Ahoy!
We’re Patchy and Meg Duty, a couple of master putterers, ambling our way towards financial independence, looking to share our answer to “If you stop working, what are you going to do with your time?”
We, and our two dogs, are fortunate enough to live in the suburbs of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on the Schuylkill River.
Most of the time it looks like this
Fun fact: Schuylkill is Dutch for Hidden River!
Or this.
Or these.
We’re also fortunate to know that the challenges that come from living here are an opportunity for creativity.
Because sometimes it looks like this.
Or this. Which can lead to that over there. Oops.
Given our locale, and our history, we are unlike many of the folks pursuing either FI or FIRE, who are excited to get out and explore the world and all it has to offer. And who consider their home an expense to be minimized to the point of discomfort or solely an asset in their net worth column. We’re both Marine Corps veterans who have seen enough of the world and would like nothing more than to stay our rear ends at home, in comfort, with the dogs, thankyewverymuch.
This is Otto Von Squishypants, our old guy who has been known to mutter, ”Get off my lawn.”
Requisite dog pics
And Sir Griff of the Schuylkill, who will sit pretty much anywhere as long as it is on you. No, he is not light.
We’re not trying to get to FI as quickly as possible either, though we’re not loafing around. And frankly we started late enough that the “FIRE and retire in your 30’s” timeframe was gone before we even knew that the FI community existed. We view reaching FI as a risk mitigation strategy. The cold facts are that if one of us must stop working or loses a job after the age of 50, the chances of finding another job in our industry are pretty slim. So, we know that we need to be in a position to go by the time we hit that age range, whether we decide to stop full time employment or not.
This gets us to the raison d’etre for this blog. If we punch our last timecard in our 50’s what the heck are we going to do with all that free time? Won’t we get bored? Won’t we lack purpose? Hell no!
Our whole house is our workshop. We’ll show you the elevated woodshop and bee space we made. You’ll see pictures of a sewing machine on a dining room table and a dismantled couch in the middle of a room. If that sounds like a recipe for chaos to you, it certainly could be. One of the things we pride ourselves on is finishing what we’ve started. So, while our beat-up old pool table doubles as workbench on occasion, it only does it for a limited period of time. And then it’s back to shooting pool (poorly) and drinking beer.
One of the reasons we get along so well is that both of us like to do “projects”. It doesn’t matter if it’s a house project, wood project, bee project, dog project, how the heck do we waterproof this or make it float project, or any other sort of project that asks us to make something, we’re in. And we’re good at packing our parachute on the way down, so if it doesn’t work the first time we’ll share that and share what we did to fix it.
Meg is also a fan of data. So expect to see a few posts about that as well. She’ll share bee data from the hives, financial data that happens to be interesting, and she even did data-based analysis on the impact that third parties had on the PA election in 2016. So if things look interesting this fall, maybe expect to see some numbers around that. Or possibly a post or two about workout improvements and PRs.
We also recognize that “projects” take money. Our goal is to do them as inexpensively as possible and share any tips to save cash along the way. We’ll also add an ass-ache evaluation of the projects, so you’ll know if they’re worth the pain in the butt or if they should just be skipped.
Welcome to the Hive. Let’s go make something.