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Why I Went Back to Work After 6 Years of Early Retirement

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8 min read. Personal Finance, Personal, Financial Independence, Blog, Spotlight, Canonical. Leave a Comment

Yep, it’s happening! I’m returning to the workforce as an employee. After a 6-year break to work on my own projects, I stumbled on a role that just feels right. I’ve accepted the job, and started last week! 🥳

Whenever I’m talking to people familiar with my financial situation, the biggest question I get is “Why?”. It’s not an easy one to answer. We have a decent amount of savings, about $1.2m even after recent events. We have cash on hand for another ~5 years, and another 5-10 with investments. Hardcover is growing and may someday make money (🤞). So why now?

I’ll go into these in detail, but here’s where my mind goes when making this decision.

  • We’re at about a 6% withdrawal rate – to high for forever FIRE.
  • We don’t have any income outside of selling stocks.
  • I found a job that’s so similar to what I’m already doing with my days it feels insane not to jump at the opportunity. 😂

There are also existential threats – things I can’t control but might happen.

  • US stock market uncertainty throws us into unknown territory for stock projections.
  • Tariffs and regulations will cause prices to rise, causing uncertainty in future spending.
  • The future of the Affordable Care Act is in question, which could spike our health insurance costs.
  • Fewer job openings due to a recession could make well-paid jobs scarce.
  • Other countries moving away from the US dollar causing it to lose value.

Basically, my hypothesis is that stocks will go down, prices will go up, and we’re already not able to FIRE at a sub-4% withdrawal rate – in the zone we’d want. It’s a period of high uncertainty, and having a job helps some fo that. Having a job I actually like, and resonate with the mission for, makes this a no brainer.

Here’s the longer version of the those three main points.

1. A 6% Withdrawal Rate is Too High For Forever FIRE

Even if you don’t know anything about how much someone has saved up, or how much they spend, if you know their withdrawal rate you know enough. In 2020 we spent $82k with $2.3m in savings – a 3.5% withdrawal rate! Things were looking good.

One big thing changed in 2020 – we stopped caring much about our spending. Getting through COVID mentally, and also enjoying life throughout the changing political landscape meant there was enough on our minds.

By 2021 our spending had grown to $104k. We bootstrapped $15 into Hardcover, and our investments continued to grow – climbing above $2.5m. This put us closer to a 4.15% withdrawal rate. Not as stable as 3.5%, but not too bad.

2022 wasn’t as rosy. Our spending grew to $133k – thanks to spending more money on traveling, bootstrapping Hardcover as a business, and the costs of knee surgery with a high deductible healthcare plan. We also lost our 14-year old dog Lily in 2022. I threw myself into building Hardcover, and stopped caring about finances. We rarely made large purchases, so I wasn’t worried about anything short term. I knew we’d eventually figure out our long term finances, and an extra $30k or so in a super-stressful year wouldn’t bankrupt us. We had at 5.4% withdrawal rate.

But somehow we spent $133k again in 2023. That did surprise me. $15k was for Hardcover, we made some luxury purchases, booked some international travel for 2024, but it didn’t feel like we were living a crazy luxurious lifestyle. We were still living in a 2-bedroom apartment, and had filled all available space from it. Our investments continued to be in the $2.3m-$2.5m range – somewhere around a 5-5.5% withdrawal rate.

By 2024, I was starting to accept the fact that forever-FIRE wouldn’t be possible with our current amount of savings and spending. We spent another $120k for about a 5.5% withdrawal rate for the year.

My wife and I had talked about this occasionally through the years, so it wasn’t a shock to either of us. We knew we could try to vastly reduce our expenses for the rest of our lives, make money now, or go back to work.

When we ran all of the numbers, that’s when we made the decision to start looking for a house. With interest rates high, my thought process was that we’d be a good buying position. Prices are high, but maybe we could find an overlooked gem, or get in fast with a good offer (we did both, and we love it!).

It’s a financial reset – one we’re still in the middle of. I don’t yet know what our yearly household spending will look like with a house. I’m guessing lower, without a $2,500 rent payment each month. My plan was to settle in, get what we need and then by June have a decent understanding of our monthly spending to estimate a withdrawal rate.

I started looking into what options we would have – besides lowering expenses. We’re happy with what we’re spending money on now. Although there are places we’d cut if needed, needed is the key word. We eat out rarely, don’t upgrade electronics often, travel enough that we’re happy with our experiences and are overall very happy.

We tried running the numbers by lowering our expenses and what we would have to cut didn’t mesh with the life we wanted to live.

2. What Are Our Income Options?

We knew our monthly expenses weren’t going to suddenly drop to a 4% withdrawal rate, so that still left the question: how do we fill that gap? We came up with three ideas:

  1. Hardcover starts generating income
  2. Rent out the 2nd unit (we bought a duplex, where I’m using the 2nd unit as an office).
  3. I get a job

Getting Hardcover to the point where it can generate enough income for us to continue saving money is not a quick task. Well, unless I decide to just put ads on it. It might be able to generate $3k-$5k a month with those. Our monthly spending is less than $5k, so that would cover our bills. But it could also destroy the thing I love building and alienate the community we’re trying to build. I didn’t give this more than a passing thought and decided against it.

To grow Hardcover in other ways will take much more time and work. But I’d be able to build what it in the way I want. Time wise, it’s hard to predict what that looks like – even with me working full time on it. Building out a feature is easy, but getting people to hand over their hard-earned money is another thing. Some of the features we’d like to charge for target authors – which would mean building an entire network of authors, figuring out what we even need to build, building it and charging for it. That’ll take a while.

Going into 2025, I was OK with it taking a while. As I mentioned, we have cash on hand to last a few years. That would give me a few more swings at making it profitable. I was happy to continue building it and see where things went – sitting out capitalism as much as possible for another year.

We thought about the idea of renting out the 2nd unit in our new house, but we just moved in. We’d like to enjoy it first! The 2nd unit is also upstairs, and the house was built in 1898, which means we’d hear them and they’d hear us. We’ve ruled this out for now. I see this as our “in case of emergency, break glass” kind of financial situation. It’s always there if we need it.

That just leaves one option.

3. The Part Where I Get a Job

Then in the span of a month four things happened:

First, I saw a job posting about a research and development position at a technology education company that sounded fun. It mirrored much of what I did at Code School for years and got me excited at the idea of working again. I applied for it, heard nothing for 6 weeks, then received an form message saying they were moving forward with a different candidate. 🤷‍♂️

Second, a few weeks later, I attended Epic Web Conference here in Salt Lake City. It was a ton of fun! I was able to put many BlueSky names to faces (side note: I’ve migrated from Twitter/X/Mastodon to BlueSky. I’m @adamfortuna.com on there). It was only the second tech conference I’ve been to since COVID lockdown, and I had a ton of fun building a hack day project (Birdcatcher, an intentionally awful video player), and chatting with other devs.

One common thing at tech conferences is companies looking for developers. It’s an ideal place to find motivated devs who care about improving. That hiring piece was missing from this conference experience. I chatted with at least 4 developers who were actively looking for jobs and struggling to find a position. The pattern-matching side of me noted this as a not-great-sign for the state of software development jobs.

Third, the stock market saw the largest drop since the pandemic. We didn’t make any notable changes in our portfolio, since we had previously rebalanced (to 20% US / 25% International / 20% bonds / 30% cash) by selling funds to purchase the house. That rebalance was based on us not having jobs, but having cash on hand for the next few years. We made one change with the market drop: selling some funds in our (very small) HSA so have more more in cash there.

The Fourth, and the catalyst of this entire post, happened completely by chance. I was working on Hardcover and browsing BlueSky one day and saw a job posting at Libro.fm for a Senior Ruby on Rails Engineer. I’ve been a Libro.fm user for 4 years, a Rails engineer for 20, and I’m building a social network in the book space. Libro is an audiobook competitor to Audible in the same way Hardcover is a social network competitor to Goodreads. I applied, not fully committed to the idea of going back to work (yet).

Researching Libro as a company, I was more impressed at every step. They’re bootstrapped, remote, employee owned, a Social Purpose company, and pay well with a small team (under 20). Every new thing I learned about them made it clear they’re building the company with many of the same principles I’ve built Hardcover with – but they’re much more financially successful. 😂

Within a week they got back to me and I interviewed with a few people on the team. Each person I talked to made me more excited to work with this group on this project. By the time I talked to Mark, Libro’s CEO, I’d switched from wondering if this would be right for me, to looking forward to seeing how I could help make even more of a difference in the book space.

