Writing this title out makes everything feel much more real. I think it’s appropriate that this post is a full month late from my birthday on August 26th. I really can’t believe that it’s been 4 weeks since my birthday but that’s just a very real example of what my 30th year on Earth has been like so far.
Moving fast, daily churn, health issues that keep me from writing and a small demotion in this blog as it stands as a part of my life.
Before we start, I actually took up the arduous task of reading the last 5 years of annual birthday posts. I highly recommend you avoid the task. It’s a strange time-capsule:
29, 28, 27, 26, 25, 24 (aka my move to New Hampshire), 23 (a pretty rough time).
Last year, I tl;dr’ed my 29th year with the following:
- I traveled a lot and spent more money on travel than I responsibly should have
- I continued my beer hobby at the expense of my health and finances
- I worked very hard at my primary and secondary income. My primary work life is better than ever and my secondary is struggling quite a bit
- I further improved my ability to take care of my things, upgrade to more mature hobbies and toys
- I actually grew my social circle and at least solidified some of the friendships I have with people local to me mostly by the continued absence of social media usage (that began in late 2013)
Beer:
I’d like to start on my beer hobby which evolved in a huge way this year. It’s a little crazy how much changed in the last 12 months since renewing my membership to Bruery’s Hoarders Society and Schramm’s Meadery.
I’ll save raw numbers for my annual Beer in Review over on the beer blog but my assumption is my beer-spending went down about 70% from last year. I shipped 2 boxes a month mostly beer that I bought from Bruery that was shipped to me, I went to less beer festivals and I think my average beers rated per month should be a great indication for how much the hobby has changed for me:
http://www.ratebeer.com/user/154569/rating-history/
The RateBeer Summer Gathering in July helped me recover quite a bit but those events used to happen quarterly. This weekend, I’ll be attending a beer festival, my last one of the year.
Do I hate beer now? Not at all. However, my summary last year around drinking less beer and more whiskey and mead is pretty clear. I drink during the week but small amounts and only liquor. Beer time is only on weekends so spending significant amounts of money on beer to drink twice a week was a waste. I have a huge back-log of cellared beers that should be consumed. Buying new bottles to replace every one I drink is no longer sustainable because the beers literally go bad before I get around to enjoying them.
I still buy beer, drink beer, ship some beer and go to beer festivals. Instead of a tasting, festival, purchase or box every week, I’m on this monthly happening now and that has enabled me to save an insane amount of money. Like realizing I spent close to nothing after bills. It truly was a huge sink of cash.
My Car & My Bike:
Those of you reading this blog regularly know that these two categories have really expanded in the lat 12 months. I purchased my car 13 months ago and my bike 6 months ago. These are the first 2 vehicles I bought w/o any outside help or co-signer on a loan. They’re mine (and the bank’s) and I’ve had a blast modifying and customizing both to my liking.
My Car, it’s a sub-12 second quarter mile beast putting 375 all-wheel horsepower and 370 lb/ft of torque. This is about 125 more than stock on both specs. Very few Volkswagens have that much power w/o the addition of an aftermarket turbo. I plan on continuing the project next year with upgraded brakes, track suspension that is fully adjustable, a cat-back exhaust system and in two years, I’ll fully replace the stock IS38 Turbo with an aftermarket solution, likely one where I send in my turbo and it’s built up to be stronger instead of dropping 5 grand on a full aftermarket kit.
My Bike, i haven’t added more power. It’s already too-squirrelly on the trails with the power it has. The 103 HP engine with 84 lb/ft of torque is not much for a bike that weighs 564 pounds wet. Because of this, it’s topped out around 124 miles per hour and is plagued with a dry-clutch (unusual for a bike) but will easily do 44 MPG around town so it’s been a nice improvement over my car in practicality. I can ride up to my favorite brewery in Vermont, grab 3 cases of beer and a 30 liter keg and have a blast doing it. I’ve made the bike more beefy for off-roading over the last few months but the tires are road-focused which will change next year.
The car & bike spending supplemented the reduction in beer spending at the start of this year but things balanced out around April to where I was saving more money again.
