hiding under the bed but ultimately she is taken to be sold off to some middle eastern prince in shady dealings - that type of thing would make me fly off the handle. 

I want to burn it down if someone bumps into me walking down the hallway. 

I am willing to ruin my life to take someone down a peg if they don't shake my hand when they should have. 

Probably something I got to work on. 

Roth IRA

 A Roth IRA may be the best investment vehicle a person can do. 

Here are some of my unpaid for thoughts on it:

1) Grows Tax Free 

2) No taxes on withdrawals at 59.5 yrs

3) You can borrow money from the account for certain things like house downpayment - this means your money isn't necessarily tied up forever

That is all pretty good. The government thinks this is such an incredible vehicle they limit what you can contribute to this.  

My oldest worked as a W2 this year and made almost $2k. I opened a Roth IRA for him. Most open Roth IRA's with their first full time job after college - think 25-30 years old. 

Investing in one 10-15 years earlier can have drastic consequences on the compounding.  

Will he be set for life? No, not by a long shot. 

Will it help? For sure. 

And this feels like a gift that won't be realized until long after I am gone. Something about having something that is going that my kids will benefit from feels good. 

But life is pretty ironic. This account could easily do well and my name never gets mentioned. 

A good day

A good day for me is pretty easy - just seems a little selfish.

The things that you need to keep you balanced are opposite of what you experience the majority of the time. 

If you are away from your family, a good day is to play with your kids. 

If you are a stay at home, a good day is when you have a few hours to yourself. 

It's a dynamic pursuit based on your life as it is at that time. 

Too much chaos and your want a little order. Too much order and you and a little chaos spice's life up nicely. 

At this point in my life - staying at home with three kids at home - having a few hours in the day to read, workout, and put energy to a pursuit like this blog, the podcast, or the newsletter makes the difference. 

I know when I am at a different stage and the kids are grown a good day will be them coming over for a dinner or a phone call. 

It feels like their are people who can be so present that they seemingly enjoy being swamped in whatever their life currently is without the want of the opposite. Color me jealous because I very much need my feet firmly planted in both to log a good day. 

Hardest lesson my Mom taught me

In college I liked to party. As the years rolled on it was harder for me to stay on course. Thankfully I went to a small private school that didn't let me get lost in the sauce. 

By senior year it was touch and go. I was steadily riding my GPA down to the lowest level possible while still being able to graduate and now that I was over 21 partying was easier than ever - the weekday specials at the bars were unmatched! $1 pitchers sign me up. 

One of the bigger mistakes I made was not managing my money all that well. Instead of paying tuition with summer wages I told myself that I would pay near the end of the semester and it would be nice to have some walking around money. That money got drank up. 

I was able to cobble together tuition and roll into the final semester of senior year but my money habits were solidified.  Working wages went to partying first and rent second.

Then one month I was a little short to my roommates. A quick call my parents and they said 'yes' to the $100 requested but don't call asking them again.

I called again next month. 

Dad was on the phone, I needed $200 this time.  He was giving in. He didn't want to tell me 'no' in my time of need. Then he gave the phone to Mom. 

"We don't have it" she said. 

Bullshit. I knew they had it but she said repeated sorry but they don't. 

I hung up the phone outraged. I couldn't believe they said 'no'. 

Now I was panicked. There was only a couple people in my life that had $200 extra dollars and the possibility of saying yes to me asking for it. 

I called Gunnar. I broke down crying asking for the money justifiably feeling like the huge piece of shit I was. 

Gunnar deposited the money the next day and my checked cleared. 

I never made that mistake again. I paid the bills first after that.* 

As a parent I can see how hard this must have been on Mom and Dad. The easier thing would have been to say yes. And they were right in thinking I would come back for more next time - I would have. 

I hope that I am as good of parent in that way if it is ever needed. I can only imagine how hard it was to do the right thing by saying 'No'. 

-----

*I also had to learn a lesson a few months later about paying car insurance. But hey, that helped me chose the US Army.

Long Tail Relationships

 A great piece of advice I got many years ago was something to the effect of 'find people where you can compound those relationships over the long term'.  

This is a long tail benefit. If you spend your life to find friends, co-workers, a spouse, that you can stay with for 50-60 years - there is a significant advantage to that. 

I will be the first to admit that in trying to find people that I can do business with long term has burned me. I am a trusting guy and making handshake deals has cost me hundreds of thousands of dollars. But what I lose out in money I gain in realizing that keeping those people in my life would have cost me more over the long run. 

Life is never that simple. Person 'X' can't help me so I won't even pick up the phone. Rather there are different kinds of relationships. I have buddies that make me laugh and the longer I know them the more I laugh - I want that to compound. 

You hit the jackpot if you find a long term compounding relationship in your wife or husband. Experiencing a 50 year wedding anniversary is a special event only a handful of us get to have. If having a spouse that you love and care about is your only compounding relationship then you already won. 

The only issue with this is you never know which ones make it through the filter until the very end. A business partner can be great for decades and one day it goes sideways. 

But we go on. It is important to respect these compounding relationships more than the others. 

The Worst Life

Back in my days as an Intelligence Analyst I worked on a job called CITP - Counter Insurgency Targeting Program. The outside looking in it was a cool job. Hunting terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan.  

Like many things, if you are on the inside it is not nearly as cool. We were a bunch of dorks that had delusions of grandeur. One of these manifestations was a 24 hour watch.  

When you are in a war zone it is critically important to have a 24 hour watch for the commanders and other decision makers to have access to the latest information to keep your troops safe.  