Aside from the empathy and communication that I experienced during the interview phase, I was amazed at how well it could just fit into my life. I’m already working ~32 hours a week on Hardcover, waking up early and juggling 20 things at a time. This will shift that to working entirely on in the code. Someone else will get to handle marketing, support, product research, and a bunch of other tasks that come along with being a founder of a startup.

That doesn’t mean I’m leaving Hardcover! In fact, I’m still working on it one day a week plus nights and weekends. In our next newsletter on May 1st, we’ll be announcing some changes, but that’s mostly our hope to bring on some new team members and focus on shifting to open source. I’m just as committed to the project as ever. If anything, it means that spending a little money of of my pocket to keep it going doesn’t mean robbing my future retirement.

The First Week

My first week happened to be their yearly offsite, and I was able to meet the team! So far it feels a lot like a bunch of people who kept their college team projects together all working at one place. 😂 I’m excited to get up to speed and start making contributions that help even more people read more – a spillover of Hardcover goals I’ve been working towards into Libro.fm’s.

I’m not sure yet how much I plan to write here on Minafi, about my finances, or about Libro. I felt burned out on financial content in 2021, which is what led to my shift to Hardcover in the first place. I’d still like to share occasional updates here, but

The Four-Year Ripple Effect of a Simple Theme

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3 min read. Personal Finance, Blog, Canonical. Leave a Comment

I don’t remember much from December 2020. I’d left my job at Pluralsight 2 years prior, and had spent that time building Minafi, going on tons of hikes and training for a marathon (ran one in 2021!). After 9 months of social distancing, my wife and I also went on a hiking road trip around Utah – in what was possibly the best time ever to see Utah’s National Parks (no crowds, 50 degree weather and no snow).

When I came back from that trip, I was energized and ready to make some new goals for 2021. I tried something a little different: I set themes for the year. The four themes I wrote down were:

  1. Continue Moving from a Goals-Based Live to a Values-Based Life
  2. Local First
  3. Avoid Big Tech
  4. Value My Own Time

“Switching to a values-based life” and “valuing my own time” were entirely mindset based changes. “Local first” is one I continue to strive for, and remind myself about whenever making purchases.

But it was “Avoid Big Tech” that ended up having the largest impact on my life.

An Initial Spark

In the spirit of Local First, avoiding big tech was a logical next step. That meant not purchasing as much from Amazon, Facebook, Google, Apple and Microsoft. Anti-Amazon sentiment was high around this time as their anti-union practices were put into the spotlight.

I made steps to leave some of these ecosystems, but others I fell back into.

I uninstalled Facebook from my phone, deleted Messenger and Whats App. Eventually I deleted my Facebook and Instagram altogether.

I stuck with Google for many things – namely Google Fiber, Gmail and Docs. Although I did switch to Duck Duck Go for search.

There wasn’t much Microsoft in my life. I still use GitHub, but only as a free user.

Apple ended up coming out in favor of DEI, and has continued to make good decisions (from what I’ve seen). I have no problems supporting them, although I have switched to buying subscriptions outside the app store to give more money to developers.

I didn’t expect Amazon to be the most difficult to break up with. We unplugged out Alexa Echo devices, stopped renewing Amazon Prime and focused on buying local. Unfortunately some businesses only sell on Amazon, which has meant the occasional purchase.

Leaving Goodreads, an Amazon owned social network for readers, ended up being more difficult than I thought. I didn’t have too many friends on there, but enough that it felt alive. When I started Hardcover in April of 2021, I didn’t realize how difficult a task I was taking on (probably a good thing, or I wouldn’t have done it!). We launched in October 2021, and I was officially off Goodreads!

On December 31, 2021 I switched from Audible to Libro.fm – severing the last connection I had with Amazon. We’d occasionally re-enable Prime for a month here or there to watch Rings of Power, or buy a few Audible exclusives, but we were mostly off Amazon.

The Power of a Theme

I didn’t realize it at the time, but that one line in my 2021 goals would end up setting the stage for the next 4 years of my life.

It led me to build Hardcover as a replacement.

It led me to learn how to deploy applications on Google Cloud Run rather than AWS, and later on Digital Ocean (where most of Hardcover is hosted now).

It led me to join Libro.fm as an audiobook listener.

Which led me to have a great resume item (Hardcover), along with years as a user, when applying for a job at Libro! 🥳

Progress Happens Because of Work

It can sometimes feels like change happens at a snails pace. When I set that theme for 2021, I was enjoying my (temporary) early retirement, and still hoped to never “work” again – yet 5 months later I started a new company. 😂

This wasn’t what I planned at all. I was happy relaxing and enjoying sleeping in and working on Minafi. But this theme motivated me to do something more. It turns our that there were parts I enjoy that are difficult to find without other people – community and the kind of work you can create with others.

I didn’t realize this at the time, or I would’ve started Hardcover as an open source project working with the community from the start. That’s something I’ve recently realized and we’re taking steps to open source the codebase!

My takeaway from this? Find your core values and stick to them. They’ll lead you to places that you don’t know exist.

Why We Traded Stocks for a House Seven Years Into FIRE

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10 min read. Blog, Spotlight, Minafi, Canonical, Personal Finance, Personal, Financial Independence, Investing, Featured. 2 Comments

Hey hey! It’s been a while! 👋

Long enough that a quick timeline can help fill in the gaps. So, what have I been up? Years of almost no changes, then a bunch all at once. To put them all in context, here’s the tl;dr on my financial rollercoaster since I left my job.

December 2018 – Decided to leave my job after Code School was acquired by Pluralsight, the company went public and I was able to sell my shares. I called it FIRE at about a ~4.2% withdrawal rate – higher than the target 4%, but clearly able to withstand any 20+ year period of market returns. My wife kept working until January of 2020, when she left her job for us to travel (just in time for COVID 😂).

I created this visualization to show how much I saved (y-Axis) at different ages. I saved 25% to 50% of my income for most years of my career. A negative savings rate of 100% would mean withdrawing 4%. Age 37 is less than that because my wife was still working at that time.

I experienced three notable income events – inheriting the house I grew up in when my mom passed away, Code School being acquired and Pluralsight going public on the NASDAQ stock exchange. At age 37 when I left my job I had about $2.2m in cash and investments, no debt and no property (other than a Fiat; that counts right?).

December 2018 – April 2021 – Minafi Focused – For the first 3ish years of FIRE, I had a lot of fun working on whatever I wanted. I created an investor bootcamp, fund directory and a number of interactive calculators. I had dreams of turning Minafi into a side project that could generate enough income for me to lower my safe withdrawal rate from ~4.2% down to a number that would last forever (3%). That’s the “goal” on this chart.

There was a problem with this plan – I burned myself out on financial content. 😭 There are two ways I’ve seen people be successful in the investing/finances/influencer space: they peddle products that aren’t worthwhile and might even cause others to take longer to reach FIRE. Or they build such a huge audience that they can make a profit from ads or affiliates.

Neither of these felt right for where I wanted to put my effort every day on. In April of 2021 I stepped back and decided to try my hand at a different project.

May 2021 – Now – Hardcover Focused – After Tweeting about my discontent with Goodreads, I decided to go all in on the idea. I put out a post on Reddit looking for collaborators, and we started Hardcover, a social network for readers! It’s been such a fun project. I’m spending much more of my time coding than I was on Minafi, where content was the most important piece. We’ve grown to 28k members, 290 subscribers with a thriving Discord and dozens of new people (sometimes hundreds) joining every day.

It’s been an amazing and fun project. I’ve spent days working on it from coffee shops, from our office in our apartment, from bed and recently from our new house (more on that later!).

What it’s not is profitable. It’s making $1,500 a month, but that’s not even covering the high hosting costs needed for such a data-heavy site.

Now – That brings us to today! I’m still actively working on Hardcover, looking to turn in into a successful business and enjoying life.

What About Income and Expenses?

Success with FIRE depends on two main assumptions: how much you’ll spend and how much the stock market will return. Out spending ended up being higher than I anticipated: 82k, 104k, 133k, 133k, 121k. The last few years that’s included $15k/yr to bootstrap Hardcover. Yet even with this, when we looked at our portfolio in 2024 it was still higher than when we retired!

However the math wasn’t mathing for forever FIRE. In August 2024 I ran the numbers. Our SWR had climbed up to 5.9%!

We were in a classic FIRE dilemma: should we spend less or earn money?

I started exploring different scenarios. What if we cut out Hardcover, reduce extra spending but stayed in our apartment? We could potentially live there another 25 years before we run out money. If the market declines, we’d run out of money sooner. The thought of bring broke at 67 didn’t sound good.