Most importantly, these are mine. Fully insured, extra money per month on payments, doing my own maintenance when I can and that $750 yearly registration to the state of NH is on me as well. Two pricey hobbies for sure.
Travel:
What a tough year for travel. Work didn’t send me anywhere and I stayed local or went on road trips. Here are a few trips I took that stick out:
- Wookies in the Woods 2016, Road Trip down to TN and back in my Golf R
- Montreal and Quebec City various trips ever 3 months
- NYC, Summer
- Boston, last week
- Chicago, last Fall
- RateBeer Summer Gathering, Pittsburgh in July
- Bermuda for my birthday
- Camping in the Northeast Kingdom Vermont for Memorial Day
I tried to link to posts in reference to those trips so you can re-cap if you feel so inclined.
I had planned a trip to Belgium but I was held up at the Canadian border (I fly out of Montreal) and missed the flight. I’ll take a future trip, didn’t lose any money just my time but I do plan on going back but this year…maybe not because:
Home Ownership:
This really doesn’t count because it’s not a part of my year in review because I’m writing this without the keys in hand. The process started June 23rd. Today, I’m 3 months into the process and while I’ll be writing a long post about the home-buying process, this was a fully 29 year old Adam taking this on and a few years ago, I wouldn’t have imagined taking this on. My salary hasn’t changed much since I moved to New Hampshire but the way I spend money has and I’ve not only worked hard on my financial status but also on my credit score.
When I left San Francisco, my credit score was 540. I took on some debt to start a business, move across country and spending 2 grand a month on an apartment while working at a startup making 55K a year was incredibly difficult. Once you factored in Muni, groceries, bills, rent, I had very little each paycheck left to save and put toward debt. When I moved to NH, I paid off all of my debts and finally this March I got my first credit card since moving to San Francisco. I’m now in the mid 7s on my score and it just went up a bit more last month.
I know talking about personal finances is not cool to some people but it’s been a lot of work to get here and my lifestyle hasn’t suffered much. Pay off debt, get a secured visa, co-signer on my first car and pay on time, secured visa became a real credit card and keep paying on time. Things slowly worked themselves out. The saving and the score contributed to being able to buy this house.
Unfortunately, I’ll save you guys the details on the house for another post. I don’t see a point in wasting time writing when it’s not in – the – bag yet.
Work:
How is that going? I think things are better than ever and I’m not saying that simply because co-workers read this blog (I assume they do?). I find that I’m pretty adaptable to getting by in most situations but there are certainly situations where I do better than others. Working on special projects in a small team or solo with low-budget and being forced to innovate is where I find my best work. If you give me a huge enterprise budget with fancy enterprise software and 50 engineers, I’ll feel sort of lost and overwhelmed and feel like we’re wasting way too much time & money on making simple processes too complicated.
For the last 18 months, I’ve been in a team that has now grown to 5 people. I work with companies outside of mine on projects which keeps things exciting. I get to see my work in consumer products which is awesome and I get to innovate quickly with our small internal team where we’re all on the same time-zone although that could change with how larger our company is in Europe.
I honestly have nothing worth complaining about when it comes to the work I’m doing and the people I do it with.
On the subject of my secondary income, there is none in the year 2016. I don’t count YouTube (will touch on that later) so my consulting, writing and photography work didn’t yield anything substantial this year. That’s okay because I really did enjoy the downtime I experienced and having nights and weekends to read, write and enjoy a ton of classic films that are top 250 on IMDB but ones I never got to see like Psycho, Easy Rider, Alien, Ben Hur and more. The lack of a second income was more of a blessing than a curse. I’m not a self-marketer but I imagine my year of quiet will be short-lived and I’ll be back to working nights next year on whatever comes my way. I enjoy the challenge.
YouTube:
A year ago, I had 250 YouTube subscribers. I had done nothing but post random videos on vacation and with friends. It was a random channel with very random videos. I made $5 a month on that channel. Pocket-Change. I started uploading car videos, then travel videos and now some motorcycle videos. I picked up a GoPro Hero 4, a TomTom Bandit and an iPhone 6S w/ 4K video capabilities and since May, I have posted a video every week day. I have a ton of videos sitting in the editing bay (Final Cut Pro) and each video makes $5 on average. It’s pocket-change but I enjoy it a lot.
