Author: geohillary@gmail.com

The road of thoughtful living and intelligent savings isn’t that glamorous.  If you are devoted to this road you will not have the biggest house.  You will not wear label recognizing clothes head to toe.  You will not always have the latest tech.   Your car will likely not be the flashiest in the crowd.  But what if you get to a point where you are good, where you have some spare funds to allow for a splurge?  Do you continue along a road of stealth wealth or do you splurge?  If you splurge, what is your one thing?

Last year we decided that it was time to replace the family SUV.  We had held our old SUV for 8 years, it had faithfully served us but had required over 20K in repairs over our ownership.  All of these repairs had been covered in the extended warranty and/or recall notices.  With the expiration of the extended warranty, the next big repair became a looming specter in our life.  After a thorough investigation of available cars and a comparison of our family desires and needs, we narrowed our interest down.  We elected to purchase an F-Pace from Jaguar.  This was with some trepidation.  Trepidation because this car would be the first car that in our minds failed to adhere to the theory of stealth wealth.  But as we got into the nitty gritty of the car and tried others on for size, it looked more and more that while this car is in no uncertain terms a splurge, it is also a great deal for the cost.  I fully expect Jaguar to up the new car price point upward to the likes of the Range Rovers in the next 5 years.  Frankly we were and are in lust as my gear headed better half continued to identify the amazing mechanics of the car and finally culminating with a live test drive, delayed for a few months because the car wasn’t out of production and dealers didn’t have it.  But that test drive sealed the deal and we placed our order.  I have to give credit to my husband, he recognized in the spring of 2016 what the car world later memorialized in May 2017 by awarding Jaguar and the F-Pace with the World Car of the Year and World Car Design of the Year awards.

 

I expect that most of you had a visceral reaction to our car choice.  No further facts provided about the car, our family or otherwise.  Avoiding this reaction is one of the pillars of stealth wealth.  So we violated that pillar, what happened next?  Nothing bad.  A few comments here or there about how nice the car was but overall I feel like this purchase may have ruined the idea of stealth wealth for me.

However, after thinking about things further I don’t think the idea of stealth wealth is fundamentally flawed just perhaps too restrictive.  Cars are our thing.  We’ve taken trips specifically to do things that are car related (car shows, race training, etc.), we read about them on blogs and magazines, we just like cars.  So apparently this is our thing.  Our house is nice but not huge, we live in a good area of town but there are more noted “wealthy” areas than ours, we aren’t at the box seats of a concert or sporting event on a routine basis and we don’t belong to any country clubs.  Perhaps this is why our car is basically no big deal.  Perhaps you can have one violation of stealth wealth and still avoid automatic judgement?

We have had our car for a year, it is still just as fun today as it was 12 months ago as I drove it off the lot so I am extremely happy with our splurge.  But I would like to leave you with the experience I had when I picked up the car for the first time:

After signing the obligatory paperwork and surrendering my old car to the dealer I eagerly was trained on the electronics of the car.  Feeling good and so impressed with my own awesomeness I pulled away from the dealer building and headed out to points unknown.  This was it, I felt like the Queen of the world, I had made it, Marie Antionette had nothing on me, cake eaters beware!  For 100 yards.  What comes driving up the dealers driveway?  A Maserati SUV.  So yeah just when you think you have climbed to the top of the heap don’t worry, the universe is fully prepared to remind you that you will never get there.  It was a solid reminder.  Love what you have, value your splurges and try to keep your one thing in sight at all times.

 

My media consumption has changed a lot in the last 12 months.  I couldn’t understand how I had been so disconnected to certain dominate trends in voter feelings.  Was I truly out of touch?  In a naïve attempt to reconnect with “mainstream America” I changed a few behaviors.

• Consumed news from both distinctly liberal and distinctly conservative outlets
• Put more time into reading and listening to news purveyors who weren’t as flashy as the big outlets
• Questioned the facts and turns of phrase of all of the media I consumed.
• Dropped media publications from my facebook feed.
• Muted friends who prolifically shared either super liberal or super conservative media articles on Facebook

I did this for the most part to preserve my general positive spin on acquaintances, friends, colleagues and especially family.  It was sad to stop seeing these people show up in my feed but better than being unreasonably angry or disappointed in them for sharing yet another crappy (to me) news article denouncing the presence of opinions that didn’t EXACTLY reflect their opinion.

These changes helped but still, something still wasn’t ringing true to me even with my efforts of the last year and my initial attempts to figure it out why didn’t fully gel.  This changed when I listened to a recent TED Talks Daily episode which finally explained to me a very obvious issue that was occurring exactly 12 months ago in the most simple of terms.  If you are interested it is the September 21^st episode “a black man goes undercover in the alt-right” by Theo E.J. Wilson.