What if we buy a house? I’ve loved living in an apartment, but math-wise I wanted to rule it in or out. I ran the numbers on different house costs, combined with lower monthly expenses due to not having to pay rent. The results surprised me! We’d be under $1m much sooner, but with lower expenses our remaining investments wouldn’t dip as fast.

This has assumptions built on other assumptions. Of how much the market will return (7%), of inflation (3%), of rent increases (3%), of home insurance and property taxes (3%) and how much we’ll spend each year on maintenance ($35k/yr – which is super high, but includes taxes and everything else).

The fact that with all of these assumptions, in 26 or 27 years we’d run out of money matched with the FIRE simulators I’d run. My wife and I talked through these scenarios and one thing stood out:

We’d rather own a house in 27 years than still be in an apartment.

So, in August of 2024 we started looking for a house!

House Hunting Without a Job

We lived in a 2 bedroom, 2 bathroom apartment for 7 years. After that many years, we’d expanded into every inch of the space plus two storage units in the building for camping gear and holiday decorations. Our second bedroom was my office, my wife’s office, our guest room and our Peloton room. We needed more space.

Deciding on a budget was the hardest part. We initially planned on limiting our spending to about $600k (of $2.3m). We were dismayed when we saw what that would get us: the smallest, oldest, most dated houses in the areas we wanted to live.

In September 2024, a house on my run/walk path went up for sale. It had a ton of space, beautiful views of the city, open floor plan and more. It ended up being entirely too expensive ($1.4m, but later sold for under $1m). But talking about that house got us both excited in the idea of being homeowners again.

We had very specific criteria for this new place:

  • We wanted to stay in Salt Lake City, Utah. Even though it’s a blueberry in a tomato soup – politically.
  • Walkability is huge to me. I wanted a place where we’d never need to drive.
  • 3+ bedrooms, 2+ bathrooms, 1,500 sqft or larger.
  • A good entertaining space inside for friends hangouts and board games.
  • A yard with enough space for some friends to being over their dogs.
  • Close to nature in some way! Specifically a park because we didn’t want to be on the ridge line (first to be impacted by fires).
  • Modern, updated interior and a nice kitchen.
  • We’d be OK doing minor fixes and updates, but didn’t want to do a renovation, addition or anything major.

In the neighborhood we wanted to live in (Liberty Wells), most houses are 100 years old or older. The “good entertaining space” and “modern kitchen” ended up being the most difficult pieces to find.

Like for most things in like, I created a spreadsheet to generate a personalized “Walk Score” for each place we investigated. These are weighted by how often I’d go to them – including going to the park with a dog once we adopt one. It uses Google Maps and a macro to get the distance to each place and convert it from meters to miles.

Throughout September and October we toured about 25 houses. We went under contract with one, but the inspection scared us off (“it’s falling in on itself” – our inspector). In late October we went on a cruise that we’d planned early in the year (Barcelona!)

One place was listed while we were gone that looked perfect. It went under contract before we came back.

The pricing and competitiveness of the housing market was starting to get to us – and we’d only been looking for 2 months! Some friends of ours spent 9 months hunting for their place (in Seattle). We hoped to find something sooner.

We got back from our vacation on Friday. On Sunday we saw a new place in the perfect spot show up Redfin. We called our Realtor, got in within 2 hours of listing and were the first to see it – even before the sign was put up!

After going through a failed purchase, we were hesitant to make an offer too quickly. We slept on it, talked about it, and decided yes, this is the place. Let’s do it!

We put in an offer that was contingent on an inspection, but not contingent on financing. We knew that would either be an SBLOC or cash. They accepted the offer in November and we started the inspection process.

SBLOC or Cash?

The big question for us was whether we’d take out a securities backed line of credit (SBLOC) or just pay cash.

We looked into Interactive Brokers for SBLOCs after a bunch of other FIRE bloggers mentioned them. Here’s how that would work: 1) we’d need to transfer all of our Vanguard Mutual funds to ETFs, then 2) Transfer those ETFs to Interactive Brokers, then 3) Take out a cash loan on those funds at a max of 50% of the holdings (so if we had $1m in investments at IB, they’d loan us up to $500k).

IB’s rates are competitive, but you’d still pay 6.5% at the time. Since this rate is variable, it could go up or down at anytime. It also means that if the value of our investments declines, we’d need to sell enough so that our loan amount is less than 50% of the total amount invested.

For an $850k house, we’d need to have $1,700,000 of investments to loan against. We didn’t have that much, but we could pay $250k immediately, then we’d only need a $600k loan on $1.2m in assets. Ideally, we’d need $1.5m+. In that case we could still be in trouble if the portfolio decreases 20%.

I didn’t love the idea of moving of our investments from Vanguard. They’ve served me well for almost 20 years.

The biggest downside to the SBLOC is the chance of the loan being called in. If the market dips, they could still some of that stock automatically. This loan also wouldn’t give a mortgage interest deduction for taxes.

The Cash Option

The alternative is that we buy the house completely in cash. We’d need to pay a lot in taxes to liquidate that much cash, but after that our ownership wouldn’t be tied to the market.

We investigated both paths for most of November and December. After the election I had no more of an idea what direction the market would head than anyone else. What we did know was the present. We could cash out some funds at the markets all time high, buy a house, and then figure out what’s next after that.

So in December I started rebalancing our portfolio into cash. I recommend dollar cost averaging for investing a lump sum into the market, and it seemed just as useful for cashing money out. I’d put in an order to liquidate $100k a week until we had enough to make the purchase. This would completely blow our chances at any Healthcare.gov subsidies for the year, but it needed to be done. We already had 3 years of expenses in a Vanguard Cash Plus account, but we’d need to sell a lot more.

Side note: Vanguard won’t allow you to send a wire from a Cash Plus account. We found this out the day before closing. You also can’t instantly transfer to another Vanguard account. This meant that the best way to wire money for the house was to wire money from the Vanugard Cash Plus account to our already connected Bank of America checking account, and then go into a physical branch to transfer from BoA to the Title company. I wonder how often people get a 900k transfer in the morning only for it to be transferred out an hour later. Not suspicious at all. 😅

Our US Stock allocation had grown to almost 60% of our portfolio – well above our target 50%. We sold mostly VTI/VTSAX to fund the house purchase, with a smaller amount of international stocks. Here’s what our allocation currently looks like.

This is the end result of our expenses after paying $72k in taxes for 2024 ( 😭), and another $100k in house fixes (😭😭). Foundations are expensive. 🛠️🏡

To me, this felt like cashing chips out at a casino after a winning streak. I don’t know what’ll happen next with the US stock market, but I’m not optimistic. I believe tariffs, trade wars, small businesses closing, more unemployment and more international competition will result in a serious correction to the US stock market. In the worst case, that’ll lead to international options for many US products and services, resulting in those companies never recovering and the dollar losing it’s position as the worlds reserve currency.

I don’t have a crystal ball, but I am concerned. I’d rather have a physical home and a decent cash cushion at this moment in time.

Consumers are voting with their wallets. TSLA, Amazon and Target are all down because of protests as these companies have made the clear decision to become political entities. I’m doing the same thing with my limited purchase power. I haven’t completely left the US stock market, but it’s switched from being my priority to a secondary investment.

Today, this only costs taxes. For this we get peace of mind by owning a home, and to no longer need to worry about the markets (for as long as our cash cushion holds out 😅).

We’re Homeowners! 🥳

That’s where we’re at today! We have a house and decent cash cushion that could last us at least 5 years.

We closed on the house in late December, spent two months on various fixes, and moved in about three weeks ago. It’s already starting to feel like home. ♥️

Notice the Midsommar May Queen and incense hut on the mantle 😂

Our new place is a 1898 Victorian 4 bedroom, 3 bathroom duplex (2/2 and a 2/1). The downstairs is our primary space, while the upstairs is my office, guest room, exercise area and future rental (if and when we want to).

For now, we’re settling in and enjoying the space. We haven’t made too many big purchases (aside from a Dresden gaming dining room table). Just about everything else came over from our apartment, but now has much more room to breathe.

The future of our finances is still in question. Do we go back to work? Do we rent out the apartment upstairs? Do Hardcover or Minafi start generating enough income to support us? These are the questions we’re still figuring out.

With everything happening politically in the US right now, it feels difficult to make long term plans. Some politicians thrive on uncertainty, but markets don’t. As we start tracking our expenses in the new house, we’ll have a better understanding of how much we spend a year here. That’ll give us some insight into how much time we have before needing an income.

