2018 Halftime Update - AKA Summer is Overrated
I am not anti-summer
I just think summer is overrated.
It's not that I hate summer, I just seem to feel better when it's not around. Ms. Life Simply Frugal sums it up well here. We went right from bitter April cold to hot as hell and humid to top it all off. Being no dummy (as far as you know) I expect a certain amount of this every year but I swear it's been hot and nasty about 6 straight weeks now. Even Banjo! our beloved and mighty boxer dog doesn't want to walk/run any more than two miles and that's not doing much for our exercise regimen.
At least you have this in summer. Home grown except for the pig and salmon.
Boo hoo. Aside from whining about the humidity everything else in life is just humming along at cruising speed. The family is all as healthy as can be expected and that cannot be underestimated. The talented Mrs. Smidlap is learning all about wine and working at a friend's wine shop a couple of days a week and has a booth in a huge art festival in August so that's a likely good score for selling some paintings. Remember this one: Will Buying Art Kill Your Financial Independence Dreams? With all that we're ready for a vacation. We haven't traveled since early April when we tore up New Orleans for my 50th birthday. We haven't traveled this summer because we had our roof replaced last fall and this year we've had to lay out some more big dollars for a paint job on Casa de Smidlap. While we've saved up for those jobs we always take from a vacation/home maintenance fund so when the repair costs go up the fun meter goes down a little. We might revisit this in the future and separate the two. I've also been waiting for the final bill from the paint guy to have that cost fixed and know exactly what the fun budget is for the rest of the year.
We'll be going to this little lake cabin in September. I can't wait to get back to the Adirondacks.
The rest of the year as I see it
The end result of putting off travel is that I'm still sitting on 4.55 weeks of paid vacation from Big Brother Corporation with only about 5 months left in the year. I was thinking about a staycation to give myself a trial run at what retirement might be like but every time I ask myself that question the voice inside my head says "fuck that." We're supposed to have visitors from New Orleans in August and have an invitation to spend some days with good friends near Boston. That's about a 7 hour drive from here but the in-laws live about half way near Saratoga Springs where they have the famous thoroughbred horse racing meet every August. If you're ever in Upstate, NY that little city is worth a visit. We usually spend a few days with the in-laws (the theme is that we love staying for free) and try and see old friends around the area. That still feels more like home for me and I've been here in Buffalo for 15 years now. We'll have to figure out what to do with the rest of the time off later on but I'm partial to October travel. If we don't fully fund one of the Roth's this year to fund it that would be OK too. We've been diligent and the finish line is near so the world wouldn't end if we made that move. You gotta balance this stuff, right?
How about the investments?
I consider this to be a solid market year. I gave everybody a look up our dress at the portfolio here. We have about half our holdings in index funds and half in individual stocks. The 401k where the indices reside is up 3.9% for the year and it looks like international is leading the way so far. The individual stock portfolio in the Roths and after tax accounts are up 13.3% for the year and that's after trouncing the S&P 500 by about 20% last year. I've been really happy with the mix even after Netlix hit a little bump in the road this week. That's why diversification is important if you're going to play in the individual stock sandbox. I turned off dividend reinvestment earlier this year in order to look for opportunities to add to stocks I already own. The preferred stock ETF's throw off quite a bit of cash and I might want more of something else or to start a new position. I've barely sold anything this year so let's not go thinking this fartknocker is going around day trading all willy nilly. We're buy and hold investors. I also let the dividend income build in the after tax account in case Mrs. Smidlap needs any cash to fund her life and interests. It might come in handy as her desktop computer just crapped out so that purchase could be on the horizon.
Good food from the garden, even though summer is overrated
We had leaf lettuce the past couple of months but that has bolted and gone to seed and we'll see a second crop of that one. The red currants are ripe and I probably should do something with them soon, even if i just pick and freeze them. Our crappy seedy grapes are healthy and thriving as always but they're nicer to look at than to eat. On the long "to do" list is to graft some better fruit onto the healthy rootstock. The blackberries are the size of small trees and we should have about a zillion of those bad boys. I saw the first ripe one yesterday. We tried our hand at composting in one of those Rubbermaid totes. We did the research and ventilated the damned thing and used brown matter in with the food matter and in a couple of weeks it was all starting to look like dark rich soil! Then one day I was looking at the currants and one of the drilled vent holes had grown to the exact diameter of a rat. Needless to say the composting experiment is now on hold until we figure out plan B. We have an old-school metal trash can that I think could do the job as I'm not going to buy something for the task. That's the summer update and it's nearly the cocktail hour.
What about you Smidlappers? You having a fun summer? Where should we go in the fall? do you think summer is overrated?
Grapes look good against the new paint on the back of the estate.