This was not that.  

The CITP Watch was in Charlottesville, VA. Roughly 6,000 miles away from anything even rounding up to hardship.  

As contractors we were all voluntold  for shifts a few times a year to supplement the government civilians that ran the watch. My shift started early morning and this older guy came in around 9 AM. He went to the white board and erased the 1756 replacing it with 1755 and declared to the room that is how many days left he has until retirement from the job. 

This made me want to throw up.  

How could someone who dislikes their job so much that they have a countdown clock but it is FIVE YEARS OUT. 

Initial disgust changed to sympathy. I felt bad for this guy. We all had countdown clocks when I was in the US Army doing deployments to Iraq but these were 15 months or a year deployment. Most importantly, none of us really wanted to be there*. If given a real choice we would have been stateside.

This sorry son of a bitch chose every day to come into a job he hated for a $30K/year pension. Based on his BMI there was a strong possibility he wouldn't even make it to retirement. Why did he do it?

You meet a lot of these people throughout life. Putting up with something they dislike or hate. Sometimes it is noble - they hate it but it feeds their family and they CAN'T do anything else. Most of the time it is out of fear. Fear that it is not the job they hate but something more internal. Changing jobs would only prove it wasn't the job after all. 

Chances are this guy retired and then took a contracting job in the same office working for the same people because the money was good ..... and still complained every day.  

Sometimes having examples of what not to be is better than what to strive for. I never want to be that guy. Counting down the decades. He may have had the worst life out of anyone I have ever met. 

----

*We all volunteered for the US Army during a time of war. Of course that was the macro choice but we really couldn't get out of deployments unless we wanted to go to jail (or fake hemorrhoids).

Sci-Fi Idea

The world experienced a new world war. One where a nefarious non-state actor was able to do a retro geo-grade orbit with the successful intention of knocking out all of earths satellites - putting us back into a more technological type of Stone Age. 

Navigation was down, along with internet, and most communications. During this chaotic timeframe nations mobilized to war to defend their countries. Skirmishes were fought at the borders as some saw this chaos as the opportunity to expand.  

Engagements quickly escalated into large scale conflicts with large payload missiles and weapons. The societies of earth collapsed quickly. Leaving only a few critically weakened city-states and hunter gathers who knew nothing was different. 

Observing this chaos are two colonies. One a multinational military base on the moon and another civilian earth outpost on Mars. By this point in history we have successfully built both but have been sustained with consistent shipments from Earth. Now they find themselves with enough supplies to last only a while. 

Do the colonies work together? Is there war between them? Does one of the nations fight for power on the MND moon base? 

How do they navigate back to earth to get the needed supplies?  

Try being a stay at home

Choosing to stay at home being a full time parent can come with a lot of stress. For me it was about doing a 'good enough' job. Daycares had play areas and curriculum for the little kids to follow along with other possible friends.  

My stresses were passed along to one of Mallory's old friends from ABQ and a great piece of advice was passed back to me. 

'That first year, a baby only needs someone to hold them with love' 

This phrase really put me at ease and it is one I refer back to frequently, especially since doing it again with our newest baby girl. 

Because it is easy to beat yourself up - or get beat up mentally by the daily duties. Are they developing enough, did we do enough tummy time, and on it goes. When in the end loving them and holding them is what they want and need.

We try our best but it's not perfect but that is alright because love for your child can't be outsourced . If you have the chance to stay at home with your kids, especially that first year - do it. You will be the best at loving them. 

It's a whole new world

Over the last two days I have been coding HTML.  The only reason that it is even worthwhile to mention is that I have never coded a day in my life and these past couple of days I have successfully coded scripts to run in Google to export data from the calendar to google sheets - all with the help of ChatGPT.  

These are the types of jobs that you would need a senior software engineer to do  along with a few hundred dollars to pay them a few years ago. Now it is free and some dumb-dumb like me can create HTML scripts successfully.* 

This feels like the beginning of something very transformative. I will not use a GPT for writing this blog. That defeats the point of why I am doing this but there is a lot of things that it will help me accomplish. Onward. 

_________

*I wasn't able to figure out how to convert the HTML into markup-style so I am using GPT to convert the output into what I need after I do the run. <b>weak as hell<b>

What could go wrong?

It is not very often that am envious of the habits of my parents. One comes to mind - my Mom's retirement blog.  Her and Dad were visiting on their first road trip south for the winter and they stopped by Virginia en route to Florida. Mom mentioned she wanted to document their RV'ing lifestyle and I helped her get a blog going. That was 6 years ago now and she has been pretty consistent with it. 

It is not for making money or fame but for posterity. I read it now and again and think that is a nice reference to have for the future. Publications are different than pictures in the same way listening to a hour long podcast is different from a couple minute home video record on the phone. It feels more personal. 

I tried this once before and failed. Not failed with a capital 'F' but didn't follow through. I started a blog in 2023 thinking it was going to be a slow year and ended up running for County Supervisor* and I prioritized my time on the campaign.  

This attempt is leaner, faster - in hopes of making it a habit. I am reading the book 'Bird by Bird' and taking the lesson that consistent writing is its own reward.  

Some of these posts will be long think pieces. Others will be journal entries of my life. Still some others will be past recollections or short pithy advice I want my son's and daughter to have access to later.  

This is low stakes so what could go wrong...

________________

*I lost but it WAS THIS CLOSE

Notes

http://roxirykalretired.blogspot.com/

The Brad Rykal Brief Podcast