For now we’re going to enjoy this new phase of life as much as we can – between protests, boycotts and calls to our representatives.

My $15,000 Knee Injury: A Year of ACL Recovery

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8 min read. Personal, Financial Independence. Leave a Comment

A year ago back in May of 2022 I rejoined CrossFit. I went religiously from 2011 all the way up until COVID closed down gyms in 2020.

Growing up with asthma I never considered myself athletic. By when I graduated high school, I’d been to the ER because I couldn’t breath more times than I’d ever ran a mile. At my athletic peak of the time I’d consider myself at the “intermediate intramural ultimate frisbee” level of fitness.

A coworker of mine, Casey Jenks who would later go on to found TrueCoach, was an early CrossFit devotee and started his own gym back in 2010-ish. On his encouragement I went in for an hour-long “foundations” coaching session with one other new member.

I remember doing a 7 minutes of half “Cindy”, one of the iconic CrossFit workouts with assisted pull-ups, assisted push-ups and air squats. Even from that I was exhausted in a way I’d never experienced. I joined on the spot.

For years I went 3 classes a week – Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 8 AM. I ended up putting on muscle in places I never knew about.

Even though I never reached anywhere near the competitive level of CrossFit, I had a blast challenging myself with difficult movements. I loved the challenge of seeing something I couldn’t do and then forming a plan on how to get there.

I saw my engine, my ability to perform work, grow more each year. Eventually I was snatching my body weight, squatting double it, performing legless rope climbs, walking across the gym on my hands and (on good days) being able to do a few ring muscle ups.

When I had to stop going in 2020 I was sad to lose that piece of my routine that me feel stronger.

Returning to CrossFit

When I rejoined 2 years later I thought I was still in decent shape. During COVID I’d switched from weightlifting to mostly cardio – slowly increasing my max running distance up until running a marathon in July 2021.

On my second day back at the gym I had a life-changing injury. I was stepping down from a 20″ high box while holding 2 20lb dumbbells when my knee buckled under me. Looking back I should have been stepping backwards rather than forwards. My knee went sideways and I saw stars. I don’t remember it being painful, but when I went to take another step my knee was no longer able to support any weight.

Diagnosing and Healing

After a few days I was still not able to walk right. After some research I found that the University of Utah has an amazing Orthopaedics center. They were very quickly able to make a guess that it was an ACL tear.

I immediately went home and started googling “what is an ACL tear”. Turns out it’s not great. The ACL, or Anterior Cruciate Ligament, is a tendon inside the knee that helps connect your thigh bone to your shinbone. Without a torn ACL the two segments of your leg can’t work together.

I wrote a lot more about the experience in my post I’m 40 Today. Here’s What I Want From My Next 10 Years To Look Like.

What I didn’t know at the time I wrote that was how much the injury would cost or how long it would take to recover.

Turns out it’s about $15,000 and around a year to get back up to 90%.

The Financial Side of an ACL Tear

I’m terrified of medical expenses. As a planner and budgeter, unexpected medical bills are one area that you can’t plan, but you also can’t ignore.

As soon as my wife and I stopped working we switched to a Bronze health insurance plan from healthcare.gov. It was shockingly easy to enroll in, and I’d absolutely recommend it.

We went with a Bronze plan for three main reasons.

First, we didn’t have any current medical conditions or expenses. If we’d had ongoing issues we would have upgraded to a Silver or Gold plan.

Second, the Bronze plan has an out of pocket max per year of $14,000. The Gold plan would have cost almost that much by itself.

Lastly, the Bronze plan came with an HSA, a health savings account. We could start saving and investing money in there that we could then use anytime in the future while also reducing income.

It’s no secret that health insurance in the US is expense. We paid $255.23 each month for my wife and I to be covered. We also received a $417 rebate each month due our artificially low income (see: How We Plan to Spend $80,000 a Year & Pay Nearly $0 Taxes). Without this rebate we would have spent another $5,000 in health insurance to get the exact same service.

Like the OCD tracker I am, I’ve kept track of our expenses in Tiller for the last decade. I pulled some numbers for the 14 month period from when I tore my ACL to 1 year after surgery. Here’s the high-level breakdown of how much everything cost.

CategoryAmount
Health Insurance-$4,085.51
Diagnosis – MRI-$1,899.18
Surgery-$7,607.79
Physical Therapy & Gym-$303.63
Peloton – Bike & Subscription-$3,088.20
Total-$15,085.13

X-Rays were $300, but the MRI was $1,500 – MUCH more than I would have expected.

The surgery itself was the biggest expense. They required a $5,000 down payment before the surgery. The rest of the expenses were dripped in one by one over the next few months.

The actual bill without insurance for surgery was a jaw dropping $32,000. Thankfully we had insurance.

One of the biggest expenses after surgery can be physical therapy. I started going every week and slowly tapered off to monthly. Fortunately for us, physical therapy for 6 months was covered by our insurance. I only had to pay for 2 sessions before I was able to stop going.

I replaced CrossFit with a much cheaper $10/mo Planet Fitness membership. I’ve actually kind of loved it. It lacks the social atmosphere that made CrossFit fun, but I’ve enjoyed trying to optimize a strength plan around my weaknesses.

The other part that was crucial to my recovery: we purchased a Peloton Bike+. We bought the bike before surgery and had it ready to jump on as soon as I was able to.

About 2 weeks after surgery my doctor gave me the go ahead to start cycling. It took a week to get to the point where I had the mobility to pedal all the way around (!). Soon after I started

I cycled 20 times in August, 18 in September and 20 in October. I wasn’t yet cleared to run, so cycling was the only outlet I had. Having that right there in our apartment was amazing. I’d highly recommend getting one if you’re recovering from an ACL tear.

Lately I’ve been cycling much less, but that’s OK! I’ve settled into a routine of one day at the gym, one day off, one day of cardio, one day off. For cardio I alternate between running for an hour, going on a hike or Peloton – whichever feels right.

The OCD side of me doesn’t like that this 4 day pattern doesn’t repeat nicely week to week. Since I work from home on Hardcover, I have a flexible enough schedule, so planning around it hasn’t been an issue.

1 Year of Recovery

This past week I hit the one-year mark since I had surgery. My knee isn’t “healed”, but the muscle strength is comparable to my good leg. It does feel more stiff at times, and it seems to alert me whenever it’s about to rain by preemptively getting tender, but other than that it’s normal.

The biggest part to still get over is the fear of declines with that leg – stepping down or jumping down and landing on it. That’s something in my head I’m still working on, even though the muscles are in good shape after months of jumping at the physical therapy.

To mark the occasion, I went on a 9-mile hike up Black Mountain. At 2,800 ft elevation it’s not the most difficult hike, but 9 miles is still one of the longest I’ve attempted in a day. Getting back up to speed to where I could hike was also one of my goals by the time I was 41.

I have a personal interest in this hike too. For starters, we can see it from our bed. It’s the largest mountain in our field of view just west of Ensign Peak. There’s something motivating to being able to look out my window and know I climbed up the largest mountain in sight.

I attempted this same hike back in May of 2019. It was one of the first “long” hikes I went on during my “summer of hikes”. I’d quit my job 6 months prior in December and it was the first time in my life I had weekdays free. I ended up going on every hike I could find – including this one.

Unfortunately it was May 1st and there was still snow on the trail. I made it within 0.1 of the summit and had to turn around. Here’s why:

Review of Valley View, Twin Peaks, and Little Black Mountain Trail Hard on AllTrails

For reference a Class 3 scramble means “Hands-on scrambling with moderately difficult moves. A fall will break a bone.” It didn’t look too difficult, but was couldn’t even be attempted due to the icy conditions.

I turned around with sight of the summit. It always stuck with me.

Fast forward 4 years later and I’ve been looking at that mountain every day. It’s basically my white whale at this point. At the 364 post-operation mark I made the decision: tomorrow I’m hiking that bastard.

I woke up at 6am and prepared to leave. I packed 3 L of water, a ton of sun screen, a gatorade and pack of nuts. By 6:30am I was on the trail!

I even had a visitor along the way that I believe was a grouse.

The trail itself isn’t difficult. It’s a constant low grade uphill for the first 2.5 miles, then a mile of steep uphill and about 0.25 of increasingly difficult scrambling. Each piece ends up taking about the same amount of time.

The scramble up was the hardest part

The view from the peak was amazing. I could see everywhere from Antelope Island down to Draper.

But more than the view it felt like a symbolic way to move into a new phase of life. A switch from “recovering from an ACL” injury to whatever comes next. I don’t have a plan for what that’ll mean yet, but I’m sure it’ll happen in time.

