There is a noticeable gap from this post to the previous one. That gap can only be explained by what I call the REI vacuum (REI = real estate investing).
As I wrote here, I discovered REI in the summer of 2019. One of the folks at Chautauqua gave me a primer, along with blogs, websites and resources to research.
One thing led to another and all of a sudden I got sucked into a world of real estate investing. In terms of time, I only have so many hours in a day. The time I was spending blog writing slowly got overcome with my newfound obsession.
There was this other thing that came along in early 2020, but personally that didn’t affect me in a negative way. My work life just ramped up while most folks were in lock down. Personally it gave me space to buckle down, think, plan and improve in several areas. The consulting business was busier than it’s been in years and real estate just tore off.
I’ve always thought that the ultimate in financial independence was to have your own land, generating your own resources, living off the grid. Imagine being in that scenario and having a pandemic come along, it may come and go and you’d never hear of it! I’m not quite there, but having your financial house in order and not having to rely on a job or others for resources puts you in a position uniquely suited to ride out black swans like 2020.
I consider the recession of 2008 to be a black swan event. It was bad, lots of negative press, jobs loss, investment losses. Having thought about it after the fact though, I realized that personally it wasn’t that bad because I stayed employed, never went hungry, never went homeless. It was largely the media and other people that were poorly positioned for such an event that exacerbated the strong emotions, thereby making things feel worse then they really were.
I am still stuck in the REI vacuum, enjoying every minute of it. As I wrote in my previous post, I will eventually get around to writing about it in more detail.
Also, 2020 taught me a few new lessons about investing in general. I’ll post my thoughts on that in another post as well.