Now, I have almost 800 subscribers and get a new one every day on average. Again, I’m not trying to make a living but I’ll make $700-$1,000 this year on YouTube. It’s enough to afford new equipment and pay for a few tanks of gas.
On the subject of YouTube is photography. It was 13 months ago that I bought my first real professional camera, a Canon 5D Mark III with a 24-105mm L-Lens and a 50mm f/1.2 L-Lens. I still want to get a 70-200 f/2.8 and a fish-eye but I’ve had a blast. I’ve taken 10K photos with the 5D and will keep this camera for a VERY long time. It’s the pinnacle of cameras I’ve shot on and I love it.
Friends:
My social circle has shrunk in the last year. I’ve realized that I’m not great at keeping up with people. I talk to my Mom and Dad monthly sometimes, my friend Chris, possibly my only IRL friend once a month over text and my friend Ben I speak to twice a year. I receive a message here or there mostly from people who read my blog or watch my videos. If you remove work colleagues, Heather and my roommates, I talk to people regularly very rarely.
I don’t really have any good reason for this. It’s just that I’ve always been on my own in a lot of solitude and now that I live away from a city and my old friends are married with kids and the young kids use social networks I don’t use, it just leaves me in this void. There’s a small beer group that only organizes over Facebook events and I don’t use Facebook or Snapchat or Instagram (except to post photos of beer but I don’t follow anyone or post comments) and I don’t even use picture-mail, iMessages or any of the new fangled communication mediums. If you want to reach me, you send a plain-text SMS to my Google Voice number, call me (on my landline) or send an email.
It really waters down to me joining today’s hot social network to talk to people I’ll never become friends with who just happen to have the same interests as me this year is a waste of my time. I’d rather read a book. That pretty much sums up my social life these days.
Health:
I lost 45 pounds in 2015 and about 5 pounds in 2016. I need to lose 50 more so consider this an off-year. My health overall is just fine. No issues, still sleeping 8+ hours a night, eating a lot of veggies, no juice, minimal soda and far less beer than before.
The biggest issue of the last 9 months has been my arms. I’ve started to develop carpal tunnel syndrome. My left wrists hurts right now while typing this and some days, my right wrist hurts more. I’ve had ergo assessments at work, wear a wrist brace on both arms 4 days a week and my night-time when I’d play games on my iMac, edit photos, write and make movies is heavily impacted to the point where I get home most days, sit on the couch with dual ice-packs and hope my arms feel better the next morning when I go back to the office and have to type again.
I’m taking steps to fix this up but it’s been agitated by my summer of motorcycle riding. I don’t really know what to do…it hurts all of the time. Speaking of the motorcycle, the riding agitated my joints and low cartilage amounts that I have from 2 decades of Aikido and martial arts with Dad. I was tackled, thrown, pushed, punched and kicked for years and the bike riding caused everything that is moving joint to ache. I started taking GNC Tri-Flex supplements in June and will keep taking them until motorcycle season is over.
As of this writing, I’m a small 38 waist, 248 pounds heavy and 6’2″ tall. 200 would be wonderful, 220 wound be pretty darn good. I’d be back in a 36 jean and my life-span would certainly be longer.
Closing:
On this year in Earth, I’ve become more normal and my place in life is a bit more in line with my age where before my salary, achievements, knowledge and approach was always a bit ahead of my age. Now, I act like a 30 year old should act or so I think.
I’m still a bit of a weirdo Apple fanatic with strange hobbies and social tendencies around people. I’m better with money, have an adult credit score and am enjoying doing adult things. I still love technology and travel and exploring the world. I also move a bit slower than I did 5 years ago and take care to not make too big of a fuss on things that are outside of my control.
The next 12 months will be fully absorbed by this house purchase. Remodeling, decorating, new furniture, chores, and things like having to research and buy a lawnmower are certainly going to keep me busy. My GF asked me what color I wanted my office painted and I responded, “black”.
I’m not a dark person, I just like things in greyscale. It’s pleasing. Here’s to another decade on Earth. I’ll keep buckling my seatbelt and looking both ways when crossing the road.