One thing I do know is I’ve made the decision that my 40s will be the best decade of my life. I’m doing what I can to make that a reality.

Oh, and the Nashville hot chicken sandwich from The Crack Shack I had afterwards was delicious.

My 2022 Year in Review

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17 min read. Personal, Featured, adamfortuna, Duplicate. 2 Comments

I’ve written a “year in review” post for the last twelve years. I highly recommend you try it. It’s a time capsule that lets you reflect on the past year, appreciate parts of it that were great, and develop a plan for the next year. You can view any of the past 12 years’ posts here: 2010,  2011,  2012,  2013,  2014,  2015,  2016,  2017,  2018, 2019, 2020, and 2021.

Lily in Memory Grove park
Lily enjoying the shade at Memory Grove Park in SLC.

2022 was a rough year. In May of this year, I tore my ACL in my right knee while stepping down from a 20″ high box while doing CrossFit. I’ve never had any mobility issues or injuries this serious before. My summer of backpacking, hiking, and camping changed to a summer of physical therapy, surgery, and recovery.

Two weeks after that surgery in July, while I was still on crutches, our dog Lily passed away. She was 14 years old and still our adventure partner. To say this crushed us is an understatement. That decision was one of the hardest either of us has ever had to make. We have no regrets for taking the most humane path when she was in clear pain without any realistic chance of improvement.

Summer was rough. It’s one of the reasons why I haven’t written as much here on Minafi this year. Both events left massive holes in my life. Afterward, I shifted my focus to my mental and physical health. This included weekly physical therapy with a trainer, daily PT at home, daily/weekly journaling, and lowering the amount of time I work on Hardcover. I’m not at 100%, but each month I feel healthier and happier.

That’s it for the bad stuff – mostly.

The good of this year still outweighed the bad. After years of quarantine, we were able to return to some of our favorite activities. We went to weddings and saw friends. We visited with family both locally and traveled to see them. We explored Disneyland in LA for the first time (after living in Orlando with Disney annual passes for a decade). We had a bunch of quality time together and continued trying to figure out what a day looks like for a semi-retired, child-free couple living in an apartment at 40 years old.

Most of the rest of this will be about the good stuff, which was most of the year.

My 2022 Month by Month

Here are some of the highlights from each month. The memories that most stand out looking back.

January: Watched a bunch of movies at the Sundance Film Festival (You Won’t be Alone was my favorite). I intended to volunteer in person, but Sundance went 100% online after the Omicron COVID variant. Played in a D&D campaign with some local friends that involved incredible 3D printed and digital props.

Dole Whips (with Tajín) outside the Enchanted Tiki Room in Disneyland

February: Marilyn and I had a Disneyland trip scheduled in 2020 (actually it was going to be a FinCon 2020 + Disney trip). We rescheduled it for February, trying to find a space between COVID spikes. It was an AMAZING trip. We spent a full day at Disneyland and California Adventure, stayed at a hotel within walking distance, and went full-on tourist. Neither of us had explored LA much, so the entire experience was new. A favorite stop was the Academy Museum (Academy = group that gives out Oscar awards for movies).

Ruby Slippers from The Wizard of Oz was one of MANY iconic movie props at the Academy Museum.

March: Most of this month is a blur. We recovered from our trip and I worked a bunch on Hardcover. We launched the beta on National Reading Day and drew in a few hundred sign-ups. It wasn’t an immediate success, but I continued working on it throughout the rest of the year.

April: Road trip! We booked an Airbnb in Seattle and drove up from Salt Lake to spend two weeks with friends. Seattle has always been on our shortlist of places we might want to live someday. We stayed in the Greenwood area (just north and east of Ballard) and had a blast. We went to breweries and restaurants, ate oysters, saw tulips, had game nights with friends, went to a Magnetic Fields concert and Lily even got her feet wet in the Pacific Ocean.

Marilyn, Lily and Adam at Golden Gardens Park in Seattle.

May: I returned from our road trip invigorated and ready to work on myself more. I signed back up for CrossFit for the first time since pausing due to COVID. On my 2nd day back I tore my ACL in my right knee while stepping down from a 20″ high box while holding two 25-lb weights. 😭 Two weeks later, at 8 AM on my 40th birthday I went in for an MRI which confirmed the tear. Later on, we went on a friend’s trip to Idaho Falls where we rented a house and the 6 of us just chilled together. I’d love to make this a yearly thing.

View of the Snake River from the living room of our Idaho Airbnb.

June: Since I wasn’t able to hike, I turned my attention back towards Hardcover and spent most of each day programming. We launched Airlists, an Airtable-like view for your books for readers to explore in ways we can’t even anticipate. Marilyn’s mom came and spent a week with us where we acted like tourists. I’m glad she was able to visit with Lily.

My knee 3 days after surgery.

July: Not a great month. I had ACL surgery (using my quad tendon) and spent the rest of the month limping around on crutches, elevating and icing it in bed. I had to let go of a volunteer from the Hardcover team in a very emotional way. And then at the end of the month, Lily passed away. We did get to see Regina Spektor in concert before all of that went down though, which was a highlight.

My daily happiness for July and August on a scale from 1-9. Bright red is a 1, and darkest green is 9.

August: If there was a theme for this month it was recovery. Both my wife and my emotions felt made of glass this month. There were so many times we’d just break down and cry about Lily. I think we both went through every photo we have of her. I couldn’t even refill my ice machine and bring it back to bed, so Marilyn was taking care of me physically. At the same time, I was icing my leg constantly and starting physical therapy. By the end of the month I was off crutches and able to walk on my own. To deal with some of my grief, I created Line of Thought to track my mood and remember what I was up to. It’s been therapeutic to look back on now.

September: Marilyn traveled to Denver for a week, so I of course took that as a chance to revamp a room of our apartment (it’s kind of a theme whenever she travels). This time it was our bathroom which I redid with a “forest spa” kind of theme that came our just like I planned (she loved it too). I also watched the show “Normal People” alone and had a less-than-healthy couple of days mentally coming down from that.

October: Started posting daily on the Hardcover TikTok in an attempt to drum up more attention (which somewhat worked). That ended up being far more fun than I expected, and I learned a lot. We tried to keep things fun by watching horror movies (X and Pearl were my favorites) and going to Rocky Horror live for the first time since before COVID. For Halloween, we went the literary route and went as Jamie and Claire Fraser from Outlander (I couldn’t get the wig right and ended up scrapping it).

November: Rather than cooking for thanksgiving we decided to order a bunch of Puerto Rican staples and bring them to Friendsgiving. I think this month felt like a time when the recovery from the last few months paid off. It was more about finding a new normal for happiness. I worked at a coffee shop for the first time since before COVID. Marilyn and I had a more serious chat about finances where I shared some worries I’ve had about them that I hadn’t yet realized myself. I’m trying to not keep those worries or stress to myself.

See if you can guess tell election day was. Getting the right balance of news is tough.

December: We jumped fully into the holiday spirit this year. We picked up a full-size Christmas tree (which was covered in snow when we got it). We made Christmas cookies and gave them away. We had hot mulled Apple Cider and wine. We watched so many Christmas movies we ran out of “good” ones and moved on to the C-list films we skipped earlier in the season. Christmas music played on repeat. And it was amazing. We ended the year with a week-long trip back to Orlando to be with Marilyn’s family for the holidays.

Yearly Favorites

Here are some of my favorite places, moments, and experiences from the year.

Roozen Tulip Garden an hour north of Seattle

Favorite spot I visited: Our Airbnb in Idaho Falls was incredible – but that could be more because of the friends we traveled with. Rosario Beach on Whidbey Island in Washington was up there for beauty and calmness.

Fresh oysters from Taylor Shellfish Farms

Favorite meal: While in Seattle we drove 2 hours north to visit Taylor Shellfish Farms – an oyster farm on the water. I LOVE oysters and being able to try a bunch of different types pulled from the ocean that day was an experience on par with going to a fancy sushi place. Saffron Valley (Indian) was our go-to takeout at home this year. Susuru in Orlando, a traditional izakaya, is the restaurant I’d love to go back to.

Favorite Video Game I played: This wasn’t much of a gaming year for me. Actually, I don’t think I bought a single new game this year. Most of my gaming has been playing Stardew Valley with my niece and nephew.

Favorite Board Game I played: Wingspan is still a goto favorite. I tried Clank which was a lot of fun too.

Favorite concert: Regina Spektor killed it (even if she forgot the words to a few of her songs 😅). Magnetic Fields were solid. Barenaked Ladies, Gin Blossoms & Toad the Wet Sprocket were just fun and nostalgic.