Algorithms, the root of my problem.  Unknowingly by liking some folks, viewing shared articles, sharing things that I liked and even muting or blocking folks ended up feeding the unseen machine.  This machine spit out a select algorithm specific to me and then has returned to me things that are, as Mr. Wilson explained, “an echo chamber of my own thoughts”.  Just like Trump bolts to his personal clubs for the weekend presumably to take solace in the embrace of likeminded contemporaries, I too had established a club, one that only reinforced my views and encouraged disrespect toward any other view by exacerbating the potential consequences of views that didn’t match my own.

I am such a sucker.

But with enlightenment can bring change.  I no longer echo headlines via social media or in conversation but ask more questions. When passionate discussions come up with friends I ask for supporting data or more importantly what can be done with that information.  When I see an expressly disturbing headline, I read the article or if it is from an interview, I read the transcript.  In real life this can’t be done for every dramatic headline but even the few a week I can fit in has made me realize that the visceral reaction is what current news outlets are looking for, it is an emotional high after all and it can be addictive.  For now this deep dive has broken my addiction, but I am still left looking for ways to stay informed without the drama of the left vs right spin machine.  What works for you?

 

Our first house was purchased by my not yet husband a few months before we had the good fortune of meeting.  It was a wonderful starter home.  Small ranch, updated bathroom and serviceable home appliances.  I’m nostalgic just thinking about that house.  Why is it so special?  It gave us the space to answer the following questions about needs, wants and purpose.  Reviewing the questions below will help you at any point in your housing journey.  Buy or rent; answer the questions and you will likely have your answer. Stay or move to a larger home; answer the questions.

 

How much house do you need?

A loaded and highly personal question.  But it made us really think about what we wanted space for.  In our first house with two adults and a dog we didn’t need much.  The main floor of our ranch had two bedrooms, 1 bathroom, a living room and eat in kitchen.  The basement was finished and had a ¾ bath and space for a guest.  Living smaller was our thing before HGTV and the tiny house movement glorified it.  At one point I did a 30-day tally similar to the closet purging technique of tracking what you wear by flipping the hangar around when you wear something our of your closet.  I tracked what space we used.  Turns out we could have gotten rid of one of the bedrooms and 90% of the basement.  Alas I still had to do laundry in the basement or the whole thing could have made my list.  This assessment was telling.  We spent most of our time together in our main living space.  No space for a man cave or woman cottage required in home 2.0, but keep that second bathroom – emergencies happen.

 

What do you really want? 

Darn Jones they really can mess with your head when it comes to answering this question.  In the year between when our friends started to purchase their home 2.0 and when we followed suit this topic was a continuous discussion at our house.  Over the year we realized that what we wanted most was proximity to places and activities we liked.  Neither one of us wanted to be packed away in a subdivision with more than a mile walk to amenities or needing to get on a highway to access areas of town we loved.  This mythical new home no longer was a discussion of size or number of bedrooms.

 

What is your house for?

Sounds simple, living in, that’s the answer right?  Really it isn’t.  When you are thinking of your new house are you envisioning hosting dinner parties with your adoring friends?  Are you looking to impress all visitors from the entry way?  Do you want to feel like you are a host on food network every night?  Would nothing make you happier than a giant family game night?  Look whatever sounds the best to you should guide your house hunt.  This is the feature or potential future in a new home you need to be looking for.  For us, we wanted an amazing kitchen.  What we got initially was an electric range and Formica counters that weren’t so great but a few years and a renovation later, we did get that kitchen.

Are you insulated financially?

What is at risk in your life?  What might change in the next 3-5 years?  These are the questions that guided us to the list price or maximum cost for our home search.  Professionally we were at a risky point, the business we were a part of was headed in the right direction but honestly wasn’t paying all that well and we wanted to buy in a neighborhood that might necessitate private school for any future children we might have.  Because of this we decided that we needed to be able to afford our next house and associated costs (utilities taxes, etc) on one income.  So we did the math for what we knew we could pay on a mortgage on one salary, took that number to an online calculator and then use that number to define the top of our budget.  This isn’t that fun, what is more fun is getting a big giant number from your lender and thinking of all the great properties you could afford with that number.  However, we all have seen how risky that option can be.

We are happy you found us here at Financially Independent Family. We are all about making smart financial decisions, positioning you and your family for success and riding the crazy trains of parenting and entrepreneurship.  While financial independence was never the main driver of our effort it has definitely shaped our lives first as newlyweds and now as financially independent parents.  We look forward to sharing our thoughts and experiences with you.