Favorite Live Event: Rocky Horror Picture Show with a raunchy live cast is always a blast. We intended to go with a group but tickets sold out too fast, so we went on our own. Bernadette Peters live with the Utah Symphony was great as well. The Moulin Rouge broadway show here in SLC was great, but lacked some of the energy from when we saw it in previews on broadway (*humble brag* 😉). Drawn To Life, a new Cirque du Soleil show in Orlando, was fun too.

Favorite hike: I went on 1 hike this year. 😭 Rattlesnake Gulch in SLC is one of my favorite warm-up hikes early in the season before all the snow has melted. I’m glad I got it in before my knee injury. We did take the ski lift up to Park City during the summer to walk around. That was a few weeks before my surgery so I had to be super careful not to reinjure myself.

Favorite movies: You Won’t be Alone is my favorite movie of the year. It’s a beautiful film about a witch in 19th-century Macedonia that amazed me. It has very little dialog, but an incredible story and performance. Some other standouts are “Everything, Everywhere All At Once”, Emily the Criminal, Luckiest Girl Alive (wait, do I like Audrey Plaza?), The Princess, Dr. Strange, The Batman, and Spirited. The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent is the one that makes me smile the most.

Favorite shows: Wednesday, Normal People, 1899, Sandman, White Lotus S2, The Rehearsal, Star Trek Discovery/Strange New Worlds/Lower Decks (all have been great, but Discovery is my favorite), House of the Dragon, The Boys S3 and Stranger Things S4.

Favorite Podcasts: Game of Thrones Season 8 Redux , Software Social, Something Was Wrong, Art of Product. I listened to fewer podcasts this year and tried to branch out to new ones I haven’t listened to before. I decided to take a break from personal finance this year, but I’ll still catch the occasional Mad Fientist ep.

Favorite books: I’m Glad My Mom Died, Normal People, Piranesi, Locke & Key (comic). I didn’t read as much as I usually did this year. Part of that is because dog walking was my audiobook-listening time. :/

Favorite new programming discovery: SVG Animations! It’s a category of web development that I’d never learned much about. After a bunch of research and an online class by Cassie Evans, I now know significantly more! I’m now excited to see what I can do with this new concept.

AdamFortuna.com redesign. I’m planning to add animals in the background with a chart of how many have come out to play.

Favorite projects: Hardcover has been my main focus this year. I also redid my Projects page and (started redoing) AdamFortuna.com. Line of Thought has helped me take a minute each day to remember what made that day special.

Favorite exercise: I started this year running (after running a marathon in 2021). That shifted to going to my apartment gym. Then to CrossFit (for 2 days). Then to physical therapy for a few months. My PT recommended biking more, so we went all in and got a Peloton for our apartment. I’ve never been much into cycling, but both my wife and I love it. It’s like a human hampster wheel that keeps you entertained.

Impactful Decisions & Habits

Since I FIRE’d 4 years ago (wow, has it been that long?) I’ve had a flexible schedule. For this year that typically looked something like this:

  • 8 am-10 am: Wake up naturally and have coffee and breakfast in bed with Marilyn. This is how we absolutely love to start each day and it’s now our routine. 😂 We’ll read or check our phones and enjoy the view of the mountains from our window. I’m trying to get better at not checking my phone during this time because that rarely improves the morning.
  • 11 am-1 pm: Physical therapy, biking on our (new) Peloton, going to the gym in our apartment, showering & lunch. PT is an everyday thing. I keep shifting my exercise schedule to figure out what works. I still haven’t found the cadence that works for me. I’ve tried every day, 2 on/2 off, alternating days – you name it. Currently, I’m doing PT every day and then every other day I’ll alternate between going to the gym or on a 30-45 minute Peloton ride.
  • 1 pm-6 pm: This is my “work” time. That could mean just about anything, but doing something. Cleaning the house, running errands, working on Hardcover, or another programming project.
  • 6 pm-8 pm: Dinner usually falls sometime around here. We order delivery on Friday nights (with enough for leftovers) and make most of the rest of our meals at home.
  • 8 pm-12 am: Together time! We’ll usually curl up in bed and put something on our projector. We both love winding down at the end of the day here. This could mean working more on projects, being on our phones, actively watching something, playing a game, or having together time.

That’s the broad strokes of how most of our days go. Most days we don’t hang out with people, have meetings, or travel. Those are the exceptions, not the rule. Developing this schedule for a day has taken a lot of trial and error. I have no doubt it’ll continue to change – and that’s a good thing.

I had a few mindset shifts this year that were impactful.

I decided that my 40s were going to be the best decade of my life. That decision changed my entire mindset about how I approach things. Want to stay in bed rather than exercise today? Is that going to make this the best time of my life? Want to stay in bed and relax not do anything today? Well, that’s OK too – this is my best decade after all. In other words, I can use this mindset power for growth and laziness. 😂

There are dozens of journaling exercises I’ve tried over the years. My favorite is a weekly review. I took a break from doing these for a lot of 2021 but restarted this year. The format I use is about the same as in the original post. Here’s what I ask myself each week:

  • Reflect on my goals for 2022
  • Reflect on any short-term goals
  • What could I achieve by the end of this week/month that would have the biggest positive impact on my life right now?
  • What could I achieve by the end of this week/month that would be the most effective first step toward finding my life goals?
  • How did this week contribute to my future well-being and/or well-being of others?
  • What was the biggest highlight of my week?
  • What was one thing I could have done differently that would make me much happier about how my last week went?
  • Set weekly goals. Break them down into super-obvious actions. Timebox everything. Don’t over-commit.

One tricky part about these questions is that they go more toward productivity and less toward happiness. I’m attempting to lean more of my journaling toward balancing contentedness and progress. I’ve found I am happier when I am making progress on something, but it doesn’t need to be leaps and bounds.

After answering these questions I spend some time adding events to my calendar and my to-do list for the week. I’ve found the more I plan things out the easier it is to jump into them when the time comes. Lately, that means blocking out entire sections of my calendar for specific chores and things I want to make sure get done during a week. Basically scheduling tasks I want to avoid the same as meetings.

Like all things this works until it doesn’t. As long as it keeps working for me I’ll keep on doing it and iterating on it.

How’d Finances Go in 2022?

We tried something different this year: I didn’t track or even look at money for the first 6 months.

We didn’t budget.

We didn’t check our investment balance.

We didn’t change our allocation.

We didn’t even track our expenses and categorize them after the fact!

And guess what happened? We spent more than any other year. 😂 Yep, it turns out that tracking actually does bring down our spending quite a bit more than not tracking.

During the second half of the year, our spending ramped up a little more. Major surgery, animal care, holidays, and holiday travel will do that.

In the end, we spent $130,000 in 2022 (!). That number still seems crazy to me. Here’s a breakdown of where it went with last year’s total in parenthesis.

  • Alcohol, Bars & More: $3.5k ($3k) +16%
  • Food & Dining: $16k ($14k) +14%
  • Fun: $7k ($3k) +133%
  • Hardcover: $18k ($2k) +800%
  • Health & Fitness: $17k ($3k) +466% (surgery, Peloton)
  • Hobbies & Personal: 5k ($4k) +25%
  • Home: $35k ($29k) +20% (new standing desks)
  • Minafi: $139 ($2k) -1,399% (Minafi is mostly breaking even!)
  • Pets: $3k ($9k, Major surgery last year) -66%
  • Shopping: $4k ($16k, New laptop) -75%
  • Transportation: $3k ($3k) 0%
  • Travel: $11k ($11k) 0%

The biggest net additions were funding Hardcover, higher rent, and home costs, healthcare, and spending more to have fun (mostly concerts and live events that restarted in 2022).

It’s hard to say how much of this spending is due to inflation versus lifestyle inflation. If you take out our largest purchases, surgery, and side projects, our spending for the year is closer to $100k. Still above our $80k target.

This year we had a 6.5% withdrawal rate from our investments. Not exactly sticking to the 4% rule. Since we managed to end the year happy and healthy, and we recently launched a paid plan on Hardcover, I think we’ve put ourselves in a good position to drastically lower this in 2023 without feeling as much of a hit.

Our accounts ended the year around $2.1m.

We love our healthcare plan. We’re signed up for a Bronze plan with an HSA from University of Utah Health through healthcare.gov. This year with my ACL surgery they did an AMAZING job, and it cost far less than I imagined. So far the entire bill for the MRI, surgery, 5 months of physical therapy, and follow-up doctor visits is roughly $5,000. That’s still a lot. Insurance has covered about $40k of costs. Our insurance is $250/month for the two of us – that’s a combined amount for the year of $8,000. Sadly in the US, this is a great deal.

In 2021 we planned to have a lower income allowing us to get a rebate on our insurance for the year. Unfortunately, that plan didn’t work out. We had $150k of stock still in Pluralsight after the acquisition that I was holding onto for tax purposes. In 2021 Pluralsight was acquired and taken from public to private. That meant that all outstanding shares were bought – whether we wanted to sell or not. That drove our taxable income in 2021 up to $200k and suddenly we needed to pay back $5k in healthcare.gov rebates combined with paying more in taxes.

That won’t happen in 2022 since we’ve kept our income under $60k. We’ve carefully sold funds based on their cost basis while doing some tax loss harvesting. I doubt we’ll have enough this year to do any tax-gain harvesting while staying under the healthcare cap.

What’s Next for 2023?

Right now our 2023 is mostly wide open. We have a trip to Vegas planned to see a few shows and an Iceland trip we’re penciling in. We renewed our lease in Salt Lake City for another 18 months, but we want to try extended stays in a few cities on our “maybe we’ll move there someday” list. At the top right now are Boulder, CO (more the general Denver area), and Portland, OR. If you’re in either place and want to meet up, let me know!

There are a bunch of events that now feel like part of our “SLC year” I’m sure we’ll enjoy again in 2023: Sundance Film Festival, Red Butte Garden Concert Series, hiking/camping/backpacking season, staying-indoors-and-looking-at-the-snow season, etc. We’d like to lean into Fringe this year and go to more local theater.

There are a few things on my local bucket list it would be fun to pencil in for 2023:

  • See a new national park. Maybe Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park or Mesa Verde National Park while out in Colorado.
  • Go backpacking to a hot spring. Most likely Fifth Water Hot Springs – it’s nearby and a very chill hike.
  • Go stargazing in a dark-sky zone. Antelope Island is a huge island in The Great Salt Lake that’s also a dark skies zone. It’s only a 45-minute drive from our apartment and has a few campgrounds.

When it comes to longer-term goals, there are a few that could be fun to tackle this year:

  • Learn more about animation and movement. When a website has playful animation and movement I’m always in awe. Doubly so if there are characters that I can relate with. I want to learn more about how to create this type of emotional connection in things I create using characters and movement.
  • Learn how to cook dishes I love from scratch. There’s something about making a dish from scratch that connects you to it. Often when it’s made I’ll realize I love the dish but wouldn’t want to make it (delicious dim sum buns I’m looking at you). I respect and enjoy those meals so much more after knowing what goes into the process.
  • Learn the skills to create an iOS application from scratch. We’re launching a Hardcover iOS app right now, so I guess I have to do this one. 😅

2023 Goals

I didn’t set any yearly goals for 2022. I’m not sure why I didn’t, to be honest. I suspect I was somewhat stressed working way too much on Hardcover and adding goals would have complicated that. Looking back I was working on Hardcover 40 hours a week for the last few months of 2021. For the last 3 months of 2022, that’s been closer to 20 hours. That’s felt like a better balance and now I feel much more excited about setting other goals.

Rather than setting a bunch of goals, I’m going to lean into the one I’ve already set:

I want to make my 40s the best decade of my life (so far).

My one goal for 2023

Simple enough, right? 😅 Keeping this at the forefront of my mind has been tremendously helpful these last few months. There are times when I get – let’s just say obsessed – with something I’m focusing my attention on. That can be a side project, something fitness-related, relationships, games, etc.

Part of this goal is to spend more time understanding what I’m focusing on with this goal in mind. Is what I’m obsessing about making this a better decade? If so, go for it. If not then something may need to change.

Considering that I also set some tasks to work on weekly, I’m alright with this being broad. The product manager in me wants a clear-cut OKR (Objectives and key results) that can be easily measured, but that’s not going to happen. Even tracking my happiness score in Line of Thought doesn’t work like that.

Instead, I’m planning on taking this one week to week. I’ll see what I can do to make each week, or each month the best it can be. Sometimes that means buckling down to work, others it’ll mean staying in bed all day and binge-watching a new series on Netflix.

A good goal can motivate you. This one gives me butterflies in my stomach just thinking about it. It leaves room for possibilities and dreams. It also can’t be failed on January 1st. There will be weeks when I do better and worse at this goal, but that’s my north star for the year.

I’m 40 Today. Here’s What I Want From My Next 10 Years To Look Like

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10 min read. Goals, adamfortuna, Personal. 17 Comments

One of my favorite questions in job interviews was always “Where do you see yourself in 5 years?”. Not because I had any concrete answer, but because it’s a question that embraces uncertainty. The future is liquid, flexible, and in our own hands to create. My answer to that question changed as much as I’ve changed (which is to say a lot).

The view from our Airbnb in Twin Falls, ID.

When I look at the past 10 years this proves to be true. I never knew I’d join a startup, or that it would be successful. I never knew I’d move to Salt Lake City. 10 years ago I never even wanted to be married – a position I completely changed my mind on.

In other words, a lot can happen in a few short years ranging from personal changes (health issues, disability, family issues) to country or global issues. When we look back in 10 years there might have been another world war, growing water concerns, global famine caused by a struggling supply chain, authoritarianism taking over and that’s just what I can conceive of today. A global pandemic wasn’t on my 2020 bingo card a decade ago.

A Pause for Reality

I started writing this post in April – about a month before my 40th birthday. Mrs. Minafi and I drove up to Seattle to spend two weeks there exploring the area, hanging out with friends, and determining if we may want to move there someday (it’s a possibility, but not anytime soon).

When we got back from the trip I was very motivated to make a few changes in my life. I rejoined my CrossFit gym, started a new skincare routine, began tracking calories with LoseIt, and a few other small changes that could lead to a healthier lifestyle. I came back re-engergized from a vacation–something that rarely happens.

On my second day back at the gym, something unfortunate happened. I was stepping down from a 20″ high box and my knee buckled under my weight (combined with gravity and the two 20-pound weights I was holding). I immediately saw stars and needed to lay down on the ground. In 8 years of CrossFit, I’ve only hurt myself and needed to stop a workout one time before this. I knew immediately it was bad.

I didn’t know how bad at the time.

After a few days of rest, ice, compression, elevation, and ibuprofen, we headed out to an orthopedic center nearby to get a professional opinion. They took an x-ray and went through a few movements. Their opinion? “It looks like an ACL tear, but we’ll need an MRI to know for sure.”

“What’s an ACL tear?”, I asked completely oblivious to the seriousness of the injury.

“We can talk more about that after the MRI. For now, you can…”, and listed off a few stretches and ways to keep safe until we know for sure. I of course went home and learned everything I could about this injury.

I learned that the recommended procedure is knee surgery where they take a tendon from your hamstring. I learned that some people don’t get surgery if they don’t plan to engage in high-intensity sports. I learned that there is a ~6 month+ recovery period after surgery to return to a mostly normal life. I learned the first week after surgery sucks.

Then at 7 AM on my 40th birthday I went in for my MRI. With The Postal Service playing in my headphones, they scanned my knee up and down, through and through. Talk about a memorable way to start the day. 😂

The next day I saw the results online: a full ACL tear.

Since then I’ve met with the orthopedic who I initially met with, and started physical therapy. I mentioned the injury to my barber, who has torn BOTH his ACL’s. Asking him about his experience was a huge help. I’m meeting with a surgeon in 2 weeks to plan out long-term steps.

Between now and surgery (which I assume will be in my future) my goal is to increase my leg strength as much as I can, get a normal stride and focus on physical therapy.

The very first time I tried one of the recommended movements was eye-opening. Standing in place I got up on my tip toes while holding onto our kitchen island. My right knee immediately buckled slightly. Not enough to hurt, but enough to remind me that I’m going to need to relearn a bunch of basic movements.

That was about 3 weeks ago now, and I’m walking much better. I hit 10k steps a few times in the last week, combined with a few personal physical therapy sessions per day. Today I spent most the day walking around the Utah Pride Festival. 🏳️‍🌈

The financial side of this is still too early to know. We have insurance (*whew*), so much of this will be covered. Maybe we’ll hit the out of pocket max for the year. Our insurance is from the hospital we’re going to (University of Utah Health), which makes it very easy. For my 3 visits so far I’ve paid $17 for a doctor visit with X-rays. Not too bad for a high deductible plan with an HSA. Once the MRI bill comes in I’ll update this post.

In the 3 years since retirement, we’ve been using this same high deductible plan while maxing out our HSA. It has $24k in it so far. My neglect of it also meant that 2022’s contribution was left in cash – which worked out for the markets this year. Two-thirds of that account is invested in $VTI, which is why it’s up 15% overall. Now that we may need this money in the next year, I’ll keep part of it in cash ready to pay knee-related bills that come up.

My Next Decade?

I wanted to start with this story because some of my goals for the next 10 years are going to be strongly influenced by this. It’s caused me to pause and think a lot deeper about what’s important.

This list of what I want from the next 10 years is very much a snapshot as of today. I’ll try to keep this post updated with how things go. In 10 years I might not accomplish anything on this list – but that’s OK. That hopefully means I’ve found higher priorities in life.

Anywhere, here goes!

By the time I’m 41…

I want to be able to hike the mountains of Utah (again)

Since moving here to SLC, I’ve been surprised at how much I love hiking. I enjoy putting in my AirPods, choosing an audiobook, and spending a few hours slowly making my way up a mountain alone. It’s amazing exercise, beautiful and fun.

With my knee injury, I won’t be hiking this summer. The risk of re-injury is just too high to take that chance. I’m hoping that I can have surgery, go to physical therapy, and build back up to the point where I can tackle the same hikes as before for next summer.

I want to get back to the point where I’m physically fit

COVID meant pausing my CrossFit membership – the one fitness program that I stuck with the longest in my entire life. I struggled to replace it with my own workouts and lacked the drive to do them on my own. Up until 2021 I had some larger goals that guided my fitness level (namely running a marathon and hiking the Highline trail).

With those now in the past, I was all ready to set another big goal. That has since switched to being able to do what I was able to do before I started writing this post.

Besides that goal though, I was all ready to set one related to overall fitness level. Mostly I’d like to get back down to the 150s (weight-wise) from my current ~170.

Before my knee injury, I had a plan that by next Memorial Day I’d like to be able to perform Murph (the CrossFit workout with a 1-mile run, 100 pull-ups, 200 push-ups, 300 air squats, and another 1-mile run) in under an hour. I’ve done it before in as little as 50 minutes, but if I did it today before my knee injury (without a weighted vest) I’d be amazed to complete it in under 1:25.

Now I believe this will involve a lot more low-impact exercise – which likely means biking, pushups, pulls, and squats. Any recommendations on Pelotons?

I want to grow Hardcover to pay for my food & housing

Here’s the thing: even though I’m “FIRE”, I’m not “I don’t need to ever worry about money again” FIRE. I’m more along the lines of “If everything goes perfectly, we keep expenses low and inflation/the market/housing/climate change cooperate then we’ll be OK-level of FIRE”.

Getting to ramen profitability – the point where it covers our household housing and food – would be a tremendous help and open up more options. I don’t yet know what housing holds for us long-term. Having more options than just an apartment in a fixed price range would help. Setting our FIRE budget in stone would mean ruling out many cities and locations that could be fun to experience.

I also worry about the impacts of climate change and limited resources in the future impacting, well, everything. I put our basic household expenses at about $3,000 a month right now for rent + food.

By the time I’m 45…

This is where it gets a lot more difficult. 5 years ago I was still living in Orlando, working a full-time job, and not even married yet! There are so many adventures I don’t even know I’ll go on that won’t be listed here that I’m just as excited about as the ones I want to experience.

I want to learn how to build mobile apps

For my entire career, I’ve considered myself a full-stack web developer. I can conceptualize and build out a website from top to bottom. This is both my most polished skill and the one I enjoy using the most.

But somehow I’ve never been able to get into mobile app development – building apps that run on phones.

I’ve tried to learn mobile development a few times. I went to WWDC (Apple’s developer conference in San Francisco) with a few coworkers from Code School. I took a class at a local community college to learn iOS programming. I worked on a number of iOS courses at Code School. I even built an app to browse the Epcot Food & Wine menu for fun but never released it.

The difference this time is that I have a project I want to make a mobile app for: Hardcover. Unless we hire an app developer, it’ll be on me to make this. I’m honestly very excited about this. Hardcover is built using React, which opens us up to using React Native to build something that works cross-platform. I haven’t started on this yet, but I’m actively reading up on this space, watching tutorials, and preparing for when we start on the Hardcover mobile app!

I want to go on a 6-week (or longer) international trip

Here’s the thing, I’ve never taken a trip longer than 2 weeks. We had a 3-week trip planned for South Korea and Taiwan in March of 2020 that was obviously called off. Now that Mrs. Minafi is also not working, we have the time, but with COVID we haven’t unpaused that part of our lives.

It’s also tough with our dog Lily leaving her somewhere for long periods of time. She’s 15 years old next week, which is getting up there in age. We wouldn’t want to travel too long without her. Eventually, I’d love to try a 6-week trip somewhere outside the country. That could mean one place or multiple places for a few weeks each. This would be more focused on living like locals and exploring the nearby area rather than being go-go-go.

I want to grow Hardcover into a successful business

As much as I’ve loved working on Minafi for the last few years, working on Hardcover has hit a sweet spot of an ambitious project, with exciting technical problems, collaboration, and a genuine need to have something replace Amazon’s Goodreads. As I’m writing this now, I think this will be my main project for the next few years. I still love having Minafi to write about whatever comes to mind, with a skew towards finances.

The hope is to grow Hardcover into a business that generates enough revenue to pay me and the team working on it a thriving wage, provide healthcare, and a 401(k). It doesn’t need to make us rich, but I’d love to be able to pay my bills and put away some in savings.

I’m also hoping to keep the team small. We can grow this space a lot with only a handful of people. I can’t imagine growing beyond a few full-time people, or 10 people overall working on the project – but we’ll see!

By the time I’m 50…

I want to give away $1 million.

Might as well think big right? A major focus with Hardcover is to create a business that can scale with a small group of people.

I’ve been tremendously inspired by many in the FIRE community who have pledged large amounts to help others. Physician on FIRE, Mr. Money Mustache, and Our Next Life have all written about donor-advised funds as a way of organizing giving. This may be through that, or through a non-profit part of Hardcover.

We’ve talked about potentially becoming a B-Corporation, which might work (although hearing that Nestle is a B-corp kind of takes some of the wind out of those sails). Either way, I want to set up Hardcover with giving in mind from the start – shooting for half of our after-tax revenue.

I want to visit all 50 states by the time I’m 50!

I’ve visited 42 states so far. 8 states in 10 years sound more than doable – especially when six of them are grouped together. My remaining states are Alaska, Hawaii, North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Nebraska, and Iowa. I’m always on the lookout for interesting events, conferences, or friends in these states. If you know of any please let me know.

I want to figure out where to live long-term

This is more difficult than I thought it would be. There might be more than one answer to this. We’ve been hesitant to buy a house again because we haven’t found that place we want to live in for the rest of our lives (or even 5 or 10 years).

As much as I love Salt Lake City, the politics of Utah go against too much of what I believe in to feel at home here long-term. I can’t even buy a draft beer above 5%, a normal-sized cocktail, or a weed gummy in the state. I’m still figuring out what we want in a home base. As I’m writing this now we’ve spent two weeks in Seattle being locals. I’d love to spend a few weeks in a number of other places on our list of potential places to live. The current list? SLC, Seattle, Portland, Boulder, Amsterdam, Scotland, and who knows where else.

I want to fitness to be on autopilot

It’s been tough to find a fitness regime that I enjoy and can stick to. I’ve found a few activities I enjoy: hiking, group exercise classes, weightlifting and yoga. With my knee and COVID I can’t exactly make any plans right now for any of these. Long-term I want to find that sweet spot where I look forward to exercise the way I did in my late 20s/early 30s.

Much of this is taking advice from Younger Next Year. The high level concepts are simple: get an hour of elevated heart rate exercise (110-140 bpm) five times a week. Don’t eat, drink or smoke too much. Get a lot of sleep.

Developing this habit during my first few years of retirement during COVID has been rocky. Luckily it doesn’t need to mean running marathons or doing competitions. It just means building a lifestyle that encourages staying healthy.

What’s Your 10-Year Plan?

Ten years is long enough to pick ambitious goals, but close enough for them to be rooted in reality. My 101 Goals for life span much longer than just 10-years and include quite a few that are curiousities rather than things I plan to organize my life around (although if I try and love surfing, who knows?).

What would you want to accomplish in the next ten years? Another way to think about it is “What questions would like to have answered in the next 1- years?” Sometimes an answer is enough. Share your 10-year plan in the comments!